All right. Yeah, we'll just start, finally, yeah. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Q1 FY 2024 earnings call of FSN E-Commerce Ventures Limited. I'm Sunita Sachdev. I'm the Investor Relations and Strategy at FSN. I welcome all analysts and institutional investors for the call today. On the call with me today from FSN E-Commerce Ventures is Falguni Nayar, Executive Chairperson, MD, and CEO, Anchit Nayar, Executive Director and CEO of Beauty E-Commerce, Adwaita Nayar, Executive Director, Co-founder, CEO Fashion, Vishal Gupta, CEO Nykaa eB2B, and the EVP Private Label, Suyash Saraf, the Co-founder of Dot & Key, P. Ganesh, our Chief Financial Officer. For abundant caution, I would like to draw your attention to our safe harbor statement and our disclaimer on page number 2. With that, over to you to Falguni for opening remarks.
Thank you, Sunita. Good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us on the call. It's always a pleasure to interact with all of you. I wanted to start with our slide 5, which summarizes our results. Just wanted to share that we are happy to announce that our gross merchandise value for the quarter is at around INR 26.7 billion, which is a 24% year-over-year growth. Revenues have grown at a similar rate of a healthy 24% year-over-year, now stand at INR 14.2 billion. Our gross profit grew at 21% year-over-year and stand at INR 6.2 billion for the first quarter. Our EBITDA has come out at INR 735 million, which is a 60% year-over-year growth for the quarter.
Our profit before tax stands at INR 9.7 million, no, sorry, INR 97 million, and our profit after tax is at INR 54 million. Both are showing positive growth on a year-on-year basis. Moving on to the next slide. Our Beauty GMV grew at 24% for the quarter on a year-on-year basis, and our Fashion GMV grew at about 12% on a year-on-year basis. Both the GMV on a two-year CAGR basis stand at 32% for Beauty and 34% for Fashion. Overall, on a consolidated basis, Nykaa's GMV has grown at 24% on a year-on-year basis. We believe that we have delivered on the growth while keeping our focus on customers and costs and consistently invest in sustainable growth.
I would like to say that we found during the quarter our growth in Fashion to be a little bit below our long-term expectation. I think it was, I mean, throughout the industry everybody's talking about it, that it was a particularly tough quarter for Fashion, very surprisingly, and the industry's hoping for a revival in that. Nykaa also feels confident that we should be able to move back to our long-term trend line growth in Fashion. In fact, moving forward, I would like to say that in July we had a good sale season and saw some green shoots of recovery in the month of July, which brought us back to our, what we call as our, on-trend year-on-year growth in Fashion.
We remain cautiously optimistic for the quarter two, though I want to say with abundant caution that July is just one month in the quarter. On slide 7, what I'd like to talk about is that we continue to grow new businesses. Our incubation business, which is the other segment, has also scaled up significantly and now contributes about 6.1% of our GMV compared to 3.9% in a similar quarter a year ago. In Beauty and Fashion, our annual transacting customer base has been growing.
You can see that in Beauty now we are at about 9.7 million annual transacting customers, 2.6 million in Fashion, 0.6 million in our physical retail business, and in the other category, which includes Nykaa Man, as well as our B2B business, we have about 0.5 million annual transacting customers. With that, I want to hand over to Anchit to walk you through our BPC performance for the quarter. I think, I will take two slides for now. We have here been talking about this for a long time. This is the industry sizing as given by Redseer on the left, and the expectation that the BPC growth is growing at about 10%. Within that, the online BPC is growing at 29%.
Online BPC penetration stood at about 15% or around $3 billion U.S. market in 2022. This is expected to be about 1/3 of the overall BPC market and grow to about $10 billion by 2027. Keeping this, you know, key to our understanding is that the realization of this growth should take the premium component of the BPC consumption from 45% currently to 55% by 2027. There has been a premiumization of the market, which we've been talking about on a regular basis. This growth should come through per capita consumption in the segment doubling over the next 4-5 years. At Nykaa, we already have our consumer spending at about $80 per capita, which is 5 times that of the industry average.
The average beauty shopper is spending about $15, whereas a Nykaa customer is spending about $80. We currently have about 18 million customer base. We do believe that there is I mean, sorry, there is 18 million dollar customers in that price point. We do believe that there is headroom for growth, and we can expand our customer base in the ensuring years. On the GMV front, we want to say that in the BPC segment, our GMV for this quarter came in at 24% year-on-year growth, with a 79% of GMV in Q1 was from our existing customers. This is a testament to the quality of our customer traffic that we attract. It is also important to note that our focus on being an omni-channel retailer has enabled this growth, as offline retail grew ahead at 27% year-on-year.
Physical stores now account for 8.2% of Nykaa's BPC GMV. It's also good to see that our investment in own brands are resonating with consumers as our GMV grew. GMV of our own brands has grown at 39% year-on-year. Of this growth, majority of the growth has come through both third-party platforms, offline distribution growth, as well as online growth. Our retail business grew at about 43% year-on-year, and we now stand at about 152 stores delivering on a very robust GMV per square foot per month of INR 3,346. Our same store growth also came out healthy at 6% year-on-year. This needs to be seen in the context of the base quarter being relatively a buoyant one. Moving on to the slide 11, which gives some of our important beauty KPIs.
Most of these are self-explanatory. You can, you know, you can go through it themselves because there are a lot of numbers. Important thing to note here is that the orders grew at about 17% year-on-year to 9.5 million, with an AOV continuing to be at INR 1,849 in the first quarter of 2024. We delivered on a consistent order to visit conversion of 3.7% in the first quarter. Moving on to the slide 12. Our own brands grew 39% year-on-year, now accounting for 12.5% of our BPC GMV, up from 11.2% in a quarter year ago, in the same quarter year ago. Importantly, 90% of GMV of our own brand comes from other channels also, this represented in the chart to the right.
I think I've given the wrong number. I'll come back on that. Our own brands have been able to win the trust of our customers, allowing them to grow at a healthy pace. To add more color on our method, We also, you know, we have been finding good investments that we can make, and Dot & Key was one such example, and we can talk about that later. On slide 13. Sorry, I'll just take 2 more minutes on the previous slide. Just wanted to show that we have been able to grow our own brands like Nykaa Cosmetics, which is now at about almost a INR 300 crore brand on an annualized GMV basis. Kay Beauty, which is our joint venture, celebrity brand, which is at about INR 130 crore annualized GMV.
Dot & Key, which was an acquisition we made about 2 years ago, which now stands at about INR 300 crore GMV. The channel mix here is about 54% is online, and you can see that there is offline of about 14%, and there is almost 1/3 of the, you know, GMV is coming from third-party business, which has grown very healthy. That has shown a very healthy growth over last year. This has been a conscious strategy to take our brand wider beyond our platform. It is not indicative of, you know, what the platform can deliver, but it is indicative of the investment that we're making in taking our brands wider.
On slide 13, I just want to say that we've always maintained deep and symbiotic relationship with our brand partners. As of June 30th, we had 3,400 brands retailing on our platform. As you will see, our spread of global, luxe, domestic, FMCG, and D2C brands is quite wide, which makes our platform de-risk from any individual brand perspective. Some of the key ones that are being listed are shown on the right-hand side. We saw the launch of Elemis, which is U.K.'s number one skincare brand. Virtue, a very unique brand. Let's go back to the previous slide, I'm still talking on it. Couple of other brands that many of the other brands that we launched. We continue to be the partner for exclusive luxury launches.
Moving on to the next slide. I wanted to talk a little bit about Elemis. I just alluded it to in the previous slide. It is UK's number one skincare brand, and it has launched exclusively on Nykaa Global Store. We are very excited and proud to be the partners of this brand in India. Our launch campaigns and our educational content on the brand, along with social media outreach and offline presence, provided a good 360-degree marketing for this brand, which is unmatched in the market. Similarly, we also, I want to talk next about an important initiative that we did. We pioneered a very unique Indian engagement with our customers. We created an Indian skincare regime, which is called CSMS, and this includes cleansing, serum, moisturizing, and sunscreen use.
We were aware that there were a number of routines like, you know, the Korean routine or Japanese routine, which were considered very much very demanding by Indian consumers. The need of the hour was to come up with a short routine that Indian consumers would be able to follow. With this kind of a program, which was developed along with dermatologists and with the reach that Nykaa can provide in terms of social media and marketing reach and 360-degree marketing reach, we also launched it in all our stores, 81 Nykaa stores.
With this, we were able to take this very, very deep, and the success of this campaign was very evident in terms of the kind of engagement and kind of click-through rates it provided, leading to a superior growth of skincare category on our platform for that at the time of the launch and beyond that. Coming to slide 16, we did similar effort in terms of focusing on beauty from the East, which was an edit that where we brought Korean as well as Japanese and many other East Asian skincare brands to the consumer in an event that was omni-channel. It went beyond physical event into digital world, and this also was a very well-loved and very engaging event.
In fact, it had a reach of almost 11 million on social media, and more than 60+ influencers participate in this. Moving on to the next slide. You know, as you're aware that we tend to have a sale, large sale once in a quarter, and our Big Summer Sale, which was an important event, went very well. It delivered 35% year-on-year omni-channel growth with more than 2,000 brands participating. We have been introducing additional features into our sale process through massive influencer outreach with more than 255 million impressions, and also introducing gaming into our playbook. Next. You know, also creating further consumer customer web experiences through our online finders, like the lipstick finder.
Creating, you know, our game-changing content, both on our social media and on the platform, like you can see here, were some of the other trends that we embrace towards our, you know, engaging our customers and continuing that what we call as art of beauty retailing. Moving on to the next slide. We also have had front and center towards our tech efforts, and our stream feature got upgraded with intent-driven navigation on the app, and that has seen a much better engagement. Homepage personalizations, where the recommendation widgets are completely driven from the browsing and shopping history of the customer, as well as buy again and wish list nudges that have been introduced on the cart page are just some of the small changes we keep making towards our overall experience enhancement of the consumer experience on the app.
With that, I would like to now hand over to Adwaita to take us through the fashion business performance.
Thank you very much. I'm excited to take you through the fashion business performance for Q1. To begin with, we remain excited by the size of the fashion market. The fashion industry is 4 times larger than the beauty industry, as we've said before. As you can see from the industry sizing numbers on the left, there's an expectation that the online component of fashion is expected to grow at a much faster rate of a CAGR of about 27% over the next couple of years. The online penetration, which today is at about 19%, will end up being at about 33%, equating to about $50 billion in top line by 2027. On the right-hand side, we're double-clicking on what we consider is the premium component of this online fashion market.
Of that INR 15 billion that is being transacted online, we believe 10%-15% is what we consider premium, i.e., average order values of INR 1,500 and above. We feel this is the space that Nykaa Fashion plays in, and today, this is about INR 1.5 billion-INR 2 billion in size. It's growing much faster than the rest of the pie, and it's this sliver of the market that we want to focus on over the next couple of years. Going on to slide 22. This quarter, overall, the fashion market, you know, FN referred to this. Overall, the industry has seen a slightly slower quarter, and we've heard that anecdotally, and I'm sure a lot of you have seen other results also coming out.
In that context, we do believe Nykaa Fashion has outperformed the market, and we have taken some amount of market share, delivering a 12% year-on-year GMV growth. This has taken our GMV to about INR 653 crores. I'd like to highlight that the two-year CAGR for this business remains 34%. In terms of repeat behavior, still on the left-hand side chart, we can see that 44% of fashion's GMV has come from the existing customer, and this is up from 30% a year ago. This signifies better customer retention, a metric that I've spoken about last time as well. It's this metric that is giving us confidence and comfort that we are continuing to find strong product market fit with the customer. You know, generally the cohorts that we are seeing is.
are giving us a lot of confidence as this business shapes up. On the right-hand side, you can see the split of fashion GMV across our core fashion.com business as well as our own brands, which again, I've spoken a lot about and I will speak about further as we go on. You can see that about 80% of our business comes from our platform, which is our multi-brand, predominantly app experience, and 14% comes from our own brand business. What is noteworthy here is that our own brand's business is growing at 30% YOY. Our platform business is growing at about 12% YOY.
In terms of offline, and again, we'll touch upon this in the next couple of slides, we're today at 10 stores, of which four are Nykaa Fashion multi-brand stores, and six are actually for one of our brands, NA-KD, which again, you might have heard of, which is our lingerie brand. So that's sort of the split. You know, further on the offline strategy, I'll elaborate as we proceed. Slide 23 gives us a quick snapshot of our metrics. You know, this will be widely available listed, you know, online, so you can take a look at this. You know, just the highlights are visits are growing at about 7%. Orders have grown at about 12%, implying a conversion improvement. Average order value is holding up at about INR 4,400.
You know, we're feeling pretty good about being able to hold up our average order value as well. Moving on, the annual unique transacting consumers is at 2.6 million. This is up 30% year on year. We are continuing to do a pretty good job in terms of acquiring customers as well as retaining. I think the other thing I'll highlight is the NSV. The NSV, which is sort of net of discounts, net of returns, what is truly delivered to the customer, is at about INR 197 crores for the quarter. This is up 14% year on year.
It's higher than the growth that the GMV is seeing, and that's because we made a lot of efforts this year to reduce things like RTOs, returns, and actually just increase the quality of the business we're doing and being able to deliver more to the customer. Moving on. Talking about our assortment, a topic that is close to my heart. We have over 3,000 brands on our platform as of the end of this quarter. This is up from 1,800 brands a year ago. There's been significant onboarding in the last 12 months, and sometimes, you know, I have to remind myself, my teams, that fashion is still a pretty young business, so there is still a lot of onboarding that just happened in the last 12 months. You can see that from 1,800 brands going to 3,000.
We're feeling really good about being able to present more choice to the customer. More importantly, despite being, you know, this platform business, we continue to have our eye on curation, so there's a constant delisting of SKUs that is constantly happening. The three next buckets, we talk about this every time, we continue to focus on The Global Store, hidden gems, and first in fashion. Each is growing very well. The Global Store business, which is now 650 brands, contributes 20% of the western wear GMV. Hidden gems, which is over 300 local emerging designers, contributes about 17% of the Indian wear business. Both are really meaningful.
You know, we hear from our customers that they like to come back to us for these sort of unique assortments that we are building that are hard to find, and they are not listed widely on other competitor platforms. In this past quarter, we also saw the Big Summer Sale event. We have now been conducting sale events in a manner such that beauty and fashion coincide on the same date. We take advantage of the rub off effect, we gain from marketing costs and are able to leverage across both platforms. Our owned brands business. In Q1 of FY 2024, our owned brands GMV stood at INR 916.16 million, which was a 30% YOY growth. The owned brands GMV contributed 14% to overall Fashion's GMV.
Actually, if you look at these metrics on NSV, they're even higher, closer to 17%. That's up from 12% a year ago. Our two major brands, Twenty Dresses and NA-KD, have both crossed the INR 100 crore mark. We really do believe that, by building these into standalone brands, that includes being able to list them on third-party marketplaces as well as physical stores. Yes, we remain really focused that, you know, some of these brands have to be built out as real standalone brands with a lot of brand love and equity. That is why we distribute them far and wide. NA-KD, our lingerie brand, which, as you all know, I'm personally really bullish on, love how the brand is shaping up. For example, this brand has massive distribution outside of Nykaa and Nykaa Fashion.
It has over 1,000 select doors in GT, MT. It has its six of its own EBOs, and we are accelerating on this strategy as well. Before we move on from the owned brand section, I'd like to emphasize that we see our owned brands business as a real moat. These brands are superior in terms of profitability profile when we compare to the third-party brands that we retail. Also, as they develop into real brands with a lot of consumer love, they make our platform an interesting place to shop as well. I really think it's a win-win situation if we're able to build these brands out beautifully. Moving on to slide 27, just a quick glimpse of the brands across segments.
We are sort of systematically trying to approach and sort of address all the segments out there on the women's side. Moving on, you can see that we've also done some interesting collaborations for our owned brands, whether it's with Pipa Bella and Rhea Kapoor or with Mahima Mahajan, who's a great designer for one of our Indian wear brands. Moving on to the omnichannel side. We do believe in exploring omnichannel to some degree. We have, apart from our website and our multi-brand play, we have 4 Nykaa Fashion MBOs, which again, I have mentioned in the past, and 6 NA-KD EBOs, as well as selling NA-KD across 1,000 selective doors.
As I mentioned last time, at the moment, we don't have plans to scale our Nykaa Fashion MBO business, that's the first thing I referred to. We'd like to continue to nail our proposition there before we move and accelerate in any manner. On the other hand, NA-KD, those EBOs we are feeling confident about, and we will be accelerating there. Similarly, you know, placing some of our private brands in MBOs is something we feel confident. Just to recap, because I know often questions come on this, there are no plans at the moment to accelerate our Nykaa Fashion multi-brand business. As and where offline works for our own brands, we are sensibly progressing in that direction. Moving on.
We, you know, we're always really focused on education and creating the right content, that continues to be done. That is always gonna be the Nykaa playbook, as you can see here. Moving on. We do believe that the long tail nature of fashion merits strong discovery. Really the ultimate question I keep asking myself and my teams is: How do you show the right product to the right person at the right time? Because you have millions of SKUs. We made some progress this quarter, which I'm really proud of, and we've launched hyper-personalized experiences across the site. We've also launched a new feed called My Nykaa, which is a completely unique feed to every person who engages with the app. Feeling really excited about the personalization that we managed to launch this quarter.
It's showing great promising results with very good click-through rates. I feel like it's finally addressing that, you know, ultimate discovery problem that exists in fashion. Finally, on the right-hand side, I want to highlight that we've also enabled our website to ship internationally, and so we're now available in 12 countries for over 100 designer labels. It's still really early days here, but personally I'm excited about, you know, now having the ability to tap into the NRI market. With that, thank you, and I'd like to request Vishal to take us through our eB2B business.
Thanks, Adwaita. Good evening, everyone. We remain very excited about our eB2B Superstore business. The reason is simple: It's a very large addressable market and where we can make 3%-5% EBITDA at scale. It's a large addressable market because the unorganized offline retail stands at INR 12 billion. It's traditional, it's ripe for technology disruption. We know that, you know, Indians are, by and large, quite comfortable in adopting technology if you see all the mobile penetration, et cetera. Given the level of underservice, you know, in the Indian market and technology adoption, we feel confident that we can disrupt this market and achieve 10%-15%, which means INR 1 billion-INR 2 billion addressable market.
Given Nykaa's expertise in technology as well as beauty and well-being vertical, we can be at the forefront of this disruption. Large addressable market with 3%-5% EBITDA at scale. Next slide. We are well on our way to, you know, on our path to profitable scale, and very happy to report that previous quarter was another very good quarter for us. You can see year-over-year, we have increased our transacting retailers by 2.7x. We have increased our brands on the platform by 1.1x. We have increased our coverage of cities by 1.4x, and orders by 2.5x, so we make very good quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year progress as per our plan. Next slide.
You can see that the benefits of this also are flowing into our bottom line, because as our GMV is growing by 2.6x, our feet on ground people productivity has gone up by 1.8x. Our fulfillment cost has come down by 10%. Our salesmen and, you know, the distribution cost has come down by 30%, you know, which are the benefits of scale. We also know that we have a long way to go. Next slide.
If you see the bottom part, you know, we are confident at scale we can be 3%-5% EBITDA for the simple reason that our focus on beauty and well-being means that we make 2.5x the margin of industry, which is at 5%-6%, and we can make 12%-15% because of our focus on beauty and well-being. Profitable scale means we have to grow our GMV by 18x, you know, our orders by 13x. You can see BD productivity, brands listed, you know, it's a journey. Like I said in my previous slide, every quarter-on-quarter, we are moving as per our plan on that path to profitable scale. Next slide.
Technology is at the core of our operations because that is where we are bringing the disruption, and this is where we have a lot of data. We not only have our B2B data, we also have B2C data. For example, what beauty products are selling in a certain pin code. You know, we have a unique advantage over anyone else in terms of helping our retail partners to buy and therefore stock and sell the right assortment, which is going to increase their overall throughput and increase their income. Recommendations is one such way where technology is adding value. We also have, you know, our own salesman efficiency app with location based check-in, et cetera, so we are able to drive very high rigor in terms of our feet on ground.
Net-net, we will continue upping the game on technology to bring the disruption and improve the service to the retailers. Thanks. I think now I hand over to Ganesh for the financial part.
Thank you, Vishal. Looking at slide number 39.
As we can see, our revenues grew by 24% YOY during the quarter. Our gross margin was at 43.5% for the quarter. Our EBITDA margins improved by 120 basis points to 5.2% during quarter one FY 2024. We delivered a 17% YOY growth in PBT for the quarter. Moving to the next slide. I'd like to focus over here in terms of the improvement which we have seen in our operating costs year on year. Operating expenses as a percentage to revenue was 38.3% during the quarter versus 40.4% during quarter one FY 2023. Quite a lot of the operating cost improvement has come through with the regionalization of our fulfillment centers and reduced freight costs, as also regionalization of our marketing expenses.
Fulfillment expense as a percentage of revenue was at 9.5% during the quarter versus 11.3% during the same quarter last year. Marketing costs as a percentage of revenue was at 11.2% during the quarter versus 12.3% in Q1 FY 2023, which is an improvement of more than 110 basis points. Our employee costs have also started seeing leverage come through as had been guided earlier, and employee costs as a percentage of revenue was at 9.7% during this quarter versus 10% in the corresponding quarter last year. Moving to the next slide. Here we have a waterfall in terms of our EBITDA margins.
As you can see, while gross margin has contracted by nearly 90 basis points as a result of a higher proportion of Superstore business in our NSV mix, the fulfillment cost improvement, which has been achieved through regionalization strategy and better freight cost, along with shift optimization of our fulfillment centers, as well as the marketing efficiency which has been achieved through attracting better quality customers. All of this has actually meant in ensuring that the overall cost parameters have improved. Selling and distribution costs, of course, increased during the q-quarter with the offline distribution of own brands, as we have seen here earlier in the presentation. Employee costs, as I mentioned, have started to see leverages coming through, and other expenses increased due to investment in technology and infrastructure. Moving to the next slide.
This slide explains the waterfall from EBITDA margins to PBT margins and gives color on the investments that we have made and the impact which is, which it's having. Depreciation and lease costs increased during the quarter is on account of incremental CapEx that we did in FY 2023 in retail stores, warehouses, and senior offices. Other income has been lower on account of the utilization of IPO proceeds. Moving to the next slide. Here we can see the vertical performance as it stands, and I'd like to bring your focus to the bottom part of the chart, where the cost items are calculated on NSV, which makes it comparable across the three verticals of the business.
The key point to highlight over here has been the improvement in the contribution margins in the business for the BPC from 25.2% to 26.5% during the quarter. For fashion, in a challenging environment that has been, and given our consistent investments in the business, our contribution margin has come through at 2.7% for the quarter. The key improvement has been from the Superstore. Again, as highlighted by Vishal, this business has done quite well in terms of cost, and as we can see within the others vertical, all operating cost parameters have actually improved significantly. Moving ahead. Here we have the One Nykaa income statement for FSN E-Commerce Ventures. Our revenue grew by 24% YOY to reach INR 14.2 billion during the quarter.
Our EBITDA margins, as we saw earlier, was at 5.2%, an improvement of 120 basis points over the corresponding quarter the previous year. This has come through reduction in fulfillment costs, better marketing spends, and employee cost rationalization. Our investments in building retail infrastructure have meant that some of the increase in other expenses and the emphasis in building own brands has meant that there is sales and distribution expenses that have seen some increase during the quarter. All in all, we believe we have managed to improve our scale efficiencies in a challenging macro environment, and we continue to invest in the growth, diversification, and improvement of the quality of the business over time. With this, I'd now like to invite Suyash Saraf, co-founder of Dot & Key, to talk about the brand and its performance.
Thanks. Thanks, Ganesh. Hello, everyone. I'm Suyash Saraf, co-founder of Dot & Key. I'll just brief a little bit on what Dot & Key is for you all who don't know this. Dot & Key is a new age D2C skincare brand. It promises efficacious products with a fabulous user experience. We have a strong product portfolio with a primary focus on face care because we feel face care has more premium and with our core categories being moisturizers, sunscreens, serums, and face washes. You know, we have about 50 different products, about 68 different SKUs for it. Next, please. My wife Anisha and me started the brand back in 2018. We really wanted to create a beautiful skincare brand which is in par with global standards.
We incorporated Dot & Key with efficacious products, joyful skincare experience, and a packaging that would really make the customers enjoy their skincare rather than making it just a product that they'd use. I think post our initial launch we really got traction because of our innovative products, which caught a lot of users' eye, and especially influencers, which gave us our first traction. I think the real game changer for us came back in 2021 when we shook hands with Nykaa. Nykaa got majority stake into the company, which completely changed the game that we were in. We have massive ambitions for Dot & Key then, and I think the next 2 years we actually spent in re-strategizing, realigning, repricing our products in order to really start building Dot & Key as a large FMCG skincare company.
I think all our efforts have paid off in 2023. We now have a analyzed run rate of INR 3 billion. We are now, we now are improved, we have improved profitability. We are in top three skincare brands on nykaa.com, and actually several of our products are top sellers across different platforms on the internet. We have grown about 5x since the 2021 acquisition. We do want to become a INR 5 billion brand by 2026. I think one of the key product innovation is at the core of Dot & Key as a brand, and our biggest reason to win.
I think one of the key points for Dot & Key winning and the products being differentiated is that we identified the international trends very early on, and we make sure that we actually bring those products to the Indian market way before any competition can. You know, this makes a product strong and what's trending globally, and the Indian consumers really want these products. I think for any successful FMCG company, the consumer and understanding the consumer is at the core of the business, of the business. We at Dot & Key really feel that if we understand our consumers, we can make great products for them.
I think this entire philosophy of ours where we are obsessed with the customers, making sure we are delivering products that they are expecting from us, and being very detail-oriented when it comes to our product has really helped the brand grow and has created a clear right to win for the brand, as we've seen in our number growth. I think one of the key wins have also been setting up a strong new product development vertical within the business, which got us to the market much faster than competition. The speed to market was a clear differentiating factor in the brand and the reason for the brand to win, which we are streamlining further to improve our speed to market to be always number like in the top in the space.
Next, please. I think last year about 30% of our revenue came from the innovation funnel that we built out. That clearly tells our new launches have been more and more successful as we launch them. And the beauty of the success is that about 70% of our revenue does come from cities beyond the tier 1, the metros and the tier 1s.
We as a brand believe that the next growth story is coming from beyond tier one, and that is where Dot & Key as a brand is structuring its portfolio, its pricing, et cetera, so it can cater to this mass audience which have the aspiration to buy the products, yet don't have the accessibility around them and they buy products which the world wants, and they can get it easily. Our growth is aligned with the growth in the metros, tier one and beyond them actually. I think what we've also done in the future is that we've actually gained a lot of market share over the last couple of years across all marketplaces that we are available at.
Our objective is to strengthen our leadership position in some of these categories by launching more products, by increasing our market share to become a dominant player in the market. I think we also want to focus on increasing our retail distribution via the Nykaa retail channel and other modern trade retail channels to increase retail distribution. I think with this our ambition is to make Dot & Key an INR 5 billion brand by 2026 and I think hopefully we'll achieve it. Thank you. Over to you, Sunita.
Sunita, you're on mute.
Thank you. Thank you. With that, we've come to the end of our presentation, and we'd like to now open the platform for Q&A. We'd request you to raise your hand, and we'll allow you into the meeting room for Q&A with the management. We'll just wait for a couple of seconds for the listeners to raise their hands.
I think, Sunita, while that's happening, I wanted to request Anchit to come in and share his insight on what we are seeing in terms of, you know, how the beauty industry is doing internationally and what we've learned through our recent visits. Anchit, if you would like to just share some qualitative stuff.
Yeah, sure. I think, you know, we were on the road, for a lot of April and May, and even parts of July, meeting with a lot of our global brand partners in the U.S., Europe, as well as Asia. I think, the feedback we're getting is that India is clearly now very much on everybody's radar. A lot of the global brands, both on the premium side as well as more on the FMCG side, have always historically prioritized China, for driving a majority of their growth. I think with everything that they've seen, with the lockdown and the impact to supply chains, and also I think what has been a relatively tepid recovery in the luxury and the premium market in China, everybody's looking for a China plus one strategy.
I know we heard a lot about this across manufacturing and electronics and other categories. I think it's equally the case for beauty. Everyone is looking to now invest into India. It is still very early days they feel, you know, we've always shown you the numbers around the market size. I think everyone is very excited by the growth opportunity. They know it's a multi-decade story. We're seeing a lot of interest for the first time, this level of interest from global brands. They're keen to partner with the right retailers. I think that's another differentiator for us. I think they've seen the kind of work Nykaa's done in India leveraging technology, also focusing on building stores.
You know, having a very extensive network of physical stores is crucial for global brands, when they are deciding on their go-to-market strategy. I think the technology, our content, education, assortment, and omni-channel approach has been a big differentiator for us and has allowed us to not only continue to win new brands to the platform like I showed you, like we showed you during the presentation, but also to continue to strengthen our business with existing partners. I think it's The optimism is high. There is an understanding that the market is still subscale, but there is a belief that it can be a very meaningful contributor to their business in the coming years, and they are looking to partner with Nykaa to achieve their goals in India.
Thank you, Anchit. We have our first question from Manish. Manish, please go ahead.
I think Manish might be on mute. Sunita also just introduce, the name as well as the company, if possible.
Yeah. Manish, are you in the call?
Yes. Hi. Can you hear me okay?
Yeah. Can you introduce yourself?
Yeah.
Then go on with your question?
Hi. This is Manish Adukia from Goldman Sachs. Thank you for taking my questions. I have a couple of questions, maybe first on the beauty business. You talked about beauty seeing a tough quarter and the industry was facing some challenges. Can you maybe just elaborate on what these challenges were that the segment was facing?
I'm sorry, Manish. I was speaking at that time. I didn't say Beauty. I meant I said Fashion faced a tough quarter with challenges. I think Beauty was in line with expectation, and we do believe that we have grown ahead of the market.
Right. Sorry, my bad. I was referring to the fashion segment.
On fashion, I think, we are also aware that it was a very tough quarter for other players in the fashion industry, be it e-commerce or physical retail as well as the fashion brands. It's been a tough quarter for most of the players. I think it was one of those odd quarters where somehow the consumer was just not interacting and picking up, and it was what we saw that there was really nothing much you could do to get the consumer interested. It was one of those way below, you know, if we have an annual trajectory, I think it clearly came out way below that trajectory.
I think when we gave the revenue guidance earlier at the beginning of the quarter, new quarter, we realized that industry had seen even lesser growth. I think that's when we started as we started picking up the revenue growth of others, we realized that our growth was still better than the industry. All I can say is that since then, in July, we have seen better growth coming back to our long-term annual trajectory that we would consider for that business. To that extent, we remain excited. However, I want to caution that July is just one month out of a quarter, which would have three months.
Sure. No, thank you for clarifying on that. Maybe just a couple of follow-ups on that. Of course, at the start of the year, I think in the month of May, there was an expectation that the fashion business in fiscal 2024 could also grow at a similar pace versus fiscal 2023. Given just the start to the year, would it be fair to say that for the full year, the growth may end up being meaningfully lower than, you know, what we had previously in the fashion vertical? Second, follow-up there would be, given that you are focusing on the premium online fashion category, it's a bit odd that, you know, we are seeing a bit of slowdown even in that category.
Is there any more color you're able to add as to, you know, whether by segment, is there some segment which is seeing more slowdown than the other? That'll be helpful.
No. Honestly, I'm not saying that it was due to affordability. It almost felt like customers were missing. Maybe they were traveling. Maybe the a year ago quarter was stronger online because of circumstances at that point, because even previous year there was a lot of COVID, non-COVID, first quarter after COVID. Also, there is certain amount of, you know, there was generally a trend where customers were going back into the stores, and this is a global trend where customers were going back into the stores compared to e-commerce. It was shaving off a little bit across that effort. I think if you take the first quarter from what we are hearing from the market, even physical retail has not done well for fashion. It almost felt like customers were absent.
Maybe a lot of customers were traveling, a lot of customers were postponing their fashion purchases. I wouldn't say it was coming out of affordability. Maybe if at our end or, you know, also maybe, you know, like sometimes what happens in an industry is that new assortment and excitement comes at a different point in time. Definitely in beauty, which we've observed for a long time, that second half is when most brands launch their new launches because it is a off-season in India generally. You know, the quarter is not such a strong quarter from a seasonality perspective. Maybe some amount of that excitement was missing.
Thank you for clarifying. Jismil?
I think I'll just add there that, yeah, I think it's way too early to sort of, you know, write off the year at all. Nothing like that. We as a team remain really confident and sort of focused on the rest of the year. Three things are giving us confidence as we're sitting in August. The first is that we have shared that July was actually quite good for us, and we did feel that there was a normalization of growth again when we were looking at July. Again, that's only one month, but we're feeling, you know, sort of confident going into festive season that we're gonna be able to hold, you know, a higher level of growth. That's point number one. Point number two is we are noticing that our repeat metrics and our cohort metrics are improving.
Again, that is giving us confidence that the customer is sort of starting to come back again and that also like points to the inherent strength of the platform and the proposition we're building. The third thing that's giving us confidence sitting in August is that the marketing metrics again are looking better. One is we're not at all giving up on the growth targets and the growth that we believe that this business can achieve in a year. Yes, Q1 was a bit odd, but again, from what we're hearing anecdotally from all our brand partners, other retailers, is that Q1 seemed to be a bit degrowth or flat for a lot of fashion folks out there. In that context, we feel that we still did take market share.
Yes, it wasn't to our overall expectation from a growth point of view. I'd say the second thing that I'm feeling good about sitting in August is that I do feel that the business has made a lot of changes in Q1. You know, sort of during the slower time. We've really continuing to shape the business. We've deprioritized certain categories. We're focusing a lot more on women. We're focusing on certain, like quite profitable segments. My belief that the profitability, you know, the shape of the profitability of the business is going to show improvement in the near future is again increasing. Yeah, I would definitely not say that we're losing confidence for the rest of the year.
In the quarter that went by, it wasn't that there were no improvements. I think our shrinkages came down and our ratio between, you know, GMV to NSV improved in Fashion. I think there were a lot of improvements in the business which were made, including controlling the marketing expenses. It's just that we found it harder to achieve, I mean, to achieve growth that quarter.
Thank you. My last question is on the B2B business. The contribution margin there seems to be improving on a trend line basis. Would you be able to comment on how many quarters from now could we potentially, let's say, get to breakeven or at least at the contribution level? Of course, at the start of the call or during the call, you also guided a 3%-5% EBITDA margin at scale. Again, you know, in terms of some sense on, you know, how far away are we from that, like qualitatively, that'll be helpful. Thank you.
Yeah. Can I answer that or?
Yeah, Vishal. Go ahead.
Yeah. Look, firstly, you know, it is obviously a slightly difficult question to answer because, you know how long it takes. But I think that it will take a few years for sure, okay. If you look at my slides, then what we are clear on is at what scale, what number of orders, et cetera, we get to the profitable scale. You can see that previous quarter, what kind of growth we had, right? You can make your own judgment. It will be a few years. It will not be two years, it will not be seven years, six years, you know.
I think the growth generally as the platform becomes bigger, comes down. Also this is a platform which is not at its full scale. It's not servicing all its. I mean, we have said in the past that we are trying to service in a concentric manner with, you know, PIN codes around our warehouses being serviced. Both the inputs into it in terms of additional warehouses, additional, you know, feet on street that will service those markets and panel the customers can also go off. And we want to also keep the discipline of the way we invest in this business. I think at the moment we can only say that at what scale we'll be profitable. We are not giving very clear guidance on timing.
Thank you. All the best.
Thank you, Manish. We have the next questions from Sachin. Sachin, once you're in the call, please introduce yourself and go ahead.
Yeah. Can you hear me now?
Yes, please go ahead. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Great. Yeah. Hi, this is Sachin from JM Financial. I had a couple of questions. The first one was on beauty vertical. This was one I think I highlighted last quarter as well. We were adding roughly 0.5 million net users in beauty every quarter since IPO, until last quarter when it dipped to 0.4. Now it looks like this quarter it has dipped further to 0.3. That is, considering that the marketing expenses are still holding up, you have not really cut it down. How do we think of ramping that back up?
I think, I think what I can say is that, honestly, like the TTM, I've always felt is not the right, it's not the right metrics for measuring Nykaa's customer and how often they come, because, while we say on an average customer buys 3.5 times in a year, it is not like food and others where customer comes back a lot more times in a year. Because of the way the customer distribution is that there are customers who come back sometimes once in 1.5 years or once in 2 years. I think the TTM number doesn't truly reflect Nykaa's buying customers.
All I can say is that we do study the cohorts, the monthly cohorts, and we do feel that the cohorts are kind of similar and not deteriorating as we go wider. Also with an acceleration of new customers that you bring into the net, you know, that balance itself can lead to the changes. I think all we are saying is that we have two separate programs. We have a CLM CRM program that monitors about our growth of our repeat customers and how that is growing, and also monitors the growth of our new customer acquisition. In fact, a repeat customer, both the customers and the purchases continue to grow at a healthy pace.
In that case, would you be comfortable sharing the new customers added in a quarter for at least the last few quarters?
I think, you know, the point is that, I mean, I think we as a company are sharing far more information than anybody else in the industry does. All I can say is that sometimes certain metrics we're not very keen to share on a regular basis, because of, you know, the changes which can be due to many reasons. You know, there could be seasonality, there could be other things, and investors tend to read too much into it. The decision to share something annually and something quarterly is a very conscious decision based on not creating further confusion amongst the investors who may not understand the strategies that may be employed during a quarter.
Yeah, I think also.
Understood.
Probably. Sorry, Sachin, I'll just add something.
Sure.
I think, look, if you look at the year-over-year growth in terms of the, you know, trailing 12-month transacting consumer base, that's almost 20% growth, right? Also for BPC. In that same time, we've reduced the marketing spend year-over-year by about 30 basis points. The marketing cost hasn't grown in line with the increase in the number of transacting customers year-over-year. I think that's one thing to point out. I would say the second thing is that, as you can see from Nykaa, it's not just about the growth in customers, it's also about the growth in the customer's basket size, frequency of purchase, right? You must also look at it in that sense.
These are unique transacting customers. The frequency of purchase, the average basket size, the average selling price, and therefore the average order values obviously have improved to deliver 24% growth year-over-year, when the growth in customers year-over-year has been 18%. You know, we have many levers. One is, of course, importance of increasing the.
Mm-hmm
... of transacting customers, but also the frequency and the quality of their transactions is also equally important, which has improved. That's why we've delivered higher revenue growth as opposed to the marketing spend growth.
Fair enough. Yeah. Other metrics are certainly holding up. I'll move to my next question. That's a housekeeping question. Looks like there has been some cost movement that have happened between selling and distribution and fulfillment. I would love to have probably at least the last quarter and the last fiscal year's number, if possible.
Yeah.
Just on like-to-like basis.
We can give you the comparable numbers for the last few comparable quarters. I think the team will share it.
Yeah. It's a reclassification.
Sure.
Yeah. It's a reclassification of off-road warehouse costs, which have logically now been reclassified into fulfillment. In terms of, in terms of value, this is roughly about INR 100 crore annually, if you look at FY 2023 numbers.
Understood. Would it be possible to share like-to-like numbers for last quarter, just to see the trends?
Yeah. The effort will be to give it to you for last quarter. I think I don't know if it's readily available.
Yeah. That's it. It's also about INR 25 crore for the offer. If you look at Q1 FY 2023, it's about INR 25 crore. That's the quarter you want.
Yes. I'll probably check on this offline. Thank you. Those are my questions. Thanks.
We have our next questions from Sheela Rathi. Sheela, please go on. Sheela, you're on.
Sheela, you're mute. Maybe you want to unmute.
Yeah. Hi, good evening everyone. My first question was with respect to the Pink Sale. Is this the first time where we are planning to do it 4 times in a year? I believe earlier it used to be 2 times a year, right?
No, I think so.
I think.
It's been four times a year since last year, yeah.
We've done this. It's a May sale. We call it a Pink Summer Sale. We did it last year as well. In terms of doing only 2 Pink sales in a year, that was a couple of years ago. In the last, at least I would say maybe 8 to 12, maybe more quarters, we've done about, we try to do at least 3 to 4 Pink sales in a year.
I think I can explain, I think why, Sheela, you may be confused because I think about 1 year ago when we were planning the sale, it was, you know, third phase of COVID and we were afraid to call it Pink Sale, so we would call it Nykaa Summer Sale, Summer Days. This year we brought it back into our Pink Sale. We didn't want to call it sale at that point.
Understood. Falguni, my second question was with respect to the, you know, scaling, which we have seen for Dot & Key. If I compare that with the Kay Beauty, there is a stark difference. Is it a transition which is happening with respect to the Indian consumer, in terms of, you know, more preferences towards skincare versus cosmetics, which was the case in the past? Especially, you know, going ahead with the CSMS campaign, are we seeing some behavioral changes among the customers? What does it mean for our margins?
No, I think, I wouldn't worry about the margins, but I think what I can say is that world over there is skinification of beauty, which means that world over there is a higher growth in skincare consumption compared to makeup. I think in the industry I've seen that these are short cycles over one or two years, you know, industry moves in favor of one particular sub-category, and then the growth happens somewhere else, two years later. For now, definitely it's a worldwide trend where there is skinification of beauty with, lot of products. Consumers preferring to, you know, the starting point is let's have better skin than trying to hide flaws in your skin. I think there is skinification of beauty going on, and that same trend is being seen in India.
Yeah. I just wanna add, because I think, Sheela, you mentioned that there has been a stark difference in the performance of Kay Beauty and Dot & Key, but I think that's not the case. Kay Beauty actually, which is our color cosmetics brand, which we have in partnership with Katrina Kaif, and it's a slightly more premium brand, that actually has done very well, and it's growing incredibly fast. I don't know if we disclose those numbers or if Vishal would like to point that out, but I think that would be a wrong assumption from you that Kay Beauty is the performance has been starkly different from Dot & Key. In fact, Kay Beauty is one of the fastest growing brands on the Nykaa platform.
Actually just yesterday it won some award at some Economic Times brand award show. That's not the point. The point is the numbers are also showing that the brand is doing incredibly well and it has become now one of our top, you know, top 10 or so makeup brands on the platform out of 1,000 makeup brands that we have.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I think, Anchit, on a makeup basis, I think Kay Beauty is doing fantastically well. I think to Sheela's broader question, I think if we see, maybe three years ago or two years ago, most of the top five, six brands would all be makeup. You are increasingly seeing that, you know, there are a lot of skincare brands creeping into being top brands at Nykaa. Skincare is definitely growing very strongly.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Just to build on that, look, both brands are doing really well, but skin as a market is, addressable market, is far larger than makeup, and therefore skin brands will be bigger than makeup brands. Right? Both brands are doing really well. I mean, across India, not just Nykaa, I am saying the overall market.
Okay. There are not much differential on the margin side from our perspective?
Uh-
Yeah
I think if you're talking about margins as manufacturer, no, not much difference. Margins as retailer also, not much difference.
Okay. My other question was actually on gross margins. You know, as a share of eB2B goes up for us, you know, in the coming quarters and years, how should we think of the gross margin trajectory now going ahead? At the consolidated levels, the numbers could be now lower versus what we have been seeing in the past.
I think the consolidated gross margin will be a function of 3 distinct businesses, which is beauty, fashion, where, you know, the gross margins are a certain number because again, in fashion a lot of business was marketplace, then now B2B. Against that, even our own brands, as we call it, between beauty and fashion also where, as you're aware, we have quite a few brands, like, about 12, 13 in beauty and similar number in fashion. I think even they have a little different structure of revenue versus margins. We also now have LBB, which is a content business. I think the margins are a combination of a number of things.
I think the reason why we give all the three segments and, you know, costs, variable costs as percentage of net sales value is with a view to for you to be able to see how they will emerge. I would just caution that in others it's a combination of B2B as well as other businesses. In terms of revenue, large portion is B2B, though in other cost item it could be variable, and that's why we are making this effort to share the B2B unit economics very clearly for you to be able to project.
Understood. My final question was to Advaita on the fashion business. You know, she mentioned that, you know, "We are confident about delivering the full year growth, which we had talked about, you know, last quarter." She also mentioned about, you know, deprioritizing certain categories and focusing on profitable categories. Just wanted to hear more details on what exactly we are doing here.
Yeah. You know, I think, first of all, I think, you know, we have to begin with the fact that fashion is a massive market, and we are so excited that Nykaa has sort of put its, you know, stake in the ground saying, "We want to play in fashion." I think in the long run, us having a role in this insanely, you know, large fashion industry will be a really great thing for Nykaa. I think growth will come. I do believe that in this category, it's absolutely incredible to crack some sort of formula to be able to drive profitability.
There is 100% a model in fashion, as I always say, to deliver, you know, 50%-60% top-line growth with limitless funds and limitless losses, which is what, you know, the industry may have seen till date, but that will never be the Nykaa way. As always, the focus is, for us remains that how do we deliver sensible growth while every quarter shaping the business such that we're driving closer and closer to being truly profitable in a meaningful manner. As you can see, over the last couple of quarters, we've been hovering around this contribution margin of about 3%. You know, it is time that there are some decisions that we take to really drive meaningful step function changes in that number.
I always think that every new leg of profitability requires some bold decisions to get to that new leg, and then you work from there and go onward and upward. How are we thinking about the profitability? Couple of things. The first is category mix. The reality is that certain categories are better from a profitability perspective. They have better margins. They show better cohort behavior. They show better type of customers who adopt to those categories. A perfect example is, like, Indian wear is a great category. You know, in women accessories, so bags, lingerie, these are great categories. You know, men's is a slightly less great category, particularly men's footwear. You end up seeing a lot of sort of returns.
Nothing super dramatic, but as a team, we're just being really mindful of what is the profitability profile of various categories and how can we shape it. A second example is, we're doing a lot on cart charges. I'm sure you guys can even see Zomato and other companies out there. They're starting to layer on a lot of charges at the cart level, whether it's around shipping or returns or whatever. We do feel that there's a margin opportunity in putting some level of charges on the cart to drive better customer behavior. That will also drive some amount of profitability. The third is own brand strategy. I'm relentlessly focused on growing our own brand share. Why?
It is a significant delta when it comes to a profitability point of view. If you just see, on a NSV level, right? Like, own brands is now 17% of our GMV, up from, you know, 12% a year ago, and up from, like, negligible two years before. With every 10% we're being able to increase in own brand share, there's a profitability improvement coming out there. The fourth thing we're doing from profitability point of view is, again, we're trying to increase our ability to deliver truly to the customer. Fashion is often plagued by returns and RTOs, which is when the customer refuses or the logistics partner can't get to the customer. There's a lot of operational heavy lifting we're doing to try to fix those.
These are sort of like 4 examples of strategic decisions we're taking and initiatives that the team is doing over the last quarter, and this is the only way in fashion to keep clawing back profitability and to build a profitable business in the long run. I hope that was clear. Growth is not really the concern. The concern is actually being able to drive a profitable business and a very clear path to profitability while still getting some amount of growth. I am happy to wait a little longer for growth, but definitely want the right cost structures in place as we keep scaling up.
no.
I think what I can definitely say is that over the whole year, we have given up a lot of business on tech accessories because we felt that it didn't make any meaningful addition to our profitability. You can get a lot of top-line revenue, but there's a lot of shrinkage and there is a lot of cost of, you know, if from a marketing perspective, it was not justified. Then we do this across brands, we do this across subcategories, so it's very difficult to give too many examples. I just am giving you one example that kind of stands out.
Thank you. I think this is very clear.
Okay. Thanks so much, Sheela. I think, we should have Vijit in the meeting room soon. Vijit, please go ahead.
Hello. Hi. Can you hear me?
Yes, please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi. Hi. This is Vijit Jain from Citi. I have two questions. My first question is, did ad revenues go down YOY in the BPC segment? My question's context is I just look at the NSV in BPC business and I deduct that from revenues, and that number seems to be down on a YOY basis. Just wondering on that, given you have rolled out new ad products in the quarter, right? If you can comment on that.
Yeah, maybe I can take that. I think there is a I would say it's not declined, but there is a slight slight softness in the advertising income on the .com platform, and I think it's predominantly for 2 reasons. Although we believe it's an aberration, and I would not try to draw some sort of longer term trend from this. The first is that, you know, we did launch our ad tech platform towards the end of the quarter and, you know, it is a very different ways of working for a lot of brand partners from what they were used to earlier.
You know, in the past, everything was handled by the Nykaa, the Nykaa brand managers helping, you know, full service, where we would help them upload their ads and, you know, monitor the performance, et cetera. Now, we've moved to what is really industry standard, which is a self-serve ad platform where brands have to themselves, come up with the creative design, the commercial offers and decide on the duration of their banners on the platform. I think there was a little bit of change management that took a little bit of time for brands to get up to speed on because they were not used to that ways of working earlier.
You know, there are many brands who are very, you know, they are direct-to-consumer brands or they're smaller and they don't have the kind of bandwidth or infrastructure to manage this on their own. It's taken them a bit of time, I would say a couple of weeks, months or so, to get up to speed on how to use our new ad platform. We knew there would have been some teething issues when we launched this. We know that longer term it is very beneficial for our brand partners. In fact, it's something that they have been asking for for a long time. As they get more comfort with it, I think you'll see that gap closing.
I think the second thing is there was a little bit of a pullback on spends this quarter from direct-to-consumer brands, not so much from FMCG or CPG brands. Some pullback from D2C because as we all know and we're all reading, there is a little bit of pressure on D2C brands with regards to profitability as they look to enter their new fundraise cycles, et cetera. I think it's a, it's a slight aberration. Could it be one quarter, two quarters? Maybe. Look, I think you have to keep in mind the longer term trend that there are more and more brands coming alive every day, every month, and they need a place to do their storytelling. They need a place to acquire customers. You know, that continues.
The platform of choice for that continues to be Nykaa, given the kind of customers that we have and the kind of marketing which we're able to do.
Correct. Thanks, Anchit. My next question is just a clarification, to, you know, Vishal and Falguni's comments on B2B margins, because I think the question was, in part, what Manish was asking was on contribution margins. I just wanted to make sure I understand that right. The scale charts, the, of, slides that you've put up, they address overall business-wide profitability, right? If you could, separate, your answer into on the contribution side and on a business side, that'll be helpful.
Sorry, I think the scale is for B2B only. The scale chart is for B2B.
Yeah, yeah. That's what. Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to understand if the contribution margins itself probably need a smaller scale than what shows up, right?
Absolutely
to hit breakeven.
Yeah. No, absolutely. You are 100% right. What we spoke about is the EBITDA includes all people cost and overheads and technology costs and everything. Contribution margin is a, you know, far shorter journey.
Okay. Got it. Thank you. Those were my questions.
I think, Kapil, maybe you wanna go ahead. Kapil, you're on mute, yeah. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you. You talked about, you know, growth in fashion picking up in July. I just wanted to check, what is the trend you're observing in BPC? Is it holding around the same range?
Yeah. Look, I would say, you know, as you can see, BPC definitely had a good quarter. Q1 was a good quarter, not only in absolute terms, but also if I look especially relative to competition. I think there was definitely further market share gain for us across our core categories of beauty, which is makeup and skincare predominantly. I think it was a good quarter, Q1, for beauty, and I think you'll see a similar trend in Q2. As we've always said, Q3 is the festive period, so that's obviously when there is the most aggression from brands as well as the most interest and excitement from customers. Q3, I think, as we've always said, is in a seasonal business our best quarter.
I think Q2 you'll see, you know, similar. We're seeing so far similar, growth trajectory to what we saw in Q1.
Okay. Thanks. Just, secondly, on the EBITDA margins, for, you know, for the business, they've been ballpark in the same range for last 4 quarters, you know. BPC also, if you look at contribution margins, they've been, you know, in the last 4 quarters been around the same range. We've seen some increase in revenues also, but, you know, that's not brought in a margin expansion, I would say. Just wanted your perspective on what is the plan for margin expansion, what will be the drivers, for BPC and, for, the company as a whole also, if you could give some direction.
I think if I may say so, in BPC a lot of cost improvement and margin improvements have been made. While we only share up to contribution margin level, below that also, you know, the employee costs and all in BPC are quite tight. In my opinion, you know, BPC business also is a combination of online, offline, and also our private label business. You know, it does get influenced by all the three elements. I think some of it balances out, some improvement somewhere balances out with some deterioration somewhere else.
Deterioration not from a business hardship perspective, but clear strategy of, say, going more in GTMT for private label that we may adopt or in a future date we may adopt certain strategies about taking a brand internationally or investing in a brand marketing sometime. Similarly, our physical retail business also goes through you know the best quarter when you know that business is very sensitive to revenues and there is seasonality in beauty business and that we've seen over a long period of time. I think it's very difficult for us to say that there'll be like massive improvement in contribution margin or even EBITDA margin in beauty from here. There will be some improvement.
I think at the consolidated level, most of the improvement is gonna come from bringing costs under control for other businesses which include fashion private label, B2B business, as well as Nykaa Man and others that we have in our frame.
Yeah. I think just to look, I think it's the point was made that our BPC vertical is a combination of us as an online and offline retailer as well as a consumer company, right? So it's a mix. There's some impact there. That, you know, that being said, there's still been a 130 basis point improvement in contribution margin year-over-year, despite there being a 60 basis point deterioration in the gross profit margin. You know, I wouldn't really call it flat year-over-year, the contribution margin. For a business that's already at decent scale, and as we said, costs are already relatively well optimized, it's still, I think, a meaningful improvement on the contribution margin line.
Okay. Thank you and wish you all the best.
I think, Sunita, I think we can. It's quite late now, 7:30 P.M., for everyone it's late, so maybe we can end here.
We just have one last, Falguni, with your permission.
Sure. Sure.
Yeah. Latika, why don't you go ahead? Yeah, Latika.
Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. I'm Latika from JP Morgan. A few questions. The first one was, you know, just taking forward, you know, Anchit's comment, I wanted to understand what led to, you know, reduction in gross margins for the BPC segment, both on YOY and QOQ basis. Is it largely to do with mix or is there something else?
Sorry, can you say again what you are saying?
The gross margins for the BPC segment, there was a reduction on a sequential basis and even on a YOY basis. What led to that? Is it just a function of product mix or there is something else here?
Oh, I think I answered that question.
Mm-hmm.
It was asked by somebody else. It's, as we said, there's a couple of things. One is, of course, mix between the three distinct businesses of physical retail, online and consumer brands that is built into that. Also as I mentioned, there was, you know, a little bit of a pullback on advertising spends from direct to consumer brands in specific, not really from anybody else. You know, international brands, FMCG, CPG, everybody has continued to spend well. I think if you read the news or you see the press out there, it's all saying that A&P spends for FMCG and CPG are back to pre-COVID levels.
That, we think, is a very optimistic trend, and we hope to see that revival continue and strengthen for a large part of our base of brand partners in the coming quarters. Yes, I think D2C has had a difficult quarter. As all of you know, there is a desire for profitability and they are in the midst of fundraising, and as a result, they are trying to optimize for the quarter. I don't think there's much to look into it from a long-term trend. There will be quarters where you know, where growth and ad income will be up and down, but I think we all have to continuously believe in the long-term trend here. That being said, look, our BPC growth is very strong, right?
I think a 24% growth for GMV, that is, definitely ahead of the market. I don't know what numbers you have, but the numbers I have, this is at least 5-7 percentage points higher than the other platforms. I think we continue to take market share in BPC despite being already quite large in size. Ad spends, there will be some ups and downs in quarters, as I said. One because of D2C pullback, but the second point I made earlier, which is, you know, we have rolled out a very new way of buying ad real estate on our platform, and there will be some change management to be done.
Certain brands will have to learn to use that platform, and that is something we expected and that is something which should be mostly, you know, I think between June and July that's being taken care of. I think by August, September, everybody should be very much up to speed on how to use our very new and very enhanced ad platform service that we've rolled out.
Sure. Thanks, Anchit. The second bit I wanted to check with you is, you know, are you sensing any change in consumer behavior, you know, from a purchase perspective? You know, you talked about, you know, four discount sales seasons in a year. Are you seeing, you know, salience of sales increasing more than previous years during these periods? I understand you don't fund those discounts, so it doesn't really, you know, affect your profit line. Just trying to understand, you know, is this something which is, you know, getting more consumers on board or, you know, help them to spend more, you know, during these periods?
Maybe I'll kick it off. You know, I actually don't really think it's a change in consumer behavior. I think a little bit of what we saw in Q1 is a lot of the horizontal marketplaces, they did step up their retailer-funded discounting quite significantly. They were pushing brands to also discount more. I don't think it's a consumer-led change. I think it's a retailer. There was a bit of aggression from other horizontal retailers, maybe in a scramble to accelerate growth in what they were seeing as a soft market. You know, they probably pushed the pedal on their, you know, their main lever, which is always discounts, to try to generate some business. Brands did move some budget from marketing and visibility into discounts and heavy retailer-funded discounts as well.
I think, again, that's. I don't think it's a longer-term trend from them either. I think they're just trying to shore up a quarter that was looking challenging. I don't think this is a new way of working. The reason I don't think so is because the brand partners do not like it at all. All the large brands are very disappointed that retailers are taking this approach to heavy discounts and trying to commoditize this category, which has never been the case. You will see a lot of pushback from brands to retailers who are looking to do these kinds of discounts, and I think it should revert to the median in the coming quarters.
Okay. The last bit, you know, of course, you know, there has been, you know, issues on employee attrition. I did see the press release put out by the company, and I do see new hires and, you know, expansion of roles for the existing, you know, employees as well. Just wanted to understand, you know, are there any specific initiatives, you know, which, you know, your company is undertaking to arrest the attrition? Could that have any influence on, you know, employee costs going forward? That was the last one from my side. Thank you.
I think I'll address that. I think attrition is a wrong word. I think Nykaa has definitely. We went through a very tight evaluation process where we have decided to differentiate quite a bit between high performers and average performers and performers which were below the threshold. There is clear, you know, upgradation of talent going on. I think some of these tend to be misrepresented in the media. I wouldn't call it an attrition. I think it is a media. You know, I mean, there are people in that group who were not doing any significant roles. Very often, you know, media picks up what they intend to pick up.
I think there was no significant erosion of talent, if I may say so.
I think it's also.
In fact, our quality of our talent is better now than ever. Sorry, go ahead, Anchit.
I think it's two things. One is, of course, upgradation of talent because we are getting a lot higher quality, higher quality talent coming into key roles. We have revamped and really focused on our appraisal process and the way we are deciding on what roles are critical and which are not. I think you must look at this in context of what's happened in the broader consumer technology space and probably in the broader space globally in terms of the kind of reduction in force you've seen across hundreds of companies. I think Nykaa has not done that at all. For us, the focus has just been on ensuring we have the right people in the right seats. You may call it attrition, but I think in the kind of
If you look at the context and the macro comparables, it's very different. As FN said, you know, we're trying to make sure we have the right people in the right seats.
Well understood. Thank you so much, Falguni and Anchit.
Right. Falguni, since that's the end of the conference call, maybe you can have some closing remarks, please.
No, I just want to thank everyone for attending this. Like, you know, we have said in our press release, I continue to say that, you know, Nykaa remains very confident of, you know, creating long-term value for all its shareholders. You know, we do feel that our beauty vertical continues to shape into an ecosystem of its own, with steady and balanced growth across our online platforms, physical footprint, as well as our consumer brands. Our fashion consumer brands have experienced steady growth, and they're also building their own labels spanning across categories of western wear, Indian wear, lingerie, menswear, accessories, and much more.
Even though this quarter growth was slightly below long-term trajectory, we remain confident that this will not be the case going forward. I mean, we hope that this, you know, we are able to go back to the trajectory of growth that we are planning. Nykaa intends to grow businesses and brands with passion, but also with a discipline is again visible in the way we are growing our Superstore by Nykaa business, as well as our beauty brand. Dot & Key has had significant scale quickly with a lot of inputs that went in from Nykaa on Nykaa way of building. Of course, we appreciate what Suyash and Anisha bring to the table in terms of innovation and their passion to build a business, so it's a great partnership.
Similarly, we are also seeing that Kay Beauty is a brand, as well as NA-KD that we talked about in our annual day. Building a number of very interesting brands. We continue to work with each of our businesses improving their unit economics. Dot & Key has in fact crossed the annualized GMV run rate of almost INR 300 crore, which we're very proud of, growing almost fivefold since the acquisition and achieving profitability and demonstrating the successful business model that, you know, Nykaa aspires for, which is building value with Nykaa playbook. With that, I thank each of you for being present today in the call, and we've enjoyed our interactions.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks, everyone.