Hi, good evening, everyone. This is Vijit Jain from Citi Research. Welcome to FSN E-Commerce Ventures Limited Q2 FY24 earnings call. From the management at Nykaa, we have Miss Falguni Nayar, Executive Chairperson, MD, and CEO, Mr. Anchit Nayar, Executive Director and CEO, Beauty E-Commerce, Miss Adwaita Nayar, Executive Director and Co-founder, CEO, Nykaa Fashion, and Mr. P. Ganesh, Chief Financial Officer. Before we start, we would like to point out that some of the statements made in today's call may be forward-looking in nature, and a disclaimer to this effect has been included in the earnings presentation shared with you earlier. Kindly note that this call is meant for investors and analysts only. If there are any representatives from the media, they're requested to drop off this call immediately. With that, I hand over to Falguni for opening remarks, and then we can take Q&A.
Over to you, Falguni. Thank you.
Thank you, Vijit. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here again this quarter, talking to all of you about the performance. I will begin with a short performance highlight. For the quarter 2 of financial year 2024, we have seen a strong, profitable growth. As you can see in this very concise summary, you can see that our net sales value has grown to INR 1,498 crores for the quarter, up 24% on a year-on-year basis. I also... I also want to just point out that the revenue from operation, it has come out at INR 1,507 crores, up 22% on a year-on-year basis. GMV, of course, has been at INR 2,943 crores, up 25% on a year-on-year basis.
I think it's an industry first, but we have decided to talk about NSV more regularly than GMV. For sake of comparison, we have given the GMV number here, and sometimes in certain segments it's more GMV comparison that becomes appropriate, and we will be giving it. However, what matters to the market is revenue from operations and NSV, and hence, I think the focus will be on that. As far as the gross profit is concerned, you can see that at INR 649 crore, it's a 16% growth year-over-year, and the margins are at 43.1%. It can look that it's down 221 basis points year-over-year.
However, I want to point out that in a year ago period, our margins, gross profits, gross profit margin was highest ever, with an aberration of about 100 basis points. If we look, if we were to look at this percentage, gross margin percentage on a quarter-on-quarter basis, it has been stable. Coming to EBITDA, I think as you can all see, our growth journey continues. EBITDA has come out at INR 80.6 crores, which is a 32% year-on-year growth, and the EBITDA margin is at 5.4%, which is a 38 basis points improvement year-on-year.
We are really happy that all of the effort that the firm has put in place over the years, be it fulfillment cost control, be it controlling marketing costs, and in more recent times, controlling our employee costs, all of those have borne fruit. In later tables, you will see that we have been able to control our costs well, where EBITDA continues to grow at a higher pace than our revenues. On the PBT picture is similar, where the profit before tax as well as profit after tax have grown around 50% year-over-year, with profit before tax at INR 13.3 crores and the profit after tax at INR 7.8 crores for the quarter. Moving on, if we were to look at the components of our business, and I just want to point out that beauty and personal care, fashion.
Beauty and personal care includes our dotcom business, it includes our physical retail business, as well as it includes our beauty private house of brands that we have under our beauty business. Similarly, on the fashion side, the business includes our fashion.com business, it includes our little bit of fashion pop-up business that we do on the beauty website, and finally, it includes a house of fashion brands. And in the third bucket, which we call it others, but it should be a little bit more like a new business initiative, it consists of a number of businesses, which we've mentioned in the past. It consists of Nykaa Man, eB2B platform, which is called the Superstore by Nykaa. Our international initiative, which are even today, little small and not meaningful today, but going ahead, as you're aware, that this is going to grow.
LBB, which was an acquisition that we had made, and Nudge, which is a subsidiary that we've set up. Nudge subsidiary is a wellness brand that has been set up about a year ago. As far as beauty and personal care is concerned, you can see that the GMV grew at 23% on a year-over-year basis, and if you were to look at the two-year CAGR, it's at about 31%. And gross, as far as the NSV is concerned, the growth is similar, where NSV has grown at 19% on a year-over-year basis, but about 28% on a two-year basis. Want to just remind everybody that this was a quarter...
This is a year where the festive season has got delayed by almost 20 days, to little more than that, and as a result, the second quarter was impacted, with hardly any days of festivals coming into the second quarter. And hence, at the margin, some amount of growth has got impacted, both at the NSV level as well as at the GMV level. On the fashion side, I think you all may remember that compared to the quarter one, which was quite subdued for fashion, we have been able to increase the growth momentum.... The GMV for the quarter in fashion grew at 27% year-on-year, and the number, the... And the GMV came out at INR 763 crore for the quarter. And if you were to look at net sales value, the growth was 32% on a year-on-year basis.
In fact, on a two-year CAGR basis, the growth is 26%, so there is an acceleration there. Again, the NSV stands at INR 232 crore. Moving on to the last bucket of others, just want to point out that our GMV growth has come out at 54% for quarter on a year-on-year basis, and if you were to look at two-year CAGR, it stands at 129% year, growth over two years. Then the picture on the NSV side is better, where the NSV has grown 105% on a year-on-year basis, and the two-year CAGR is at 202%. In fact, this reflects, some amount of improvement in shrinkages that were happening in our businesses earlier. Moving on.
I think we talked about how we have pursued diversification of TAM through entering new industries, and we started with BPC, introduced fashion four years ago. Today, fashion accounts for almost 15.5% of our NSV contribution. And similarly, the others category, which predominantly has eB2B platform, Superstore by Nykaa, is now contribute to about 6.6%, though there are other businesses included in this, and as a result, this is not all of B2B business NSV. But we are really happy with how the diversification has been achieved. Coming to BPC, the strong growth across key metrics continues.
Looking at the composition of GMV, you can see that almost 79% of our GMV now comes from existing customers, which is the customers who existed on the platform before the year began, and 21% comes from new customers that have been acquired during the year. The GMV for the quarter stands at strong INR 2,000 crore. NSV picture is similar at 28% CAGR over a two-year period, and NSV stands at INR 1,167 crore for the quarter. Interesting to note that annual unique transacting consumers has increased at 24% on a CAGR basis and now stands at 10.7 million customers. On the orders, we again delivered about 10 million orders in this quarter, which is a 28% growth.
On the fashion side, in fact, the picture is. You can see the picture that existing customers are contributing more and more to our fashion business GMV. And today, 46%. For this quarter, 46% of our business GMV came from existing customers, which were at the beginning of the year, and 54% of the businesses come from new customers. The GMV for fashion business was at INR 762 crore for this quarter, and that was about 35% CAGR over a two-year period. On the net sales value, this quarter, we delivered INR 232 crore of net sales value. And again, interesting to note that on an annual unique transacting customers, today, fashion has 2.8 million annual unique transacting customers, and this is a 47% growth over a two-year period.
On the orders, we did about 1.5 million orders this quarter, which is a 36% CAGR over a two-year period. On B2B, a significant progress has been made on path to profitability. From the GMV perspective, over last one year, the growth has been almost 70%, and the NSV growth is even better at almost 200, 2.3x, which is, you know, a 130% growth over the base. On a transacting retailer basis, we saw a growth of 73% year-on-year, with now 130,000 retailers transacting on Nykaa platform. And activation rate stands healthy at 66%. On the orders, this quarter saw 280,000 orders from this transacting base, which was a 62% growth year-on-year.
Like we said in the past, we served these retailers across 770 cities. With that, I hand over to Anchit to take us through the beauty industry and how Nykaa has pioneered the beauty industry journey.
Yeah, thank you very much. Moving to the first slide, just a quick update for those of you who may be new to this call. Just reminding everybody on what the opportunity is on the beauty and personal care side. I think the three major levers that are going to serve as strong tailwinds for our business are the following: First is, a large part of the current BPC market is currently unorganized retail, and that is going to continue to move towards organized, with the online segment of the BPC market to grow the fastest over the next five to 10 years. Second, India today has some of the lowest per capita spend on BPC in the world, at about $15. That is set to grow to $50 over the next eight years.
The third major trend is the shift from personal care to beauty, and we are seeing and expect to see strong growth in beauty categories such as makeup, skincare, and fragrances. Now, Nykaa's focus, I think first and foremost, our focus is we see ourselves as category creators. And as a part of that responsibility we have towards building the beauty ecosystem, that can be done in large part through education, experiences, and events. Second, there is a strong focus from us on personalizing the discovery, as well as curating the experience for our consumers on platform to ensure, that we are doing the best possible art of retailing for the benefit of our customers. Third is Nykaa continues to be, seen as a destination and partner of choice for the leading brands in the beauty space, both global and domestic.
And fourth, a very strong symbiotic winning partnership between us as the retailer and our brand partners, 3,600+ brand partners who we work with. And a large part of that is achieved through a very strong focus on what we refer to as the art of retailing, to help our brand partners to build meaningful brand equity in the India market. So what have we achieved so far? 79% of our revenue comes from existing customers. I think that is an indication of how sticky, loyal, and highly engaged Nykaa's consumers are. Second, Nykaa's consumers spend close to $80, U.S. dollars, per annum on our platform. That compares to just $15, which is the average Indian consumer spend on BPC. So 5 x the industry average is the spend of our consumers.
Third, we today have over 21 million consumers have shopped on the Nykaa Beauty app. As I said, we work with 3,600+ global and domestic brands, and we have today over 165 physical retail company-owned and operated stores across 60+ cities. So to my earlier point, in terms of, you know, Nykaa's role in the ecosystem as a category creator, we just wrapped up the first edition of Nykaal and, which is India's biggest and first beauty and lifestyle festival, which was held at the Mahalakshmi Race Course in Mumbai. We had over 80 brands participating in the event, 800+ influencers, makeup artists, and KOLs, and over 5,000 pieces of unique content were generated across the two-day festival.
Some of the new brands which launched at the festival include Urban Decay, which is an iconic cosmetic brand that is owned by the L'Oréal Group, which has launched for the first time in India exclusively with Nykaa and was launched at the Nykaal and event. Bath & Body Works, a global brand in the bath and body space, also launched their most renowned collection of products with Nykaa at the Nykaal and event. There were master classes hosted by makeup artists, hairstylists, and skin experts across the two days. These include some of the global icons, such as Mario, as well as local makeup artists such as Namrata Soni as well. In terms of celebrities, we had Katrina Kaif, Janhvi Kapoor, Masaba, Kriti Sanon, and many more attend the two-day festival.
Most importantly, we were able to generate over 15,000 consumers who attended the event, which I think was quite a large number of consumers, and it goes to show you the interest that exists in India for learning and experiencing beauty. This is just some imagery of the kind of content which was created at the festival. Highly experiential, highly education-focused, and a very unique opportunity for consumers to experience some of the best global brands for the first time. Next slide, please. This is just a short video to give you an example of the sheer scale of the event. As I said, biggest of its kind in India and possibly in the world. Very unique concept, combination of brand experiences, master classes, yoga, lifestyle events, food and beverage, live entertainment as well.
This is an event which we hope to continue to do over the years. Moving on, in Q2, we also hosted our flagship Hot Pink Sale. As many of you know, we do two large flagship sales in the year, one in July and one in November. The July edition was a success this year. We saw 37% growth in omnichannel beauty GMV. Our reach was substantial, over 450 million, both through social media as well as through influencers. This was the first time we innovated very meaningful gamification on the platform as well, and over 200,000 users engaged with some of the gamification upgrades which we had performed prior to launching the sale. Importantly, we also launched early access for our Prive Gold and Platinum users.
As many of you know, our Prive users, our Prive program is our loyalty program, and our Gold and Platinum users are some of our highest, some of our most valuable consumers from an LTV perspective, and they were given 24 hours early access to the sale, which proved to be a success with the consumers and, is another moat, for retaining and engaging with our highly loyal, sticky, repeat customer base. Speaking a little bit about our physical retail business. As many of you know, today, with 165 stores, we are one of the largest physical retailers for beauty as well, not just the largest online. Today, our offline physical retail business contributes roughly 8% of our beauty GMV.
We have 1.6 lakh sq ft of offline space, which is a 34% growth year-over-year, and we have, roughly INR 3,250 is our GMV per sq ft per month, which is, we believe, best in class in the industry. Next slide, please. So just doubling down on a point I made earlier, which is we continue to be, the partner and destination of choice for international and domestic brands to launch in the India market. They see us as much more than just a retailer, but truly a marketing, engine, as well as a influencer platform, and an all-around partner who can help them to build and create brand equity in the India market, thanks to our specialization and 10 years of experience in this market.
We do have a very good understanding, and we have some of the most premium and highly engaged consumers of beauty in India today. Just two examples: we launched Redken, which is again a L'Oréal-owned brand, professional haircare brand. Very successful brand in Western markets. It has launched in India exclusively with Nykaa online. We also launched the brand Uriage, which is a derma cosmetic brand owned by the Puig Group, based out of Barcelona. This brand, again very popular brand in Western markets, has launched exclusively with Nykaa. There were an additional 10,000 SKUs that were launched this quarter across 400 other brands on the platform. Some other brands which we also launched this quarter include Formula 10.0.6, Novology, Versed, and Juice Beauty. Novology is a brand owned by HUL.
Natasha Moor, Lamel, Sugar Play, and The Good Bug were brands that were also launched on the platform. Natasha Moor, a very popular makeup brand, launched exclusively again, only on the Nykaa platform. So events and experiences, as I mentioned earlier, are crucial, as we look to continue to grow awareness for beauty. We believe that awareness is a large, barrier to consumption of beauty in the market, and it's events and experiences such as the Nykaa Beauty Bar, which will help to overcome that current, lack of awareness. This is an event which we do, a few, maybe three or four every month across different cities. So far this quarter, we've hosted seven beauty bars across seven different cities; we had over 10,000 customers who registered for these events.
As you can see from the video, a very diverse selection of consumers who attend these events. These events also allow us to create incredible content, and the content we created from these events generated over 50 million in terms of cumulative impressions across channels. On the right are just a few more examples of some of the events which we conducted this quarter. Next slide, please. So Nykaa is the platform where trends in beauty are identified very early on before they become mainstream. And one of those trends which we've seen emerge this quarter has been the trend of Korean beauty brands. As you can see on the left-hand side, these are search terms on the Nykaa platform, and they are growing exponentially.
So the search number of searches for Korean skincare, glass skin, are at 148% and 61%, respectively, showing that the Indian consumer, the Nykaa consumer, is starting to gain a lot of interest in Korean beauty. As a result, to better serve our consumers and to stay ahead of the trends, Nykaa has launched a dedicated K-Beauty store. We are creating dedicated Korean beauty content on site and hosting Korean beauty events. As a result, we have the largest selection of Korean beauty brands available in the market today, and we are the destination of choice for consumers looking for this particular set of brands. I think this is a very interesting case study of how Nykaa continues to focus on building the category of beauty.
One of the big challenges in India today for skincare consumers has been that Indian consumers don't actually follow a skincare routine. Our skin is very unique compared to Western skin. It is very melanin-rich, and as a result, our requirements are very different from other markets. Our consumers told us that they were very confused by the sheer number of products which were available and did not understand what was the right assortment of products for them to use. As a result, Nykaa collaborated with over 100 dermatologists across India, and we came up with the ideal regimen, which is relevant for the Indian consumer in particular. This routine we have called as the I Beauty. On the previous slide, I showed you K Beauty, which is Korean Beauty. This is I Beauty, Indian Beauty, and it's India's daily skincare routine.
It consists of four steps: CSMS, cleanse, serum, moisturize, and sunscreen. It is specifically tailored for the Indian skin and climatic conditions, and this has been a great growth driver for certain categories within skincare. It has helped us to expand the basket. It has helped us to expand the frequency of purchase, as well as drive deeper penetration of skincare usage in the Indian market. Next slide, please. For CSMS, we also did 360-degree awareness building for consumer education. We believe education will be the greatest driver of awareness, and then once awareness is in place, that's when the consumption happens. So as I had mentioned already, we partnered with influencers and KOLs to amplify our CSMS routine, and to create more awareness for this program.
We generated over 123 million impressions across Nykaa's own platforms, as well as off-platform, including across third-party platforms like Google and Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. In terms of our brand partners and customer adoption, 60%+ of Nykaa's customers shop skincare on our platform... and because of this new routine which we have created, CSMS, we have seen a 35% growth year-over-year in serum sales and an 85% growth year-over-year in sunscreen sales. Next slide, please. And with that, I'll, I'll hand the presentation over to Adwaita to take you through fashion.
Hi, everyone. I'm looking forward to talking about the fashion business today. So as a reminder, we've covered this in previous sessions as well. We do believe that obviously fashion is a massive market. We're incredibly excited about the opportunity. But, you know, I think what was incredibly important to us was that we carved out a bit of a niche and a differentiation for ourselves because it was a crowded market, and so we've been very focused over the last four years in building a premium, differentiated, fashion-forward platform, which shifts the conversation away from discounting and price and more to style. We do believe that we have found product market fit, and we do believe that the consumers and brands are appreciating us for our positioning.
And so on the right-hand side, we have a couple of metrics that we measure, which, you know, which ensure that we're staying true to our positioning. And those are things like the percentage of sales coming from new season collection, which stands at 26%, far, far higher than what our competition sees. We do see, a really strong cohort developing, so we're seeing very impressive repeat rates coming through. Today, 46% of our GMV is coming from existing customers, and it reflects a very strong cohort. Next, we're seeing that the order conversion is increasing very dramatically and quickly on the platform, and so now the order conversion per unique visitor stands at 3%, 3%.
Finally, in terms of the annual spend by the average customer, it's at about $110, which is, you know, 2-2.5x higher than what our competition sees. So some of these metrics give us confidence that our differentiated positioning is definitely clicking, and we're trying to stay true to that. So with that, we can move to the next slide. In the past, we've spoken a lot about assortment. I think assortment is at the heart of all e-commerce companies, and it's particularly important in fashion. Fashion platforms need to have a point of view. They need to stand for something, and so our platform chooses to stand for, you know, great selection, great curation, very trendy fashion. And so on that note, we've been aggressively onboarding brands.
There are a couple of new properties that we've been building this quarter, which I'd like to talk about. So in the past, you might recall, I've spoken about properties like Hidden Gems and Global Store. This quarter, we've added two more distinct properties that we're building on. The first is the Gen Z Store, which you can see on the top right, and so this is basically just focusing on the younger consumer in a much more targeted way. Again, we're seeing very good traction of this new property that we just launched. And the second, right below that, is what we're calling the Nykaa Fashion Luxe Store.
So this is, you know, the luxury brands, both in Indian wear and Western wear, that we're trying to pull together in a very concentrated manner, and we have about 150 brands that we're pulling together in this regard. So all of these are just different elements of assortment and curation, that are, you know, coming together to make Nykaa Fashion an interesting and a distinct place to shop. We can move on. So all of you have obviously heard how Beauty has this very big, Hot Pink Sale, and we do these, you know, Pink Sales through the year.
So Fashion has taken a call to align with Beauty for these mega sales, and, this past quarter, we held, what was our largest sale to date, where we saw 18 million visits, nine million unique visitors, and an order to conversion, order-to-visit conversion of 1.3%. All of these numbers, all the metrics that we saw in this sale, were the highest, we've had to date, which gives us confidence that we are cracking the sale playbook. Moving on. You know, so I think something, as we mentioned, that was very important to me was that we were differentiated, and we were truly adding value in what was a crowded and cluttered market. And so this time we've pulled together some quotes that we've gotten from our brand partners in terms of how we differentiate ourselves.
And so I'll read out a couple of those. This first one up top here says: "Nykaa has always been a preferred platform for Forever New, as it helps us increase our visibility to a target audience that Forever New caters to. It's because of great marketing collaterals, we're able to reach the targeted and relevant audience, making it easier to provoke genuine interest in the audience." So basically, you know, the fact that we have this premium audience that is very serious about shopping is something that brands are liking about us. I think right on, you know, on the right, right-hand side, you see a quote from Forever 21, another important brand partner of ours from the Aditya Birla Group, which says, "Nykaa and Forever 21 have been working very closely to offer very trendy and quirky fashion to the consumers.
The intent shown by Nykaa in promoting upcoming trends has been significant, and as a result, it has the highest contribution to fresh season sales for Forever 21 across all marketplaces." So it is the sort of qualitative feedback that we're getting consistently from brand after brand, which makes us feel that we are really becoming a preferred destination for brands and for consumers in this, you know, premium, fashion-forward segment. We can move on. I think Fashion has been doing a particularly good job over the last quarter on introducing personalization into our app. So I think a lot of you know that fashion is the ultimate discovery problem. There are over 3 million styles that you need to, you know, help the customer discover, and so personalization plays an incredibly important role.
I feel really proud of the work that the team has done over the last quarter, bringing personalization into the app experience. So now about 20% of people see a completely personalized homepage, where they will see widgets based on their interests, what they've been exploring, what they've been buying. And we do believe that some of the conversion uptick that we've seen has come from this you know personalization efforts, which is on the back of a lot of strong technology and data science behind the scenes. Moving on. I think you know this is this is an important part of the presentation.
Over the last couple of quarters, a lot of you are asking that, you know, "When is Fashion gonna see sort of a meaningful uptick, both in growth and profitability?" And I do think this is the quarter where everything has lined up, and so we're feeling pretty good about the trajectory Fashion is on and what we've delivered in Q2. So, you know, starting with the left-hand side, you can see that the order-to-unique visitor conversion has hit almost 3%, climbing really beautifully quarter-on-quarter, year-on-year. The next, you know, the middle chart here is the NSV. So you can see that the NSVs hit INR 232 crore this quarter. The growth has significantly come back. It's a 32% year-on-year growth. It's a 1.6x over two years.
And, you know, in other parts of the deck, you'll see that this is also on the back of improving profitability. So I think this is the quarter where fashion has delivered both meaningful top-line growth as well as improvements in the PNL and profitability, so truly been able to impact the top and bottom of the PNL. And finally, on the right-hand side, you can see that the contribution margin, you know, has climbed to 4.7% from 2.3% last year and 1.3% the year prior, and this is on the back of a whole bunch of efforts, which we'll cover some on the next slide. So I think this really talks about what's helping the PNL shape up nicely.
On the top left-hand side, we can see that, a lot of you know, fashion is plagued by things like returns, RTOs, cancellations, discounts. We've done a lot of very targeted effort over the last 2-3 quarters to bring this down. So, from two years ago, our leakages are down significantly, so it's about 0.8x of what they were two years ago, which is really creating a lot of goodness in the PNL, and it's leading to much higher NSVs versus GMVs than ever before, and so you will see that in the PNL reflected from an NSV to GMV ratio point of view. And you'll also see it from the fact that NSV is growing faster than GMV. On the right-hand side, I think the teams have done great work to finally see a breakthrough in marketing expenses.
So marketing expenses have come down from 28.4% last year to 24.9%, and we're feeling confident about the trajectory. As you all know, that this is a very important line item in improving fashion's PNL going forward as well. There's a lot of meat here that will give us, you know, leverage on a contribution margin line perspective going forward. On the bottom, we talk about a couple of other shifts we've made to the business, which are shaping the PNL nicely. So the first is premiumization. We have been focusing on attracting a more premium customer, and we have been doing that by... One of the metrics that's reflecting that is the fact that the iOS share has gone up by 1.4x.
Next, you'll see that the return, the repeat customers coming back well, and so you'll see that the business from the repeat customers going up from 13% to 46% over two years. And lastly, and importantly, our own brands, which I'll talk about a bit later, are also growing very fast. They're growing faster than the platform. They're gaining share on the platform, and that's also helping both the profitability as well as making Nykaa Fashion a more interesting place to shop. Moving on. So, you know, just before I wrap up on fashion, I just wanted to close with the remark that I do feel that it has been a bit of a turning point in terms of fashion's journey.
You know, the trajectory that we're on, it does give us confidence that we will be able to, you know, get to profitability in a nice, timely manner, as well as continue growing in a very strong manner as well. So a lot of our experiments, a lot of our investments, and most importantly, our commitment to our positioning has been finally paying off, and we're quite pleased with the Q2 performance. So moving on, I'll be talking about Nykaa's House of Brands, both across beauty and fashion. So in prior sessions, we've spoken about how we have this intent of cultivating a beautiful bouquet of our own brands. These are not private labels.
These are our own brands, and many of these, you know, are now quite sizable, and we really pour a lot of our heart and soul into building beautiful brands. So we have 13 brands of our own on the beauty side and 16 of our own on the fashion side. And on the next slide, we'll talk about, you know, the top line of the beauty side of our own brands business first. So you can see that the GMV has grown to INR 243 crore for the quarter that has just ended, and this contributes to about 12.2% of the overall BPC GMV. On the chart below, you can see that where this business is coming from.
So 56% of it is from sales on our own platform, 13% is what we sell in our own stores, but importantly, 31% of it is also what we sell in other third-party channels. So we truly are trying to build brands that can stand on their own two feet. Similarly, now, talking about fashion in terms of size. Oh, sorry, before we get to fashion, so I think we'll double-click on one beauty brand. So one, you know, one of the brands that we're really excited about is this beauty brand that we have with Katrina Kaif called Kay Beauty. It's actually India's first celebrity beauty brand and definitely one of the most successful. And on the bottom left, you can see how the top line has been growing.
So it has grown 4x in the last four years and has now crossed INR 150 crore annualized run rate. On the right-hand side, you can see that, you know, it's won several awards. It has over 300 points of sale, and again, you know, it does do about 75% of its business on Nykaa platforms, but 25% is being sold via other channels. Next. On fashion, so similarly, it's a newer business, but it is already about INR 100 crore per quarter GMV business. In terms of NSV, that's after discounts, returns, and so forth, it is a INR 44 crore business for the quarter two. I think I want to draw your attention to this 19.2%, which is the fact that this business contributes almost 20% of the overall fashion NSV.
So, even though it's only 13% on GMV, it actually translates to 19% on NSV, and that's because our own brands actually show better behavior in terms of lower returns, lower RTOs, lower cancellations. So it's quite meaningful from an NSV point of view, and if you actually look at it from a profit point of view, it's even more meaningful. So, you know, on both sides of the business, our own brands are important to us, both from plugging consumer gaps, but also from a profitability point of view. We can move on. Yeah, so one brand here in particular we'll talk about is Nykd. We've spoken about this in the past. It's a brand that we're incredibly proud of. It's a lingerie brand. We started it three years ago. Today, it's an INR 140 crore annualized run rate brand.
It does about 80% full price sales. It's not a discounted brand. It has over 1,000 points of sale. It's the number one bra category. It's the number one bra brand. Sorry, it's the number one bra in the bra category on Nykaa Fashion. And it's a top three bra in one of the largest marketplaces in India. So it is finding traction both inside Nykaa as well as outside Nykaa, and we're quite proud of this trajectory. Moving on. So Nykd has many points of sale. It has seven exclusive stores. We've started a franchise model as well, which is scaling up well. You know, it does very well on Amazon.
And we try to focus very much from a marketing point of view and truly, you know, form brand love via this brand, which you can see a little bit on the right bottom, right-hand side, some of the collaborations we've done. Moving on. So with that, that wraps up the own brand section, and I'll hand back to Falguni to take us through the ESG section. Thanks.
Yeah, thank you very much, Adwaita. I think we are really happy to introduce this section in our presentation, where we're talking about how we are impacting the society at large. Nykaa works with more than 6,700 brand partners today, both in beauty and fashion. Every upcoming brand in the country wants to be on Nykaa platform. I think the discovery and the kind of early-stage growth that the brands can get if they are built well is immense. We are not an open platform; we are a curated platform. So in some ways, we look after our customers and don't allow wrong quality products to be sold on our platform.
But at the same time, if the brand is good and delivers quality to the consumer, you know, our platform is very open for brands to scale up and get recognized in the country. So time and again, many of our brand partners tell us about the role Nykaa has played in enabling the beauty and fashion industry's growth in the country, where many D2C brands are able to reach the consumers in a very cost-effective manner, thanks to a platform like ours. We also work with a number of influencers. More than 6,000 influencers are on our NAP program, where they could create content and put links directed to our websites and our apps, and that leads to a steady source of revenue for them.
This is also a way of contributing to the entire ecosystem. Of course, we have more than 10,500 employees, about 3,500 on rolls, and others which are off roll, creating a large employment in the country, both in our warehouses as well as in our stores, as well as in our, what we call as beauty advisors that work in our various stores as well as in GTMT. On the supply side, we work with more than 7,000 suppliers, who are supporting our ecosystem. Also another interesting thing is we've enabled Nykaa Pro users.
These are makeup artists and, you know, beauty service providers who go into people's homes and provide services, and these guys are registered users on our platform, and they get special benefits, which are passed on by the brands to them. So really building an ecosystem that benefits everyone in the industry. More than 2,500 MSME vendors operate on our platform, again, helping create a robust economy in the country. Finally, now, with our B2B platform, we have more than 1.9 lakh registered retailers.
I think in this world, where everybody talked about how e-commerce, how a physical retailer needs to be protected from e-commerce platforms, I think we have been very inclusive and, taking our brand collection to retailers who could then cater to the customers in their area. We do believe that this will only grow the ecosystem for beauty, and it'll benefit all, rather than... Because we do believe that beauty, consumption will grow in the country, and it doesn't need to only go through one channel. And the right optimum mix would be if beauty reaches, beauty as well as fashion, reaches its customers through multiple channels. And in each of our businesses, we are pursuing such multi-channel approach. Moving on.
I think, again, some amount of quality work that we do in this area. I think since for a long time, we've had two special collections highlighted on the platform. One is what is called Conscious at Nykaa, educated customers on vegan brands, cruelty-free brands, as well as clean brands, and, and provided this knowledge to our consumer for our entire catalog on our website, where they are able to select the right conscious brands on our platform. This has been, you know, an effort over the last two years we've put in place.
On the fashion side, similarly, we've always highlighted the responsible collection, and, this also has more than 650 brands, which are disclosing, you know, what they mean to the customer in terms of whether certified organic and a whole category of, sustainable criteria that the customers like to choose from. Moving on. We also, I mean, with our vision to have, you know, protect our planet, we came up with a 10-by-10 initiative where we have said that over the next 10 years, we will move to improving our usage, or, I mean, reducing our usage of plastics and moving more onto recyclable materials.
Today, we are proud to present that almost 323 tons of plastic is being recycled in 2023, as well as, 80% of our packaging is now sustainable packaging. We've also introduced paperless picking, which, you know, obviously due to even in spite of increased order fulfillment capacity, by improving picking process, but we've also achieved zero paper utilization in how we process our orders. Moving on further... from in terms of Nykaa Foundation is focused on our CSR efforts, and our CSR, is focused on empowerment. So there are a couple of initiatives that have kind of achieved deep penetration in the last year, and there'll be more that will come.
So first being that, we now have a Nykaa Chair at IIM Ahmedabad, which is focused on consumer technology and the role that consumer technology, including digital marketing, plays in today's consumer brands. And this learning chair is focused on doing research as well as education on campus. From a transforming lives perspective, we also have partnered with LabourNet, where we are helping marginalized young women become skilled beauty professional, and this also, too, is being done at scale. On the education front, we have partnered with Rangeet to launch an app-based learning program called SEEK, which is benefiting more than 15,000+ students, and also very much focused on children's health through our collaboration with Anushka Foundation to enable the skilling of doctors in treating clubfoot.
Our values have always been the ones of sustainability, inclusivity and community being part of Nykaa's corporate identity. Be bold, but be good. Corporate governance is extremely important to us. Also, be the customer's champion and believe that the customer is sitting at the table while they're negotiating with us. One Nykaa and a culture of belonging, where every Nykaa belongs to the organization, and sustainability in every action are our key, you know, philosophically, our key values in our philosophies. Also very diverse and inclusive workforce. 67% of our committees are chaired by women, 63% of Nykaa leadership is under the age of 40. 43% of our women employees in our workforce, 40% are women directors, and 33% of Nykaa leadership are women.
So pretty much, pretty strong inclusivity based on gender as well as age at all the levels. And, in terms of our mix, you can see that in terms of years of experience, in fact, the younger, lesser number of years of experience we have, female population is better represented at 46%. So at entry, we are kind of almost taking near equal, gender, you know, gender diversification. I agree that we all have to learn to retain women, especially as they go through their young roles in their family. And that's why you can see that this erodes to about 41%. But we are doing a lot of effort to change that and to improve that.
Pretty young organization, like you can see, almost 19% of our employees are under the age of 25, 36% in the age of 25 to 30, 27% in the age group of 30 to 35, and just about 18% are over the age of 35 years. We are extremely proud of being a young organization and young talent, getting to take critical decisions throughout the organization. This data is for the on-roll employees, which are 3,216. With that, I hand over to Ganesh to take us through our financial performance.
Thank you, Falguni. Good evening, everyone. Before we get into the financial performance for quarter two, I would like to highlight that this quarter has been impacted by the shift of festive season to quarter three. However, in spite of the same, we have been able to drive strong growth across our business verticals. So with this, let's actually get into the financial performance. Next slide. Yeah. As we can see, our revenue has grown strongly at 22% for the quarter. Our gross margins came in at 43.1%, which is in line with the long-term trend for gross margins. We achieved an EBITDA of 5.4%, which is an improvement of 40 basis points over the corresponding quarter the previous year, and our PBT margin was at 0.9% for the quarter, with PBT growing 51%. Yeah.
So in this slide we have the One Nykaa income statement, and as I mentioned earlier, gross margins were impacted during the year versus quarter two last year, but in line with the long-term trend, because last year, quarter two numbers had a one-time aberration and came in higher than the normal trend. Also, what you would like to see is that the fulfillment expenses have been smartly improving quarter after quarter, and there's more than a 210 basis points improvement on the same. And this has been driven by regionalization strategy with our expansion of warehouse locations and capacity in FY 2023. This has in turn resulted in lower air shipment ratio along with shift optimizations. All of this has resulted in a smart reduction in fulfillment expenses.
Our marketing expenses have been slightly higher, so also other expenses, while selling expenses have been more or less in the same line. You would also see that employee costs have started moderating, as we have indicated in the earlier quarters, and on a YOY basis, has about a 90 basis points reduction. Overall, through scale efficiency and improvement in expenses control, we have been able to drive strong profitability, and with EBITDA growing at 32% YOY, and PAT growing at 50% YOY. Moving ahead... So in this slide, you can actually see the EBITDA margin waterfall. And what you can actually see over here is that, as I mentioned, while gross margin has contracted on a YOY basis, marketing and other expenses expanding marginally.
Fulfillment expenses moving up is something which has actually helped us improve our profit margins. And selling and distribution expenses have also been marginally higher. So broadly, cost optimization and cost control has actually resulted in a strong uptick in terms of margins and profit margins coming in at good levels, and therefore registering a high profit growth. Moving ahead. So here we see the vertical performance, and as you can see, I would like to focus on the bottom part of the table, where we have put all the costs on a comparative basis, and therefore expressed as percentage of NSV. This is what will make all the businesses comparable.
The key point to note over here is that there's been improvement in contribution margins in fashion as well as in eB2B business, while as far as the beauty and personal care business is concerned, this has already been at a healthy place. So contribution margins in the fashion business has improved to 4.7% this quarter, versus 2.3% in the corresponding quarter the previous year, and driven mainly by reduction in marketing expenses, which had been sticky for some time, but which is now starting to moderate. Similarly, the eB2B business, which is the major part of the Others vertical, has also been consistently reducing the EBITDA losses with increase in scale.
I would like to—with that, I would like to thank all of you for joining the call, and would like to move, request Vijit to initiate the Q&A session. Thank you.
Thank you, Ganesh. Thank you, everyone. I would now like to initiate the Q&A session. Anyone who has a question, please raise your hand and limit yourself to two questions so we can accommodate as many as possible. Operator, can you please unmute Sachin Dixit?
Yeah. Hi, this is Sachin from JM Financial. Congrats on, like, hitting the ball out of park completely on fashion. However, I just wanted to understand, like, looking at how this business has trended, can we talk about EBITDA profitability now in terms of how soon can we achieve it?
So yeah, I think, you know, we're not gonna give a exact timeline, but it's definitely, of course, on all our minds, and we're working towards it, every single quarter. So what I can say is that, you know, we'll just every single quarter deliver better and better, you know, P&L line items, but we won't be able to talk about exactly when, you know, that breakeven will be coming through.
Yeah. But I think, main item that matters is basically the marketing expense, like all of you can see. And, as that improves with a mix of new and existing customers improving, with every passing quarter and with every passing year, we remain confident that that should not be an issue. It's just a question of the timing on how many quarters it's gonna happen is the only question that we don't want to commit to at the moment. And as far as the overheads of these businesses are concerned, this business are concerned, they're quite reasonable. I don't think we've shared, I think we've promised that by the end of the year, we'll start giving EBITDA for both beauty and fashion, and we hope to live up to it and start disclosing that, by the end of this year.
You'll be able to see then that it's not so much the issue on overheads, but more about how quickly we can bring down the marketing costs. It won't be magic that'll happen overnight. It just needs a lot of painstaking work, acquiring and retaining the right customers, and but the benefits will are sure to flow.
I'm sure. On the beauty side, right, while we do understand that margins are not comparable to last year, but even with Q1, this seems like a 60 basis point dip in gross margin. What's happening there?
Yeah-
So maybe I'll, I'll kick it off, and then I'll hand it over to Ganesh. So look, what I can say is that, you know, last quarter we had spoken about there was a little bit of softness in advertising revenues. But that, you know, that has improved quarter over quarter. Sequentially, that has improved meaningfully, I would say. It is still slightly below where it was exactly a year ago, but it has improved to almost being at a similar level. So we're happy about the way that the ad income has come back. And in fact, going into the second half of the year, especially Q3, which is when a lot of brand partners choose to really market heavily, and they tend to save a lot of their- ...
marketing budgets for the Q3 festive season, we are quite optimistic that that will recover nicely. So that's my comment on, on the gross margin for beauty.com. What I would say is, please remember that the BPC segment includes our own brands business. It also includes our physical retail vertical, as well as the .com business. So with that, Ganesh, maybe you'd want to explain, the rest of the delta.
I would also just like to add to what Anchit mentioned, just highlighting that on a quarter-to-quarter basis, there is actually a small improvement in gross margins from 45.2% to 45.4%.
... Sorry, I, I'm seeing gross margin declining in beauty from 42.1% to 41.5%. I'm not sure if I'm missing something. Anyways, we can take this offline. Another question, quickly, or more like housekeeping question: I saw borrowings having gone up by almost INR 260 crore . Can you explain the nature of the borrowings, and why do we need them?
Yeah, so the borrowings have gone up in line with working capital requirements, and quarter three happens to be the largest quarter for us. And in line with your building up of inventory, et cetera, for the peak quarter, working capital has gone up. And this is on the basis of established lines of credit that we have, so it's purely working capital.
Sure. Thanks. Thank you for that. Bye.
Thank you. Operator, can we please take Kapil Singh next? Thank you.
Yeah. Hi, good evening. Just wanted your comments on, you know, a couple of points mentioned in the press release. So we've talked about discounting in BPC category increasing due to proliferation of number of homegrown brands, and increasing number of international brands as well. So just if you could talk us through, what exactly are you trying to communicate here in terms of the external environment, and what does it... what does that mean for Nykaa?
Sorry, first, I think, some reporting has been wrong about... It's not discounting by Nykaa, it is, an additional discounts that are being given by the brands that operate on our platform. There has been a little bit more of a competitive landscape, both from D2C brands as well as international brands that are coming into the country. And in terms of trying to hold on to... Each of the brands trying to hold on to their market share, they are sometimes doing little extra discounting, especially in the second quarter. So it was more comparison of a difference between GMV and the NSV growth that we were trying to explain.
Okay. Sure. But, as far as competitive intensity is concerned, are we observing any change there or, it, it is pretty much under control?
It's pretty much under control, no change there.
Okay.
I think I'm sorry if maybe that came across as confusing in the press release. The I think the only point we were trying to make is that the environment for brands is becoming more competitive because of the brand proliferation that's happening, as well as, I think because it was a soft Q1 for the brands, for consumer brands as well, especially for them, I think there was an effort by them to drive more top line through discounting, and that was the limited point we were trying to make. It is, it's not retailer-funded discounting, and it is not a reflection on the competitive environment for us as a retailer.
Great. Second, we've also mentioned that we lost around 20 days of, you know, festive season during this quarter. So, any estimate of how much revenue we would have lost, or whether the growth in the third quarter can be much higher compared to the second quarter? Because we'll have higher number of festive days falling in the third quarter this time.
I think difficult to... I mean, we wouldn't like to indulge in forward-looking statements, so unfortunately can't talk about that. But you can safely assume that if the festive season is shifted, it should probably lead to some bump up in growth in the third quarter. As far as the second quarter is concerned, I think, you know, again, it varies, you know, depending on certain number of days. But theoretically, one can assume that it would have taken off at least 200-300 basis point of growth from a retailer, but it can be varied depending on whether beauty, for fashion, or some different sub-segments.
Just to add, there is no loss of sales per se because it's actually shift of the festive period from quarter two to quarter three. So it's more of a shift, not really a loss.
It's more a year-over-year comparison that become difficult, because in the previous period there was festive, and this period there was no festive.
Sure, sure. Understand that. Thank you. I'll come back if you-
Thank you. The next question is from Nehal Jain. Nehal, please also introduce yourself before asking your question. Thank you.
Hi, good evening. Am I audible?
Yes.
Yes. Good evening, this is Nehal Jain from Nuvama. My first question was, you did mention about the increased competitive intensity, where brands are obviously increasing the discounting for the BPC segment. So did that not lead to maybe potentially higher advertising spends on your platform? Because maybe that's another way of targeting the increased competitive intensity, and ideally, it is a tailwind if there are more brands proliferating.
Yeah, so we've always said that, you know, brand proliferation is a good thing for a retailer like ourselves, and having that competitive intensity between, you know, global, local, B2C, FMCG, that is a good thing for a retailer in the long run. So yes, you know, as to your point, it is beneficial to a retailer like ourselves from an advertising income perspective. And as I mentioned, qualitatively, as we mentioned, because we don't disclose the number, but there was an improvement in Q2 versus Q1, when we look at our advertising income, which we receive from brand partners.
Yeah. Any specific reason maybe they chose to discount more than advertise? Any trends that may be happening that you wanna highlight on that?
I think these are very complicated questions, and they vary by brand. But I think coming on back off a slower quarter, the previous quarter, the first quarter was generally slow for the industry. So it's very difficult to predict. But yes, I think all you can see is interpret the number, you know?
Yeah, I think it's different. As FN said, it's different for different brands. You know, some brands have taken a price increase, which they've obviously pulled back. Others have not pulled back the price increase yet, so they're able to provide more discount. For some brands, they feel that discount gets immediate sales, whereas advertising, you know, the benefit of advertising is slightly more longer term. And each brand has their own, you know, has their own objectives. And as we said, because Q1 was so soft for the industry and even Q2 hasn't been great for the broader industry, there is probably a little bit of near-term objectives that some brands are trying to achieve, but it's too difficult to paint all brands with the single brush stroke.
Sure, and good point, Anchit. My second question was on the fashion bit. It's, it's good to see the kind of a growth turnaround, especially in the order side that fashion has seen. At least from the numbers we see, the sales and marketing spends have not moved too much. If you could just highlight what are the specific steps that you've taken that has led to this growth revival, especially after two quarters where growth, I think, was single digit in terms of growth in the order side of it?
Adwaita, you take this?
Yeah, yeah, I'll take it. So, so your question is what's causing the growth really, right?
Very much.
Yeah, so I think in terms of what's causing the growth, you know, there's a whole bunch of strategies at play. You know, it first, obviously, I'm a big believer that everything begins with assortment. And you know, we've just been continuously adding to our assortment, strengthening a lot of our unique propositions. I keep harping on these propositions we're building, like global store, hidden gems, our private labels, but truly... And now we see it, and you know, what people are searching for on the website, it's these unique propositions that are making the platform an interesting place to shop, and people are coming there for that. There have been also a lot of mainstream national brands that we've been collaborating with a lot more closely, so that's another level. So yeah, I would say one full bucket is just better assortment.
I'd say a second bucket is very focused, you know, product-level features to improve conversion, whether that's improving the checkout funnel, the payments, whether it's the personalization I was talking about, whether it's differentiated product strategy on mWeb versus app. Just like meticulously line by line, going after every opportunity we see on conversion rate. And then finally, there's a whole lot of good work that we've been doing on marketing. So, you know, just working as a very close-knit team on delivering really end-to-end marketing. So everything from getting new customers, our new customer acquisition is back in a very strong way, to going out and getting the repeat customers back. Our CRM team, our retention team, is doing some really good work on targeting and bringing back different cohorts of customers in a very focused way.
So I wish I could say it's one thing, but it's really not. It's probably, you know, five or six different things spread across assortment, marketing, and product tech that are coming together. I will also say, like more thematically, we've decided to focus a little bit more on women, and we decided to just lean in a little bit more into our proposition and, and do that with confidence. So those are two sort of more qualitative inputs that we've been focusing on, and we see that that's paying off. We do think premium women's wear is our right to win, and we've kind of been refocusing on that. So even if you were to look at our share of women's business, that's been going up. Our share of premium business, that's been going up. Our iOS share, that's been going up.
Just shaping the business a little bit more.
This is helpful. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you. We'll take the next question from Abhishek Banerjee. Abhishek, please introduce yourself before asking your question. Thank you.
Hi, this is Abhishek from ICICI Securities. My question to Adwaita, so, in terms of the improvement in contribution margin, and you've actually mentioned that there are some leakages you have plugged. Could you give us some more insight into exactly what that means? And also, in terms of your spending decreasing on existing users, may I just know how do you define an existing user as in till what timeframe they must have ordered in the past in order to qualify as an existing user?
So yeah, I think in terms of, the reducing of leakages, taking your first, question, I'd say there are two distinct, you know, legs to this answer. The first is that we've actually worked on reducing things like RTOs. That's like, you know, the deliveries that could not be delivered to the customer. And we've worked on reducing things like returns, and we've done that again through a lot of micro efforts. So for example, blacklisting customers who have very bad behavior, blocking certain PIN codes which show very bad behavior. You know, we've started introducing some charges at the cart level, which dissuade some of this bad behavior. So there's been a lot of just identifying, unique kind of use cases on how we can change some of this behavior.
We're working a lot more closely with courier partners, seeing how we can do a better job to work with them to kind of increase some of these metrics. That's what we've been doing on one leg, and I'd say the other leg, and this goes back to my prior question, is you can sometimes pick the right categories which show better behavior. So again, women's wear is a category that shows better behavior from a leakage point of view than, let's say, men's footwear. So there are certain choices we're making from a category mix perspective, which is also allowing us to deliver better NSV. And, so yeah, I would say both those things. One is, like, category shaping, but the other is also, like, very discrete efforts that we're making, line by line to plug any kind of...
You know, anything that's controllable from a leakage point of view, we're trying to attack and reduce. I didn't actually follow your second question.
So, in terms of marketing expenses coming down as a proportion of NSV, you said that it is because your existing users or old users are buying more, which is why it is coming down. So I just want to know how you classify an old user, as in how many times must they have purchased in the past?
No, no, sorry, can I just come in on this? I think for us, the definition of existing customer is someone who was before this financial year started, and that number is at 46%. Actually, there is a repeat user customer definition, which is when a customer's bought the second time. I think that what happens is, if you acquired a customer in the year, they may have again—many of them may have bought the second time. But I think we have chosen over the years to disclose the repeat customers in this manner, where we call them existing customers. Means that they were on the platform before the year began, the financial year began.
Understood. Just one last question from An for Anchit. So you've actually mentioned the INR per sq ft in your offline stores. So could you give us some guidance of, say, what is the number for stores that are older stores vis-à-vis the newer stores, so that we have some idea of where this number can go, go up to, GMV per sq ft?
So I don't, I don't know if we disclose it, so I don't want to get into that right now. Maybe we can just talk slightly more, you know, qualitatively. One, look, what we can say is, you know, obvious, generally, as the store tends to mature, the productivity improves, and increases, so older cohort of stores tend to have better productivity. Of course, there's many variables, like, sometimes if the location is wrong or it's a high street versus a mall. So I think there's a lot of variables, but generally, we do see that the longer the store has been around, the better the productivity. And, you know, we continuously churn and update, the brand mix in the store to ensure that we're maximizing the productivity in the store.
Footfalls, as the store matures and the local catchment is aware that the store is in the mall or in, on the, on the high street, then there is. It tends to be higher productivity as well. So I think various factors, but what we can say is, as the stores will mature, we do get to see better productivity. I don't know, Ganesh, if there's anything you'd like to add.
Yeah. I think you summarized it well, Anchit. In terms of a breakdown between older stores, newer stores, et cetera, while that's not something we've given in the public domain, as Anchit explained, by and large, as the stores mature, this is a number which tends to go up. Yeah.
Understood.
Thank you. I'll just, you know, jump in with a question of my own, if that's okay. My question is just staying on the beauty side. You know, I understood your comment that you know, the ads have recovered somewhat QOQ, but still remain weak on a YOY basis. But if I take those numbers into account, it does look like the e-commerce business gross margins, stripping out ads, is also somewhat weaker on a QOQ basis, YOY basis. So just trying to understand if that's because own brand mix is more or less stable, or is there, you know, something to do with the sale event that you launched, this quarter? Thank you.
I think, yeah, I think all I can say is that, you know, I think, own brands, did do a little more discounting. Like we told you that between GMV and NSV, the discount for most of the brands had gone up in that quarter. And to that extent, our own brands also probably had to participate in slightly higher discounting than they would have done in the past. And there is somewhat a factor, but it doesn't move the needle in a very meaningful way. So it's a lot of small, small things. All we can say is that, urge you to say, treat it like an aberration rather than a huge trend or anything like that.
Correct. Thanks, Anchit.
Yeah.
Got it. Yeah. The next question is from Sheela. Sheela, please, unmute yourself and introduce yourself before asking. Thank you. Operator, can we unmute Sheela Rathi, please?
Yeah. Hi, thanks for taking my questions. Adwaita, my first question was to you. Would it be fair to say that the worst is behind us, with respect to the fashion business, from a growth perspective and as well as, you know, in terms of operational metrics point of view?
You know, I think the way I would frame it is, I think the peak loss is definitely behind us. And I think that, you know, the PNL is just going to improve from here. Both from a, you know, percentage of NSV point of view, the contribution margin is just gonna keep increasing, as well as from a absolute, you know, loss of last year versus going forward. You know, that number's also gonna keep decreasing. So I feel like I said this in a prior call, that I think in building any new business, there's a year of peak loss, and I think that year is behind us, and from here, the loss will keep going down.
I do also feel that some of the challenges we faced in, you know, Q4 and Q1, the last two quarters, were pretty unique from a growth point of view. So yeah, I don't see that coming back. I do find that Q2, Q3, and onwards, both the growth as well as the profitability will be moving in the right direction. But yeah, I think, you know, as you guys have probably figured out by now, we have a lot of discipline in terms of not growing, if we're not seeing the right unit economics or the cost structure stacking up. So yes, for Q2, and from what I can see right now, everything is stacking up well, so the growth can be continued.
We will always bring that discipline of just making sure that our unit economics are constantly improving and moving in the right direction. So I think what I'm trying to say is, you know, the growth you're seeing now is the growth we want to keep steady at. We want to keep growing at this level, and we feel like at this level of growth, we will also be able to keep improving our unit economics and our contribution margin line quarter on quarter.
Yeah, I think if I could just add to what Adwaita is saying, I think to phrase it as the worst behind us is probably not correct, because the reality is that you have to invest in a new business, right? And the biggest unlock is on marketing. And, you know, as the repeat versus new mix, as that evolves, and as existing and repeat customers start to account for a larger share of GMV, then the marketing spend as a percent of sales will start to trend downwards, which will obviously reflect well on the profitability. But I think any business has to first build that base of repeat and existing customers, and to build that base, you have to acquire the customer, and customer acquisition is going to cost money regardless, and especially so in a competitive business like fashion.
Thanks, Anchit, and thanks, Adwaita. That brings me to my second question, you know. Like, we have seen improvement on the GMV contribution with respect to the fashion business now at 46%. Obviously, on the beauty business it's much higher. But, from your perspective, and also what we see at the industry level, from that lens, what do you think is a sustainable level, with respect to, you know, the GMV contribution coming from, you know, existing customers?
I honestly think that just year-on-year, it keeps, you know, it keeps climbing. I think what that eventual number, like, sort of stabilizes at differs from every market to every market, you know, depending on the, you know, where that particular business is in terms of their journey. But I think more directionally, what I can just say is that I think every year you'll see this percentage coming from existing buyers increasing. But it's not like next year we're gonna jump to where beauty is, but, you know, it'll just keep increasing sort of sequentially every quarter.
Would you-
The way we, the way we look at it is, you know, it's, it's not about... We're not trying to solve for a mix. I think we have very, we have very clear goals in terms of what should be the growth in new customer acquisition and what should be the growth in repeat customer, and we try to maximize both. And, you know, wherever the mix shakes out, it shakes out. Now, naturally, beauty as a business has been around for 10 years, so they've had 10 years of customer acquisition, that has allowed us to build a very large base of existing users.
In fact, I would say the if you see a business that's been around for 10 years but has a low share of repeat or existing customers, that to me is indicative that they're not doing a good job at customer retention, and customer retention is an output of the kind of customer experience that you're able to deliver. So I think better the customer experience, better the retention, higher the share of existing customers, and that's kind of how we look at it. That being said, you know, new, new customer acquisition is an investment for the future and has to be done, and therefore, we look at the two very separately, and we invest in both and try to drive growth in both buckets.
Fair enough. Just if you would give us some ideas in terms of where the industry would be on this number?
No, no, it's very difficult to comment. Each platform will be different, and it all depends on the pace of growth also. You know, I think it also depends on the quality of growth in the past. If you have periods of very poor quality customer acquisition, then you would have difficulty having good cohort.
Understood. And my final question was, you know, very bookkeeping-related question, but, in the fashion business, the NSV growth is higher than the GMV growth. You know, the gap is about 5 percentage points. What could be the reason?
Yeah, you know, I think I tried to allude to this, but, it's all the efforts on reducing the leakages, right? So when you're able to reduce your returns, RTOs, cancellations, and so forth, then, your NSV looks better. So because this quarter versus, a year ago, a lot of those leakages are looking far better, you'll see that the NSV on a year-on-year basis is growing better than what the GMV is growing at. So it's-
Thank you
... sort of different. Yeah, I think you've understood. Yeah.
Thank you. We'll take the next question from Aditya Chandrasekar. Aditya, please introduce yourself before asking a question. Thank you.
Hi, this is Aditya from UBS. Just a kind of follow-up question on the marketing spend on the fashion side. So obviously it's come down sharply because your repeat, kind of customers has increased. Just wanted to get a sense of as the repeat share of repeat customers kind of, or share of existing customers keeps inching up and maybe heads closer and closer to where beauty is, where can we see this kind of 25% of NSV go down to? Do you have some kind of target in mind for the medium term? Just wanted to get a sense, because structurally it would be higher than beauty, I'm assuming. But what kind of a number you're kind of targeting, that would be helpful.
You know, there's no, like, explicit number that's in, in our head. Obviously, every quarter we just wanna do as, you know, well as possible. We set sort of three-month, six-month kind of targets. We keep gunning for those. But we do feel there is significant headroom to bring this down.... significantly. Like, so if you see this number for beauty, it's, it's so very low at the moment. So I think between where beauty is today and where fashion is today, there's so much room for us to continue optimizing. We see a lot of low-hanging fruit. We think that this number is not only related to the repeat existing mix, of course, that's one big element, but there's a lot of other optimizations that we continue to do which can bring this down significantly.
So, you know, again, I can't give you an exact number and by what quarter, but what I can say is that the goal is to every quarter bring this down in a meaningful manner. And there's a lot of room, and there's a lot of flex on this number, and most of the contribution margin expansion will come from this number going down.
Thank you. Hi, can we take the next question from Latika Chopra? Latika, please unmute yourself. Go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, thanks for the opportunity. You know, first of all, congratulations. You know, it's very encouraging to see so many efforts to scale up the, you know, both beauty and fashion portfolio from a consumer lens. My question was on contribution margins for the beauty and personal care business. You know, it's hovering at pretty healthy levels of, you know, 26%-27% odd. Just wanted to understand how should we think about, you know, progression of these contribution margins over the next two to three years? Can they reach, in your view, a high 20s level? And the question is the context that I guess you will need investments behind your own brands and also on the offline stores.
How should we think about, you know, how this number is going to move, and what will drive that? Thank you.
Sorry, you're asking for the number for fashion? Is that what you're asking about?
For beauty. Beauty, beauty and personal care.
Yeah.
The contribution margins are hovering at about 26.5% now. You know, these are good levels, but just trying to understand, should we see scope for further improvement here? You know, considering that you have to make investments behind scaling up your own brands and behind the offline stores.
I think there is a certain amount of offline store growth already built into our current numbers, because if you remember, we accelerated the offline stores. Sorry, I wanted to point out that we accelerated the offline. It's built into our financial numbers, because we accelerated the offline store count after the COVID. However, and it is not above the contribution line, so actually, our store expenses, if I'm not mistaken, come below the contribution line.
Sure. So-
That's one thing I wanted to point out. Secondly, we also have a fairly large critical mass of our own brands, where, again, while we don't, I think, invest in our brands in a way that can lead to large investment. We kind of own and then invest in the brands. I don't know whether right or wrong approach, but that's the one we follow. But so it's more measured. However, it can go up. I think marketing spends to a certain extent towards brand building, as well as some amount of brand building spends for our BPC brands, I mean, beauty as well as fashion brands, can go up in future if we see conducive environment.
All right. So, Falguni, does it mean that we should, for the time being, assume that contribution margins are going to hover in this 26%-27% zone, and it's going to be a more gradual expansion from these levels for BPC?
See, the point is, like, you've always seen us, that we will try to deliver the best margin, margin possible, so I don't want you to tell me to not try to improve those. So what can I say? I don't want to promise that I won't improve it, but yes, you can assume. It's been a huge effort to to tighten-
Sure
... the fulfillment costs, and a lot of benefit of that you've already seen. We work towards improving marketing costs over the last few quarters, but right now, like, you can see that we do believe that we do need to create and build a market. Like, you saw that we, you know, we are doing work towards market creation, and I think. So we'll do the right thing for each quarter, rather than worry about the Contribution Margin. But overall, we don't see a huge need to spend too much.
All right. Thank you so much.
That was the last question for the day. Thank you, everyone, for joining the call. I'd hand this back to the team at Nykaa for any closing comments. Thank you.
Sorry, I just forgot to mention that while we discussed contribution margin, at the EBITDA level, we have improved our employee costs quite substantially over the last year, from 9%, 9.9% to around 9% level, and I think that has been a big focus during last year, and we're happy to report that. And like you can see in other expenses line also, it's been flattish, and we think we can improve it slightly more there, too. So yes, overall, at the EBITDA level, trying to work towards improving EBITDA margin will definitely be a possibility because, you know, many of our businesses, like fashion as well as the new businesses, can see improvement in EBITDA margins.
Thank you, Falguni. Thank you, everyone, who joined this call. On behalf of Citi, that concludes this earnings call. Thank you for joining in. You may now disconnect. Thank you.
Thank you.