Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the Q3 FY 2022 earnings conference call of Page Industries Limited. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during this conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. V.S. Ganesh, CEO, Page Industries. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Thank you so much. Good evening all and greetings from Page Industries, and it's a pleasure to talk to you all today evening. I look forward to our interaction, and I'm very happy to answer all the questions that you may have. I'm happy to report that we had an excellent quarter last quarter. With the market opening with less restrictions and being almost near normal, there is a good improvement in the out-of-home purchasing and the channels like modern trade and general trade are seeing increasing businesses. I'm also very happy to report to you that we have been able to expand capacities in- line with the increasing demand which we have seen, and we have taken a lot of measures to increase capacity both in-house and with our chosen outsourced vendor partners.
The supplies have been improving month-on-month, and the robust performance in the marketplace and the performance of the supply chain team in delivering more goods is reflected in the Q3 numbers. Our Q3 revenues grew by 9.8% quarter-on-quarter and 28.3% quarter-on-quarter. Volume grew by 5.3% quarter-on-quarter and showed a 24.6% growth quarter-on-quarter. As of end of December, all our channels are fully functional. We are happy to report that we have presently more than 105,000 MBOs and 1,030 EBOs. For us it was a historic moment when we crossed the 1,000 EBO mark, and now you'll be happy to know that we are 1,030+ EBOs. The operating environment overall has seen good improvement and is having less disruptions.
We have introduced shift operations in most of our manufacturing facilities to ensure safety by way of maintaining social distancing amongst our associates and to augment more capacities. We also increased our sourcing capacities. Our compliance teams are closely working with the outsourced vendor partners to make sure that all health and safety protocols and standards are followed. The sales have been on an increasing trend since last year, and we continue to see that in this quarter as well. Our branding effort continues through multiple channels, including online, media, and point of sale. If I had to talk about our Athleisure business, the investment we made in 2019 to set up a dedicated sales team for the Athleisure business is yielding good results.
The strengthening of the team and having a focused leadership for this vertical has resulted in rapid expansion of our distribution footprint even during pandemic times. This comes not just from new apparel stores, but even from existing EBO stores. The new retail identity in our EBOs lends itself beautifully to showcase a range of Athleisure products. The Athleisure products are so well received that the demand for this category has been moving upward each quarter. We also been working on the back end to augment those capacities. This gives us tremendous confidence that with this increased demand, expansion of distribution, introduction of new products and styles, Athleisure will continue to show increasing growth year on year, and this is going to be one of our key focus areas. When it comes to women's business, the story is similar.
Women's continues to be a very high growth opportunity category for us. In the last four years, we have built an extensive and strong product portfolio to specifically target women. The launch of Jockey Woman distinct identity in 2018 has helped us to communicate and build awareness in the women's category. The campaign which we did last year or during the Q2 of this year has also helped us to create more awareness. This is complemented by the addition of some very exciting products in this category. Women's business is growing at a very healthy pace, and we have aggressive plans to expand the business through focused initiatives. We believe that women's innerwear will be one of the biggest pillars for Jockey in our journey of becoming a billion-dollar company.
Our kids wear business has also shown very encouraging results, and it continues to be a special focus area. We have had a very encouraging customer acceptance and feedback in this category, and we are now going all out in creating more capacities and supplies in this category in line with the demand. We now have around 53 EBOs that are exclusive for Jockey Juniors, and we have also appointed Jockey Junior specific channel partners across 50 cities as phase one. The journey continues, and we continue to expand in this area. Considering the immense potential that we are seeing in the women's and juniors category, starting this year, we have a separate business vertical with a dedicated sales team and distribution to cater to the women's innerwear and kids wear business.
We continue to expand our depth within existing market geographies as well as strengthen distribution in markets which are witnessing expansion of mature retail formats. Jockey is now present throughout India in 2,850+ cities and towns. We see great potential in the rural category and for cities as well, and we are strengthening our distribution network in a phased manner in these markets. We'll continue our focused approach on our core business verticals, that is men's innerwear, women's innerwear, Athleisure, men and women, socks and towels, and we are confident of maintaining growth going forward. We continue to innovate in EBO in areas of customer acquisition, cost control, cash management, and investing in the well-being of our people and in our sustainability initiatives.
While we deliver strong year-to-date performance, I think it is right for me to thank our teams in having continued focus on excellence and driving the brand with purpose. With their support, we are recording continued progress and good financial performance. For today's call, I have the pleasure of having Mr. Gagan Sehgal, our Chief Sales Officer, and Mr. Rahul Shukla, our Chief Retail Officer, of course, along with Mr. K. Chandrasekar, our CFO. So they will be more than happy to answer any of your queries which you may have in their domains. I now call upon Mr. Chandrasekar to give you the financial update. Over to you, KC.
Thank you, Mr. Ganesh. Welcome to the call once again. I'm extremely happy to report the best ever quarter in the history of Page Industries, which is Q3, INR 11,898 million with a 28% growth and PAT of INR 1,745 million, which is a 14% growth quarter-on-quarter. In this year, Q2 was the best ever until it was surpassed by Q3. As you know, we reported INR 10,840 million top line. This has surpassed the last year Q3, which was INR 9,270 million top line, and Q4 was INR 8,807. In the past five quarters we have delivered the best four quarters in the history of Page Industries, barring Q1, which was partially under lockdown due to pandemic.
in terms of EBITDA margins, we have delivered a 21.1% EBITDA, which also compares favorably with about 21.5% of the previous quarter. The last year quarter-on-quarter Q3 was 24.4%, and we had significant raw material price increases since then. We have also increased our ASPs, but we had... I mean, typically we deliver around 21% margins, and we are around that range in Q3 as well. The gross margins are around 40%, which is more or less in line with the history in terms of range between 39% and 40%. The Q3 PAT has been good at an, as I said, a growth of about 14%.
We're also doing extremely well on the conservation of cash and being able to support the vendors. The cash and cash equivalent is about INR 5,560 million, which again is better than Q2, which was about INR 5,300 million. The net working capital is about INR 5,935 million, which was at September about INR 6,100 million. Inventory has increased to about INR 6,950 million when compared with about INR 6,400 million. We're building up inventories and ensuring that we are able to match the supply to the demand, because the demand is ahead of the supplies even now. We are increasing our inventories and the good quality inventories as such.
For the nine months, the revenues are INR 27,754 compared with INR 19,522. Or quarter-on-quarter, it is a growth of 42%. EBITDA margins because of Q1 for the nine months ended 31st December 2021 is 18.7% and compares favorably with 18.3% of the previous year. The profit after tax 1.5% as compared with 11.5% is also favorable. I suggest we move on to the Q&A session now.
Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on the touchtone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. We would like to remind the participants to restrict your questions to two at a time. This will allow the management to answer questions from all participants in the queue. If time permits, we will come back to you should you have any follow-ups. We take the first question from the line of Avi Mehta from Macquarie. Please go ahead.
The opportunity. First was on the price increase. In the Q2, you had indicated that you've taken about a 5% price hike. Have you taken any further price hike to pass on, you know, the input cost inflation?
Mr. Mehta, we increased the price by around 8% during December, January.
Mm-hmm.
This is mainly because of the input cost increase. Of course, we were planning to do it in two phases because we were also expecting the GST rollout. We didn't do the second phase because the GST rollout didn't happen, so we did the price increase to meet the increasing raw material prices.
To follow up with this, from the margin, EBITDA margin point of view, should we now aim for 22% as we go forward? Or what? If you could kind of help us what range are we looking at as we go forward after this price increase given the input cost inflation?
Mr. Mehta, we always curate the prices in such a way that we are in the 20%-21% range. For that we can continue to be a value for money brand for consumers. We always are conscious of that, and we are comfortable at a 20%-21% level. We touch the prices in such a way we are in that zone.
Got it, sir. Sir, my second question was on the gross margin calculation that you've shared in the presentation. This time you've excluded sale of raw material to vendors and sale of non-moving inventory by doing the math. Could you explain the nature of the sales and whether the increase that we have seen in that component, the excluded component in this year, is that one-off or is that a new run rate that we should assume going forward? If you could help understand that.
It's a good question, Avi Mehta. Increasingly we are dispatching, you know, we have opened up outsourcing in Bangladesh as also, and we also worked very hard on disposing the slow and non-moving inventory. We also have opened factory outlets, which was not there in the past. These are not necessarily related to the FG sales. In order for apples to apples, and since we we sell raw material to our outsourced vendors at cost, that does not contain a margin. In order to remove that distortion from this quarter, we started reporting on apples to apples the finished goods that we are selling.
Sir, this is.
Sorry, sir, may I request you to please.
Yeah. Okay.
Move on. Thank you.
No problem. Okay.
We have the next question is from the line of Tejash Shah from Spark Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi. Thank you for the opportunity, and congrats on good set of numbers. Sir, my question pertains to EBO expansions. We have actually achieved a very good milestone, 1,000-plus stores. In terms of EBO network, we are actually next to. I can think of Bata or perhaps some of the other networks in lifestyle space. First of all, how much more runway you see in terms of expansion, let's say in next two years, on EBO network? If you can give some more color on what is the nature of expansion that we have done in the recent past?
Are we getting to Tier 2, Tier 3 cities, or it is largely penetration in areas where we are already present and we are going deep in existing markets?
I think, sir, Rahul will be the right person to answer this. Rahul, you want to take this?
Yeah. Thanks, Tejash. Thank you for the question, Tejash. Am I audible?
Yes.
Yeah. On the first question, you know, if you see over the last two years, we've been opening practically one store every two days in the year. In total of around 160-180 stores is what we've been opening. We'll continue to drive the pace of expansion as we move forward. In fact, this year probably we'll exceed that target as well. As far as the second question that you have in terms of the possibilities for growth and then in the tier one and tier two towns, if you look at the number of cities that we are present in, yeah, the MBOs, it's hardly 360 cities that we are present in.
Out of the 28, more than 2,800 cities that Jockey is currently getting retail. You can well imagine the kind of opportunities that exist for expansion for Jockey retail. Of course, every market will have its own time when they will be prepared to take an MBO because our vision is to have an MBO in every relevant viable and sustainable catchment in the country. Our expansion is happening uniformly across all tier three cities. We are expanding in metros, in tier one and tier two, as well as in tier three and tier four. Roughly, you know, one third of the distribution presence is in all these three buckets.
Yeah. What is the least population city or town you would have went to so far till now?
Typically we define these tier four cities as the ones which have a population of 50,000 plus. We are targeting those markets, and there's enormous number of markets where you know where we can actually open MBOs.
Sure. Then just last one on associated questions. Usually this kind of expansion also needs associated backend investment in supply chain, warehouse facilities and all. Any color on that? How are we ramping up on the backend?
Well, as a
Yeah.
Yeah. We have a five-year plan in place, and we review it every year, so we have our budgets for next year. The entire operating plan, including warehousing, is done proactively to be in tune with the increasing demand and sales. We are well prepared on this, on that front, not only on the warehousing side of it, but also on the manufacturing side. We also done enough groundwork with the supply chain partners on the RM side of it. Similarly, we have worked very closely. Our IT team works very closely with the business to ensure that the IT infrastructure, including to serve the e-com business, is well tuned for the projected business growth. We are well prepared as far as those expansions are concerned.
Sure.
That's all from my side, and all the best.
Thank you. A reminder to the participants, if you have a question, you may press star and one on your phone. We have the next question from the line of Ankit Kedia from PhillipCapital. Please go ahead.
My first question is on the MBO channel expansion. Could you give some color of this 100 ,000, you know, MBO outlets? How many would be between men, women and kids? While I understand there could be some overlap between them, individually if you can tell us, we will know the opportunity size of more expansion which could come in individually between the three men, women, kids, and Athleisure also, if you can, you know, help us give the opportunity size. Gagan, you want to take it?
Yes. Thanks. Thanks, VLG. Thanks for the question, Ankit. Yes, this 100,000 MBOs that we have right now is the total base. You know, our focus is that wherever there is an opportunity, we try to do range selling. We just don't go ahead with one category. If we see multiple categories, all the teams get activated and wherever there is a potential, we try to be present there in that particular category. I would say the percentage is pretty healthy. Out of our total men innerwear base that we have, you know, when it comes to women and Athleisure, it is almost 60%-70% of that where women and Athleisure is also present, and we are still counting. As I said, it depends on the total base itself.
Wherever we see an opportunity, we try to go with all categories. You know, after one, everybody else follows. It's pretty healthy in terms of our presence across all categories.
Just a follow-up on that. You know, last quarter you highlighted that 1 lakh was the target which you achieved. From going forward from here, will we see a pause in the expansion of MBO and it will be more of, you know, increasing repeat purchases in these outlets or we'll continue the expansion strategy and the repeat purchases and others will follow simultaneously?
Ankit, it will not be either/or. I think it has to go hand in hand. You know, like, during the pandemic period itself, we have expanded our MBO base by 61%. You know, exit FY 2020, we were at 65,000 outlets. Today we are at 105,000 outlets. We see there is a lot more opportunity because almost 50% of these outlets we are opening in tier three and tier four towns, and we still see more and more opportunity there. At the same time, we will continue to do range selling and category upselling in the existing outlets. Both we continue at the same time.
Sure. My second question is regarding omnichannel. You know, most of the other retailers are today, you know, shipping their online consumer buying from the retail outlets. So given that our retail outlets are franchisee owned, do we have the ability or the technology to actually ship from the retail stores, or we will continue to ship from our warehouses, and that's where, you know, some of the inventory could actually be blocked for us, and that's why we are facing some supply chain issues, given that 8%-10% of our orders today are coming from online? Well, if you see the numbers, we have clocked very good growth. So-
The issue as regards supply chain was a good problem because the demand was much higher than what the supply could do in the beginning of the year, and then they started catching up. I should compliment the teams for revving up capacities very fast and to catch up with the demand. We are in a much healthier situation as far as the supply chain issue is concerned. Coming back to the online business, we have our own e-com warehouse through which we cater to the requirements of online businesses. It is not happening regionally or through the distributors. It is from a central warehouse. You know, again, we have robust marketing plans there, and we keep enough inventory to meet the demand. We have everything close by.
All our warehouses are close by, so we ensure that there is no sales loss. If there is an upside in some other channel, we ensure that we cater to it.
Sure. That's helpful. I'll come back in the queue. Thank you so much.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sanjaya Satapathy from Ampersand. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thanks a lot for the opportunity. My question is that quite a few consumer discretionary companies reported fairly weak revenue and volume performance in this quarter three. They cite a variety of reasons like delayed monsoon and weather disruptions as well as impact of excessive inflation on affordability. Whereas your top line growth has been fairly okay, fairly strong in fact. What really is the reason that are you seeing some kind of a change in consumption pattern or that the penetration potential in your case is far higher?
Well, Mr. Sanjay, how I see it is, I think it's the power of the brand. The product which we offer, the acceptance of the product offering which we have for our consumers. We have come out with very exciting products which is well received in the market. The other most important two things which I can say is, one is the value for money proposition. If you see how we attach the prices, we have been trying to hold on to the maximum, and we have only touched barest minimum so that we continue to be a value for money brand for our consumers. Second is the team's passion for excellence in whatever they do, which makes sure that we give superior products of the highest quality to our consumers.
I think it's the right product, retail expansion, where we have made sure that we are present in wherever we need to be. We did invest even during the pandemic. We didn't shy away from investing in increasing our retail footprint. The value for money and the quality of our products and the range of our products, I think these factors have really helped us and that's what we could hear from the consumers when I see the demand.
Understood. If I can just ask then, are you saying that you could not have done better compared to what you have achieved, even though these were late surge of Omicron wave and monsoon? What I'm trying to say that your performance was fairly what you wanted irrespective of the disturbances or you would have done better?
Actually, Sanjay, we could have done more, but there is so much we can switch with supply chain. We did. I, to be honest, I think there were some opportunities lost because the demand was much higher than what we could supply initially, you know? As far as last quarter is concerned, yes, we did catch up quite a bit. If I say, see, year to date, we could have done much better. As you know, we lost 48 days in Q1, and we lost the operating capacity also during those times. We had to do quite a lot of catch up. The demand was much higher than supply at those periods. You know, things are looking very bullish for us even going forward, looking at the acceptance of our products.
Understood. Which means that you will be able to sustain this kind of top line growth in the coming period. Apart from that, the one comment that you made about your proposed price action in two phases and then GST, we would have liked to understand that part.
Okay. Sanjay, what I meant was you know, there was a question, did we increase the price? Yes, we did increase. You know, we did increase the price in anticipation of the GST, and we wanted to revisit it for the raw material sometime in January or February, early February, but we didn't do that since the GST was not rolled out. The recent increase in prices which we made helped us to meet the increasing raw material price.
Understood.
We thought of doing it in two phases, but we didn't go ahead with the second phase because the GST increase bit was not rolled out.
Understood. About your top line outlook, because you have given out some kind of a guidance that you'll be touching some billion-dollar sales.
In by FY 2024 or something like that. You are well on your way to do that today. I just wanted to get a feel of that. Yeah, we are very much in that trajectory. In fact, the quarter-on-quarter performances are in line with our long-term business plan to achieve the target. We are very much at it, and we are clocking very nicely to hit those targets, and I think we'll hit it faster than what we thought. Understood. Great. Great, sir. Thanks a lot. Thank you.
The next question is from the line of Gaurav Jogani from Axis Capital. Please go ahead.
Thank you and congratulations on the strong set of numbers. My question is with regards to the EBO outlets. Now you have sort of 1,000+ EBO outlets. Would you like to share what would be the percentage contribution to the overall sales from the EBO?
Rahul, sorry, your question is about EBOs as an overall company contribution?
Yes, yes. Sales contribution of EBOs
All I will say is that it's now, you know, quite a substantial contribution, probably one third of what the company does. It's been growing rapidly over the last couple of years as we press the accelerator on expansion and the same store growth activity.
Thanks for this. The next question is with regards to, you know, the strong 24% top line, the volume growth that we saw, and even on a two-year CAGR basis, it exceeds a 22% growth that we have seen. How much, sir, would you attribute this to the pent-up demand, you know, that because of the strong demand of the earlier quarters that we're not able to maintain and some of it got bunched up during this quarter. How much of this would you attribute to that?
I personally feel this is a real demand rather than a pent-up demand because I do understand when we had wave one and wave two, when the markets were closed and, you know, hardly any shopping was possible except for online, yes, when the markets reopened, there would have been pent-up demands. If you see the last few six months, the markets have been operating near normal, and our demand continues to be as high as before, you know. It is what we can read from the market is that these are real demand. It is not a pent-up demand and, you know, we are preparing ourselves for the same.
Sure. I just want last clarification from my end. With the billion-dollar target that you have set for yourself, that is the FY 2024 or the FY 2025?
We are looking at 25, 26.
26. Okay. Thank you.
Of course, we may try our best to achieve it faster than that, but you know, the target is 25, 26.
Okay. Okay, sure. Thank you. Thank you for that. Thanks.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Chirag Lodaya from ValueQuest. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Sir, my question was on volume growth. If I just heard it correctly, you had 24% volume growth during the quarter, and top line growth was around 27-28. The pricing element was just 3%-4%, Y-o-Y. Is that understanding correct?
K.C., your take. Yeah, thanks,
Chirag. In terms, there is not a mix element in terms of channel and product category in that. It's getting increased prices by close to 5% in Q1. There is always an impact of premiumization and mix in that.
Okay. 5% price increase.
Yeah.
Q1, recently you took 8% price increase, so now it is in all 13% over last nine months. Is that understanding correct?
This increase will take effect only from Q4 because this happened towards the end of Q3. It's yet to be reflected in the numbers.
Right. You could also touch upon this Bangladesh, what exactly, you know, we are trying to do, which kind of products and what is the plan? How big can be Bangladesh for us in terms of sourcing?
Okay. On Bangladesh, you know, we have been working with couple of vendor partners for quite some time now, and we have added one more vendor partner. We have been very choosy about the selection of vendor partners. We have been looking at, you know, as we have told in the previous calls, we don't outsource a product, we outsource the execution piece of it, and they should be an extended arm of Page. You know, they should be a mirror of our in-house facilities. The same way we operate in-house, the outsourcing vendor partners operate. We were lucky enough to identify few vendor partners who had the same wavelength and could work with us at a strategic alliance.
Our volume growth from Bangladesh will predominantly be determined by the alignment of the vendor partners to the Page way of working. Otherwise, you know, we will be looking at expansions wherever possible. It's not particular to Bangladesh. We are not gone to Bangladesh for price benefit. It is, in fact, the cost of goods purchased from Bangladesh and domestic continues to be almost same. It is to make sure we get the volumes and we get the quality and standards which we expecting. There are some very big factories in Bangladesh which does for the best brands globally, and they have the best management talent available. We pick and choose such vendor partners who can associate with us. In that sense, you know, it has worked very well so far.
The growth will be based on how they can grow along with us and how fast we can find like-minded partners there.
Right. Got it. Just last bookkeeping question. What is the A&P spend for the quarter and first nine months?
Sorry.
Advertisement spend for the quarter and nine months.
KC, I was not able to hear the question.
Yeah, he's asking the advertisements, right?
Yes.
A&P, we say, spent about INR 160 million. I mean, sorry, INR 294 million in Q3. The nine-month spend would be around INR 715 million.
Okay. Thank you, and all the best.
Thank you.
The next question is from the line of Bharat Shah from ASK Investment Managers. Please go ahead.
No, sorry. We'd like you to see the kind of robustness of the business performance. One question. We've embarked on the technology transformational project for the length of time. Just wanted to understand where are we in the journey. Technology at one point of time probably was for hygiene and for, you know, informational value, then it has become an enabler, and now probably it has become the key component of the business to improve the character of the business. Where are we on that journey, and how extensively we are adopting that to improve the character and resilience and the strength of the business? Related to that, a smaller sub-question is what is our overall logistics cost both in terms of sourcing as well as distribution.
Given our manufacturing proliferation and improvement in usage of technology, can we expect to see improvement in cost in percentage terms in the logistics cost over the period of time?
Thank you, Mr. Shah, for asking those questions. Actually, to answer your first question on the technology side of it, as you rightly said, this is a continuous journey. I think year on year, we need to upgrade ourselves to bring agility to the business, bring smartness to the business, and to bring safety or security to the business, you know, when it comes to data protection and other things. We have been working on those fronts. Just to update you, we have now fully migrated to Blue Yonder for the planning side of it. This is the latest development which we have on the technology side, which is going to give us lot of edge as far as supply chain planning is concerned, right from demand sensing, demand planning to operations planning. That's something which has happened.
Some of our units, especially on the women's verticals, most of the units have now smart technology wherein we get real-time information to improve productivity. So every machine is attached with, and every bundle which has the iButton so that everything is logged in and logged out, and we get real-time information. Any downtime is known real-time. This data also is helping us to bring in lot of efficiencies. Similarly, we have made lot of investments on the HR side, when it comes to HRMS, and that continues to be a continuous, you know, investment being made. We always were very, very strong on the front end as far as, the sales force automation and other activities are concerned, wherein we are able to get lot of information.
Today our sales team in their palm can see, you know, how much stock is lying with the distributor, what has been the purchasing pattern of the retailer, and therefore which product needs to be pushed. What is his target, where is he against that on as far as targets are concerned. Everything real time. We do have that. We have a very strong management dashboard with real-time alerts, so that we get early warning if something is not right. I think KC can elaborate further on a lot of initiatives which we have taken on data protection and data security is concerned. We have been working on that, and we have continued to be investing on these fronts, and these investments will continue. That has brought in.
It has been a great enabler for us to have this accelerated growth, because as you know, what took us here will not take us there. Unless we embrace technology and support, we cannot scale at that speed. You know, we have been blessed with an amazing team which was able to spot the right requirements and implement them on time. As far as the logistics cost optimization is concerned, this is well within our control, within our budgets, and it is well managed. We are still looking at warehouses, a warehouse expansion wherein we can have a better reach to the market with a lower cost, and also improvement to logistics cost. That is something we are working on. Our main focus area is to reach the market faster because the cost is well under control.
There may be little bit of weakness as far as cost benefits are concerned when we work on the new warehouse systems. It will be mainly to improve the stock health of the distributor because if we can reach inventory to the distributor faster, he can work with a better inventory and rotate it better and have that much better health as far as inventory is concerned.
My second question. For a length of time, we have been working on improving and transforming the innerwear of the firm. In between, market situation was less favorable. Therefore, we were in a kind of a state of trouble for a length of time, where efforts were more than purposive, but outcomes were somewhat stingy and hard to come by. Do you think finally we are at a stage where the Page going ahead will look more and more of the kind that we have seen in last some time, rather than that phase of trouble we were in that kind of a situation. Have we kind of decisively broken out of that?
Where we can look at that target of billion-dollar and all that is fine. Internally, given everything that we have, the product portfolio, the brand and the distribution and the value proposition, we are at a stage where Page of future will look more and more of the kind that we have seen of late.
Absolutely, Mr. Shah. You can count on us. We are tracking well on those fronts to achieve that billion-dollar target, and it can be achieved only if we can achieve those numbers which we used to achieve in the past. You can see in the last few quarters that is what we have done. We are pretty focused. We are blessed with a great management team who are well aligned to the business. You know, there are strong shoulders on which we are standing and driving the business. We are blessed with an amazing team, and our product development team is coming with some exciting, amazing products. The operations team has been working so much on excellence that we can continue to be cost competitive.
In fact, we were awarded the Manufacturing Excellence Award very recently, you know, when it comes to excellence, you know. We are fully geared up in that sense. You know, you can see that. You already seen it in the last few quarters, and I'm sure you'll continue to see good results.
Sure. Thank you so much. Just last question, which I had asked earlier, but wanted to check on that. What kind of logistics cost as a percentage of our revenue, so far it has been? Do you think we'll be able to see measurable drop in the percentage of that too over the period of time?
I think, Bharat, thanks for that question. If you look at the kind of logistics and the inbound, outbound, as well as the entire warehouse, managing the warehouse. As you know, a large parts of the business today are outsourced to DHL, and we are increasingly doing so. The total cost of warehousing is somewhere around 2%, and it remains. It is slowly coming down, but maybe, you know, maybe 2.4%-2.2% kind of thing. While it is not significant, but it can make or break the supplies. We are focusing on excellence at DHL and with all the B2C and new channel partners coming in. The capacity of warehousing is what we are focusing and also investing in best-in-class systems.
We recently switched over to Vinculum as a billing for e-commerce. A lot of these automation initiatives will, you know, help us to match the supply to the demand through the warehousing.
Right. Thank you so much. Best wishes to the entire team, and delighted to see the kind of a change which has been unfolding. Thank you.
So much. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Swagato Ghosh from Franklin Templeton. Please go ahead.
Yes.
Yes. Okay.
I wanted to understand how are we thinking about inorganic growth opportunities?
We have recent cash which we can deploy. How are you thinking about that growth inversion?
Mr. Ghosh, if you can repeat the question, the line was not clear.
Okay. I want to understand how are you thinking about inorganic growth opportunities. We have recent liquidity at our disposal, so how are we thinking about that growth inversion?
Are you, Mr. Ghosh, since it was not clear, I'm repeating the question. Are you asking, since we have cash and how we are going to use it for growth? Am I right?
Yes. Inorganic opportunities specifically.
No, at the moment, yeah, let me put it that way, VSG. We are not looking at any acquisition, if you're asking about that. Because we have a lot of work on our hands in the organic growth itself. As you know, we are growing rapidly, and we need to expand capacities in the future of the brand in India itself is so huge that we have to specialize and focus and improve the operating efficiency. So in the same category, obviously we cannot introduce a competing product based on our agreement with Jockey. I hope that answered your question.
Yeah, yeah, that does. You are saying that the cash we have, that would all be used up in, say, expanding capacity and, investing in, say, marketing, et cetera, for newer categories, et cetera? Organically.
Organically, yeah. We already have all the categories that we want to do.
Great.
We will be investing in capacity expansion, in digital transformation, in all other aspects where the business can become faster and more efficient.
Okay. Okay, got it. That's helpful.
Sorry, VSG was not able to hear you, so I stepped in.
Yeah. Mr. Ghosh, just to, you know, As Mr. KC said, we are looking at organic growth, and there is so much to grow.
Right.
You know, we don't want to get distracted. Unless there is something very, very exciting, nothing of that sort has come to our radar. As you can see, you know, we have been growing our ranges, as you might have seen when it comes to juniors. Now, the way our accessories are performing, which are in line with brand Jockey. There is a lot of work to do in that front. There are a lot of opportunities in our hand, and we would rather try and focus and leverage on our strength.
Understood. That is very clear. Second question is, when we talk about expanding MBO numbers, can you give me an idea about the forecasted incremental MBOs? How much percentage shelf space we get, for, say, a new MBO that we are entering? Say in the first year, two years, what is the percentage shelf space allocated to our brand?
Well, it depends actually. There are some MBOs which will be having appetite to accept most of our ranges, you know. They may want to keep the juniors, the women's innerwear, men's innerwear. There are some MBOs which are just selling, you know, kids wear. They may only accept the kids wear product. It depends on the MBO. There are also some cases where they start off small, and then they keep expanding as they get comfort. It's very difficult to put a hard number there by way of the percentage. Gagan, you want to add some more light to it?
No, I would completely agree with what you said, V.S.G. You know, shelf space can only be, you know, we get majority of the outlets in any case, looking at our distribution footprint, we are present in most of the outlets, you know, which sell premium apparel. So we are there. So when we go to a new outlet, it can be maybe a non-conventional outlet, for example. In a non-conventional outlet in the similar category, we can get 100% shelf space because there is nothing else present except Jockey. You know, while there can be, you know, some other outlets where, as V.S.G. rightly said, it's only a kids outlet and we want to make a foray into that. They do not sell adult at all. So there we can place our products. So it depends.
Maybe there is an outlet which is a footwear outlet where we place our socks. It's very difficult to talk exactly, but yes, we do strive towards getting the rightful market share, what we deserve, at the last outlet level. That's all I can say.
No, no. This is helpful. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Mridul from ABSLI. Please go ahead.
Hi, good evening. Thanks for the opportunity and the presentations are very strong. I just have two questions. One is, in the initial remarks that you mentioned, you know, the demand is from across the categories. Could you give some sense, you know, from particularly with respect to men's innerwear and women's wear and also Athleisure, what are these, the demand quite, you know, stable across categories or, you know, is there any one single category which is driving the growth? And point two, if you could also share, you know, basis, are you seeing any differentiation in growth between urban and rural markets?
Well, as far as growth across categories are concerned, all categories have done well and every category has shown robust growth. That is one encouraging and good news which we have. Men's innerwear, Athleisure, Women's innerwear, the bras, it has all shown good growth. We are seeing since our market penetration has been low as well as bras, Women's innerwear, and Athleisure is concerned, we will be seeing accelerated growth there because there is much more headroom on those fronts, you know, because as far as penetration, you know, on the men's innerwear we are around 17%-18%. When it comes to other categories, we are in single digits. Obviously you will see much more accelerated growth there. Even men's innerwear has grown tremendously well. All categories have recorded robust growth.
Okay. Thank you. You know, in one of the interviews you have, you know, highlighted about non-innerwear category, almost 1/3 of the, you know, contribution to sales. Has that kind of inched up further or, you know, that's the. Or is there any range that you guys, you know, are thinking in mind going ahead? Also if you could just, you know, address the question on rural versus urban. That's it.
It is more or less the same because the men's innerwear. Even though the Athleisure side of the business has grown, the bras have grown, men's innerwear has also shown similar growth. Overall, as you could see the numbers, the exciting numbers we have. The percentage has not shifted because we are very happy that all categories have shown similar growth.
Sure. Thank you very much. Any difference between urban and rural, if you can just, you know, again, qualitatively speak about it?
Well, you know, there has been, when it comes to retail footprint expansion, I can say around 45% of the expansion has been on the tier three-four cities, and therefore the corresponding sales is being booked there. You know, Gagan, do we have specific splits on rural top line and-
We have had you know in terms of percentage growth. I think it's we have grown in all city tiers. There's not too much to talk where we have grown. You know but when it comes to our expansion, our endeavor is to reach the last town you know for the ease of the customer to come and purchase and explore our products. But overall rural we are pretty excited because we have also seen that the new MBOs that we opened in the tier 3, tier 4 towns show us a very healthy throughput from the first month itself, which shows that there is an appetite for the consumer you know immediately to come and shop there. Because the density of the outlets is also pretty low when it comes to rural.
When it comes to growth, I think we are seeing almost a similar growth in all city tiers.
Understood. Thank you very much.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sameer Gupta from IIFL. Please go ahead.
Thanks for taking the question, and congrats on a good set of numbers. Sir, since FY 2020 our MBO footprint has grown from 66,000 odd to now more than 1 lakh odd. If I look at the nine-month FY 2022 sales CAGR on a two-year basis, growth is at around 7%. Also I noticed that the city footprint has been kind of stable from FY 2020 to 2022. What exactly is happening here? Are we targeting smaller stores within existing cities? Since any of the business metrics is quite stable when it comes to margins and working capital, what exactly are we doing different now to get this kind of an expansion in our MBOs?
Well, our expansion has been driven with opportunity. Wherever we see an opportunity, we are expanding. We are being very mindful on that. There is tremendous scope there. You know, there is also room for expansion as the product gets more and more stronger and when there are more and more offerings, you know. It also enables us to expand faster. Of course, going forward we will also be focusing. While we are expanding, we will also be looking at productivity side of it and the cost to serve. That is definitely one area of focus for us.
Could there also be an element of competition being disrupted during this time and that is an opportunity that we have seized?
I feel this is a true demand because the supply chain disruptions, they're more or less common for everybody. There might have been a big shift from the unorganized sector to the consumer shifting to the organized sector, to the brands. That definitely has happened, and you can see it across the brand, you know, across the brands, including our competition. Everybody has done that because there is definitely a movement from the unorganized sector to the organized sector. For us, we have been able to do comparatively better because of the power of our product and the acceptance of our product in the marketplace. We will continue to focus on our very foundation, the product and the price.
Hello, there's something wrong.
Hello.
Yes, sir.
Yeah, no, sorry. I have something else. Yeah, yeah.
Please go ahead, sir.
Okay. No, I was just telling you that, you know, for us, we did comparatively better because of the strength of our product and the value for money which we always offer to consumers. We'll continue to focus on that very foundation on which we built the brand. Gagan and Rahul are working hard on improving the reach, and that is also very important so that our presence is felt by our consumers. A better reach, much better product range and value for money. These will definitely help us.
Got it, sir. That's very helpful.
Sorry, Mr. Gupta, I request you to limit your question 'cause we-
Sure, no problem.
Yeah. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, due to time constraint, we'll be taking the last question from the line of Harpreet Shah from Stallion Asset. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi, congratulations on good set of numbers. I just wanted to understand, what is our market route to expand so many MBOs? We have broadly gone from 72,000 MBOs to 105,000 MBOs. Have you gone direct to the retailers or you've been assigning distributors to go to these MBOs? If you see the most of the attempts will be coming in rural areas or in smaller towns, they've gone direct. They've not assigned distributors, they've been attempting to go direct. Also quality controls, what is your view on having so many distributors in urban areas where you can actually save on channel margin sensitivity, having a lot of second-tier distributors?
Gagan, you want to take it?
Yes. Your question is what is the strategy for the expansion of these outlets and whether we are doing direct service. You know, there was a question on technology as well earlier. We have mapped the potential and the opportunity areas and, you know, we are expanding our MBOs completely based on that. You know, we have geotagged all our MBOs, so we know exactly where we need to be present in order to be closer to the customer. That is the strategy that we are taking in expansion of MBOs rather than just growing rampantly, you know, where there's already an MBO and we open another MBO next to it. It's very strategic, you know, to get closer to the customer, that's one.
We have the approach which has been successful for us so far, which is through a distributor. All the MBOs are serviced through the distributor. The good thing is that wherever we are opening new MBOs, as I said, the throughput is very healthy from day one, and we have not had to subsidize any outlet so far. Wherever we are strategically opening outlets, they are being serviced by the distributor without giving any subsidy, and it's working very well for us. Which gives us a lot of confidence that the closer we continue to go to the customer, it will be a win-win for us as well as the customer.
Got it. There is one more question. If I just see one of those smaller peers on the top of your side, it's actually undertaken 22% price increase in the premium segment and broadly their volume growth is 0% for that. For the whole company, the price increase is around 16% for that company. For us, the volume growth has been 24% and the price increase has been 3%. While the revenue growth is broadly the same for the second company and our company. I'm looking to understand the difference why this kind of other peers have to take a lot higher price hikes and where we have taken lower price hikes and still we have been able to maintain the margin.
Well, we have taken a lot of initiatives to control expenses. I should thank KC and his team for having a lot of budgetary controls in place, and we have worked with utmost discipline during these difficult times. We also made some strategic moves. We built a strategic raw material inventory. To some extent, we were able to insulate ourselves from the raw material price pressures because we could see it coming and since we had money in our hand, we could better utilize it by investing on stock, which came very handy. Our operations team has also worked pretty aggressively on improving productivity and controlling cost.
All this has helped us to ensure that we touch the price to the minimum extent, continue to be competitive despite all the price pressures we had on the RM front and deliver better volumes.
Do we have a different way of calculating volume growth? Like what is the volume growth dependent on? The volume growth has been super healthy at 24%, and this kind of volume growth is not seen in any other consumer discretionary consumer staples group in India. How are we calculating the volume growth?
You know, we are looking at same quarter last year, the volume and the volume for this year and calculating the growth. You know, this is what you're seeing, is a true growth and it is. There is no change in the way we calculate. We are reporting the way we have done all these years.
Got it. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. K. Chandrasekar, CFO of Page Industries, for his closing comments.
Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure and such knowledgeable participants, and I enjoyed answering all the questions. Thank you very much for participating in the Page Industries Q3 earnings call. Have a good day. Bye-bye.
Thank you very much, members of the management.
Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Page Industries Limited, that concludes this conference call. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.