Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Q4NFR25 earnings conference call hosted by RateGain Travel Technologies. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touch-tone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Bhanu Chopra, Founder and Managing Director of RateGain. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Thank you, Seijal, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for RateGain Travel Technologies' Limited Earnings Call for the Fourth Quarter and full Fiscal Year 2024-2025. It is a pleasure to reconnect with you and share key highlights from the quarter as well as the year gone by. Joining me today on the call are Mr. Rohan Mittal. It's his first call as a new CFO. Mr. Tanmaya Das is our outgoing CFO, and Mr. Vivek Anand is our Head of Investor Relations. We announced our Q4 and FY 2025 results earlier today, and I hope you've had a chance to review our financials, press release, and investor presentation available on the stock exchanges and on our website. As AI adoption increases across industries, the need for easy-to-use technology that helps in generating new revenue is increasing across the travel and hospitality industry as well.
As an AI-first company, RateGain is very well capitalized on this need as we continue to identify several new use cases to solve, shipping new features and products across all our business lines, to constantly provide an easy way for our customers to solve their revenue challenges. This focus on becoming AI-first has helped us end the year with record EBITDA margins for both Q4 and the full year, alongside driving steady growth across our existing relationships, which continues to demonstrate the trust that our long standing customers have in RateGain. Building on this momentum, as mentioned in our earlier calls, we are ramping up investments in GTM efforts across geographies with a sharper focus on APAC and the Middle East. Revenue contribution from these regions has grown from 11% two years ago to 13.7% year to date, that too on a significantly larger base.
As industry continues to navigate a cautious outlook amidst continued global uncertainty, we remain focused on operational excellence, making deliberate investments to prepare for what comes next. Central to this is our continued commitment to being an AI-first company, a shift that is shaping how we build, operate, and deliver across the business. With that, let me take a brief look at our business units. The DAS business continues to perform well and contributed to 32% of our revenue. This vertical grew at a healthy pace with continued traction across key accounts and with the addition of new logos. The airline segment led the way with major renewals and new signings, including multi-year agreements with some of the industry's biggest names. We also continue to gain traction amongst a host of mid-size airlines we have partnered with over the past year, along with key national carriers across Asia.
Hotel, car rental, and OTA segments saw steady activity as we continue to make inroads with key clients and deepen our presence. Our ability to process and analyze large volumes and data in real time continues to be a big differentiator and has really allowed us to build a leadership position within this segment as we continue to see incremental opportunities with key accounts. Our distribution business remains stable for the third consecutive quarter. We continue to remain the top technology provider that has been consistently recognized by all top OTAs, Meta Search providers including Booking.com, Expedia, Google, Trip.com, Microsoft, and much more as a preferred technology partner. We also closed a large enterprise deal with a global travel tech provider owned by one of the largest software companies in the world. This multi-year relationship will drive significant growth to our distribution business.
We continue to see opportunities with large chains to enable further connectivity for them as they undertake digital transformation and have a healthy pipeline of conversations underway. For Uno, we see good traction across small to mid-size chains across the Middle East and APAC to further scale this up in the coming quarters. In MarTech, we continue to deliver strong performance, contributing 47.6% of our total revenue. Adara remains a key growth driver, signing new contracts and healthy renewal rates with leading DMOs, financial institutions, hotel groups, airlines, and entertainment parks. By leveraging real-time travel intent data, Adara enables brands to target the right audience at the right time, optimizing their marketing efforts across channels and devices. This empowers our clients to deliver more personalized, effective campaigns and drive stronger ROI.
We're placing a strong focus on driving growth in the European and Asian markets where Demand Booster is gaining strong traction, particularly as part of our integrated Uno bundle. We continue to drive innovations that align with our vision of building an integrated technology stack to enable our customers to acquire, guest, retain, and engage them, and do a wallet share expansion with them. Let's now talk about the innovations driving our commitment to becoming an AI-first organization. In our annual survey with New York University through the state of distribution, we found there are three big challenges facing hotels today. Number one, hotels struggle in integrating technologies and getting a single view of their efforts. Number two, getting higher ROI from the digital marketing efforts. Number three, training team members to deliver higher outcomes. Number four, manual management of rates and rate parity violations.
To help hotels tackle these challenges, we launched multiple new products last year. Last year, we launched Uno, our AI-powered hotel commerce cloud, which is our integrated NetMax platform designed to power every step of the guest journey. Integrated, easy to use, quick to implement, Uno helps hotels to get a single view of their revenue across all channels seamlessly. As part of this integrated offering, we also introduced Demand Booster, an AI-powered digital marketing offering with Uno that helps hotels optimize campaigns and drive higher return on ad spends. Most recently, we launched two very innovative solutions. According to our study with New York University state of distribution, 18% of hotel reservations still come through phone calls.
Yet for the longest time, calling a hotel has been associated with long wait times, repeated transfers, and having to explain the same request multiple times, often resulting in guest frustration and, in some cases, a lost booking altogether. We are solving this with Viva, the world's first CRS-integrated AI voice agent designed to help hotels convert more bookings, reduce missed opportunities, and strengthen guest engagement by engaging guests in over 18 plus languages, answering common and complex queries, processing reservations, and confirming bookings. While many voice solutions exist in the market, Viva stands out as the only solution that uses generative AI built on top of OpenAI integrated directly with the hotel's CRS to help hotels quickly onboard it and start making bookings. Hotels will now save time and effort of training new team members as well as ensure there is no revenue leakage.
In addition to this, a very big problem for hotels over the last decades has been overbookings and rate parity violations. This issue has existed due to outdated technology, which sends a lot of junk updates to OTAs. As OTAs process these junk updates, there is mismatch between inventory and rates, leading to overbookings and parity issues. RateGain has used AI to solve this problem with a new product called SmartARI, our innovative AI-powered ARI management engine designed to streamline how hotels manage and update their availability, rates, and inventory across OTAs and demand partners. While SmartARI helps hotels, it will also help OTAs and demand partners reduce IT spends and fewer updates to process saving costs and getting updates in real time.
According to our study with New York University state of distribution, reporting tools are often developed with revenue managers in mind, leaving the specific needs of distribution teams underserved. As suggested earlier, helping commercial teams make faster decisions is a key focus for us at RateGain. To solve for that, we have introduced RG Insights, a real-time analytics solution that provides hotels and demand partners with in-depth visibility into their distribution performance. It enables them to assess the impact of each partner, identify revenue opportunities, and make data-driven decisions with greater speed and accuracy. For our fast-growing airlines business, we have launched an AI-powered digest, which provides airlines with real-time insights into route performance, demand trends, and anomalies. This enables airlines to make proactive pricing decisions by offering timely access to critical data, helping them optimize pricing strategies and stay ahead in a competitive and dynamic market.
Enabling this change across our products is critical, and to ensure that our customers get timely support, we are also leveraging AI to deploy timely support with a conversational AI assistant, enabling faster problem-solving and the adoption of new features. As we continue to drive this shift towards building an AI-first culture, we're seeing huge productivity gains as we ship out more code while deploying AI internally. We have seen improved developer productivity and faster deployment through our AI adoption. Along with this, we are using AI in our marketing and sales functions for increasing reach, better targeting, capturing intent, and improving conversion. We continue to strengthen our leadership team as we scale the business globally, and I'm pleased to share some of the key additions and movements in the past year.
These changes are aligned with our AI-first vision, ensuring we have the right leadership to drive innovation, scale, and customer success. Rohan Mittal recently came on board as our Chief Financial Officer, bringing over 18 years of financial leadership and transformation expertise. Rohan has played key roles in scaling businesses, managing IPO readiness, and driving strategic planning and operational excellence for fast-growing companies like Yatra.com, Allcargo Logistics, and Guthy. Anurag Jain has joined to drive our expansion across APAC, the Middle East, and Africa. In his last stint, Anurag was responsible for driving expansion for Expedia in the Indian subcontinent. An IIM alumnus, Anurag will leverage his experience across Amazon, Johnson & Johnson, and Godrej to implement new go-to-market strategies that help us grow faster in the region. Toby March has joined us to accelerate growth in the U.S. market.
With extensive experience of driving commercial strategy for some of the world's leading travel brands, Toby brings deep expertise in hotel tech and enterprise sales, having worked with major chains and tech platforms across North America. His career includes leadership roles at W&S, Kalaleo, Sabre, and Abacus, amongst others. Sala Shaw has come on board to lead our social media offering based out of the U.S., which focuses on helping luxury hotels drive social media engagement. Sala has extensive experience in building high-performing customer teams and scaling digital programs across global hospitality portfolios. Her background spans both SaaS and travel, helping clients realize long-term value through meaningful engagement. Lastly, Deepak Kapoor has been elevated to the role of Chief Technology Officer in recognition of his pivotal role in our AI-first transformation.
Deepak has been instrumental in leading the development of our SaaS infrastructure and data platforms, ensuring we continue to innovate at speed and scale. This quarter, we continue to build on our momentum with strong progress across our people agenda. Our attrition rate remains at record low levels, reinforcing the impact of our efforts to retain and grow top talent. We've taken steps towards a more future-ready workforce by embedding competency-based hiring and learning across roles, enabling sharper decisions and more aligned development. We are also actively integrating AI across the HR ecosystem, from smarter hiring to always-on feedback through our first AI employee, bringing speed, insight, and scale to how we engage with our people. As we step into this new fiscal year, our focus is clear: hire right, retain right, nurture right.
That's how we will continue to unlock potential and build a workforce where high performance and growth will go hand in hand. The investments we are driving in product leadership and building an AI-first culture are helping us with the right results as we have been recognized across industry. Some of the awards that we got over the last year, we have won four HSMAI Adrian Awards for excellence in digital marketing on behalf of our clients. We were once again named amongst the top 10 most loved tech products globally in a survey by a vote of over 120,000 hoteliers by Hotel Tech Report. The Economic Times recognized us as the best B2B travel technology provider, and we were named one of the Deloitte India Technology Fast 500 companies.
We were also honored by Great Place to Work as one of the top 100 mid-sized companies in India for 2024. Last but not the least, we continue to be one of the only companies covered by a top university as a case study, which is New York University in the SaaS segment for their growth. These accolades are a testament to the dedication of our people, the commitment to innovation, customer success, and our shared vision of building an AI-first company. With that, I will now hand it over to our CFO, Mr. Rohan Mittal, to take you through the performance of Q4 and the fiscal year. Thank you.
Thank you, Manu. And a very warm welcome to everybody on this call. It is a pleasure to join you all today, and I'm looking forward to interacting and working closely with all of you.
Coming to our numbers for Q4 FY 2025, we have reported a revenue of INR 2,607,000,000 crore with a continued year-on-year growth in EBITDA and PAT at 11.7% and 10%, respectively. This is the third consecutive quarter where we were able to deliver more than INR 500,000,000 crore impact . Overall, for the entire Fiscal Year 2025, the company has reported a revenue of INR 10,770,000,000 crore , with a year-on-year growth of 12.5%. This is the first time we have crossed the INR 10,000,000,000 crore revenue mark. This was on the back of steady growth across all verticals, with DAS growing at 8.5%, distribution growing at 5.4%, and MarTech growing at 19% for the full year. Our EBITDA grew by 22.3% to INR 2,320,000,000 crore , with the margins coming in at 21.6%, up by 180 basis points over previous year.
We have delivered a part of INR 209 crore for the entire year, which is up by 44% from previous year same time. All of this has helped us deliver a strong free cash flow of INR 120 crore for the entire year. Further, we've reported an NRR of 105% for the full fiscal year on the back of strong customer relationships and our continued ability to upsell, cross-sell, and add new logos. This is further supported by the fact that our revenue from the top 10 customers grew by 17.3% on a YTD basis. Our total customer base currently stands at 3,224 customers. We continue to closely track and strive to outperform on key operating SaaS metrics. Our revenue per employee stood at INR 1.3 crore for employee, and our LTV to CAC stands at INR 13.67 crore .
With continued traction across key customer segments and geographies, we have built a healthy pipeline of about INR 516 crore. We continue to have a strong balance sheet with our net worth currently at INR 1,682 crore and our cash and cash equivalent balance at INR 1,267 crore. Further, I'm also happy to report improved traction and growth in the APAC and Middle East geographies over the past year. A great outcome based on the investments we've made in expanding our GTM teams in these geographies over the last few months. As we continue to navigate an evolving demand environment, the management and the board have approved the plan to ramp up investments in the coming year across both AI-led products as well as GTM. These investments should enable us to capture the opportunity ahead of us by enhancing our market reach and customer engagement, thereby driving long-term value creation.
Last but not the least, inorganic growth remains a key value enabler for us, and we continue to have conversations with prospects. We remain keen to consummate deals that will meet our risk and valuation parameters. With that, I would like to conclude our prepared remarks. Happy to open the floor for questions. Thank you.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touch-tone 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. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Parth Agrawal from Bashton Research. Please go ahead. Thank you for the opportunity. I have two questions.
One is regarding the DAS segment. This quarter, Q4 FY 2025, we have reported a decline of almost 9% in this quarter. Can you help me understand the reason for that? Hello? Am I audible? Y
Yes, sir, you are.
Yeah, hi, Parth. This is Tanmaya. I think this quarter, in Q4, we had a few contracts that needed to be reorganized, and we had some pricing pressure in the DAS segment. We had to reprice some contracts. That is why there was a decline.
Okay, got it. Secondly, coming to all the three segments, going forward into FY 2026, what kind of growth can we expect in each of your business segments? I am sure we have seen some customer loss in the MarTech segment as well, which you highlighted previous quarter. Can you just give me some sense on that?
Yeah, hi.
On the growth, as Rohan indicated in his opening remarks, this year is going to be a year of investments. We want to accelerate our focus on GTM, especially we're basically hiring more people, et cetera ., across all the three geographies, APAC, U.S., and Europe, with a larger focus on APAC because we see a huge amount of growth potential. We believe that the growth will be single-digit this year because the impact of new sales on revenue is usually lagging, and it can lag anywhere between one to four quarters. As I've indicated earlier, also the focus is really to increase the new sales, the new bookings amount, which we didn't do very well on last year. We want to make it more predictable because in the past, it has been also quite dependent on one or two big deals.
This year, we are very, very close to signing a couple of big deals, but we want to, going forward, make it a predictable engine, and thus we are making investments. NetNet , I believe that we should be able to get to about 6% to 8% growth this year. With the investments that we are making into GTN, my view is over a three-year period, we want to beat the rule of 40, which is an aggregate of our growth and our EBITDA margin. As we continue to sort of grow and invest in our GTN, I'm very, very confident that we can get into high double-digit growth rates organically. Hopefully, with some of the opportunities we're chasing on the M&A side, that would be additional growth.
Even in the DAS segment and distribution segment, I think you guys have been facing rising pressure for some time. I just wanted to get a sense w hen our customer decides to choose us versus our competitors, apart from pricing, what are the qualitative aspects generally they select?
It depends on the kind of customer. For the bigger customers, they are actually seeking a trusted partner that has scale and flexibility and ability to serve versus their specific needs. Scale becomes very, very important. Given we are one of the scale companies, that is why we are in with most of the customers. For the SME segment, the approach has been to have a one-stop solution because they do not have the wherewithal to work with different point solutions.
Most often, because these solutions are not interoperable and do not talk to each other, the value accretion is lost. We are trying to solve that by having one integrated platform that we call Uno. Those are the reasons that we are winning. On the point about pricing pressure, yes, there have been a couple of accounts where we have faced this issue, but I do not want to generalize this as a common issue across all DAS or distribution customers. We have had some favorable pricing historically through legacy contracts that we acquired, and those had to be corrected. For the most part, most of our contracts actually have CPI increases.
Okay. Okay. That is all. Thank you so much, and best of luck for the future quarters.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, in order to ensure that the management is able to address questions from all the participants, please limit your question to two per participant. If you have a follow-up question, I would request you to rejoin the queue. The next question is from the line of Karan Uppa Phillip Capital India. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. So the first question is on the employee expenses. So we have seen a sharp drop of almost 15% in this quarter s equentially in employee expenses. Also, the number of employees are down almost 15. So if you can explain what's the reason for this decline in employee expenses. That's the first question.
Yeah, so currently, the decline in expenses is on account of some bonuses that had to be clawed back that we had accounted for basis meeting yearly targets.
Obviously, we didn't meet those targets, and as a result of which, those bonuses had to be reduced. The other reason for seeing a net decline in employee number was pretty consistent in my opening remarks. I am quite hopeful that the size of the company in terms of number of people will continue to stay where it is because we are investing quite significantly in this AI transformation, not just in our products, but also how we run as a company. Given we are a tech-based company and we are seeing some massive transformative things happening in engineering, I think the whole engineering organization is going to be reimagined given the advances that we are seeing using AI transformative tools. We continue to see NetNet a lot of productivity gains. In fact, in all our departments, I am really pushing our teams to think AI-first.
Whenever there is a task, we ask AI if it can do it. We will continue to see these optimizations happen organically as we go forward. Like in HR, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, we have now an HR AI agent, AI employee, and we are introducing similar kinds of productivity gains where we are AI first in what we do and how we do it. I do not anticipate adding a lot of people even going forward.
Okay. Thanks for that clarification. Second question is on the margin outlook for FY 2026. Considering that you are talking about ramping up your investments in geographies like APAC and Middle East, and also you are deriving a lot of productivity benefit through AI. Given these levers, which are quite in opposite direction, how should we think about margins for next year?
Yeah, so the productivity gains, we have not really factored into lowered costs simply because we think we'll just ship out more stuff and do more versus reduce more people. I mean, if it happens organically, that's fine, but that's not how we are accounting it. Even in future, we just expect our teams to deliver more. On the GTM investments, additional investments that the board has approved is about $5 million in FY 2026, with bulk of it about close to $4 million going into GTM. We do think that our margins as a result will come down in this year. It will be more around 15% to 17%.
As we sort of look to scale the company and see the impact of the GTM investments in terms of new bookings and how they impact our revenue in FY 2027 and 2028, because of the operating leverage that you have seen, we should come back to that 19% to 22% kind of EBITDA range as we see the impact of operating leverage as a result of new bookings.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Deep Shah from BNK Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Thanks for the opportunity. So Bhanu, one question on the market space. Despite these headwinds and we lost a client, yet it was doing well. Suddenly, this quarter, it seems that it has fallen down a little bit. Is there any new pain here or nothing meaningful to call out?
No, no, nothing new.
In MarTech, we also account for our Adara business. It is more of a seasonal thing. The first quarter, calendar quarter in Adara is usually softer than the Q4 of the calendar year. It is because of that you are seeing that softness, but it is a seasonal thing. There is nothing new to report. In fact, I continue to feel very, very bullish about our MarTech business. Adara is doing significantly well. Barring that big customer loss that we had in Demand Booster, we continue to see traction. The only thing to call out will be our social media offering, which has been struggling over the last sort of two, three years. We brought in a new GM, new leader to sort of lead that business, and we are integrating it to being part of our full MarTech stack.
I'm optimistic that we will turn the corner there as well. It is a much, much smaller part of the business, so it does not move the needle as such. Yes, overall, it still looks pretty good.
Understood. That is all from my side.
Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Anmol Garg from Dam Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Thanks for the opportunity. A couple of questions. Firstly, I wanted to understand that since the last two years, our LTV to CAC ratio is coming down for the company as a whole. This is despite Adara having relatively larger and longer duration clients. Is it because our focus has somewhere shifted to smaller hotels or smaller clients overall, and the churn is relatively higher over there?
Yeah. I think if you look at our historical numbers, they have been significantly exceeding industry benchmarks by two or three X, including the LTV to CAC. Something that I've been looking retrospectively on how that happened, one key realization was that we've been quite lucky in securing one or two big contracts every year. The reason we felt kind of short last fiscal year in terms of new sales is because we didn't really win any of those big-sized contracts. In the fact that we did win, and like I was saying earlier, the new bookings always have a lagging impact on revenue because we have to monetize the order book.
I feel that going forward, we need to be much more predictable on the new bookings because that's repeatedly I've been saying that if there is one key driver that we really need to solve for is the new bookings. There is a lot of focus now on introducing this GTM intensity and also how the teams are organized. We were largely focused on feet on street, meaning very enterprise sales-led. I wouldn't necessarily say that we have now become not enterprise sales-led or are focusing on the SMB segment. We are focusing on the SMB segment, but we are also reorganizing how we go to market where we're sort of breaking down the structure and the process of go-to-market teams. For instance, to generate more interest, we're doing a lot of marketing-led initiatives.
We've instituted a new team of what are called in SaaS SDRs, sales development reps that help create interest and create brand awareness in the market through cold calling and through lead gen efforts. We've also introduced an inside sales team that enables to help close out the smaller deals so that the bigger enterprise deals get attention of the enterprise teams, and they're not spending time on the smaller deals. NetNet , there is a little bit of a reorganization of how we were organized. There is massive investment into making these resources sales-enabled. There are sales enablement teams. There are a number of tools, AI tools that we are investing in. Also, we are investing in building out, as I said, this year, we are investing $5 million in addition to all the other investments we had to increase our GTM intensity.
I think it's a very modest amount of investment. As we begin to see results of these investments, my goal is to continue to invest and aim for much, much higher growth because I know we haven't delivered on the overall promise of the growth narrative that we had stated a couple of years ago. I do not believe for a minute that the opportunity has diminished. The opportunity is still very, very large. We have built out massive capabilities. We just now need to build out our distribution engine to be able to process the massive and diverse set of capabilities that we have built. Like I said earlier, we began this process a couple of quarters ago, and I do believe that it is beginning to show results.
So much so, I'm quite hopeful that this quarter will be, hopefully, fingers crossed, the best sales quarter in the history of the company. As we begin to see these kinds of results, we will continue to invest and scale the company further. NetNet , my point is, look, our sales efficiency was very, very awesome. It was industry-beating by two or three X. Now, as we begin to scale the company, that sales efficiency will come down, which is very, very natural, but still will be industry-beating. We will not hesitate to increase this intensity to go out and win.
Understood. Understood. Just one more from my end. Our MarTech businesses can be more sector-agnostic. Are we planning to kind of go to the other sectors, particularly for our MarTech offering?
If you can give an overall outlook for all the three segments that we have in terms of the growth rate for next year, while you said it is 6% to 8% for the full year, how do you see each of these segments coming up?
Okay. Yeah. To your question about do we intend to go outside of travel and hospitality, no, we don't. We do continue to get requests outside of travel and hospitality to service other industries. Like our travel intent data is something that is of huge amount of interest to a number of industries. We are not proactive, but reactive to service those requests.
Very recently, we had requests from some very, very large financial institutions on a lot of the pricing data because a lot of hedge funds are very keen to use that data to decide on their investment strategy. We proactively don't go after these, but reactively, we do address them. We are very clear on our strategy, which is to be very focused on travel and hospitality because our TAM is fairly large, and we have not penetrated it. It is about $7 billion to $8 billion, and the company is quite small compared to the opportunity that exists. We need to keep our heads down and stay very, very focused. Your second question about what is the growth that I see across different segments? On DAS and MarTech, we will have double-digit growth.
I do not want to put the exact numbers in a broader call right now because of the sensitivity and competition intel, et cetera. Our distribution business is projected to be going a bit negative. This is because of a couple of things that have happened. I think one was, which is something that we have already indicated to the market, is a big account, a big OTA that is part of a big larger OTA group and is going to be sunset. We had significant volumes going through that OTA, which will continue to sunset, and it is projected that this year, it will be completely sunset. The second reason is there was one of these other legacy contracts where we had favorable pricing from the time of the acquisition of Disco that we had to renegotiate.
We were in good luck for a number of years, but we had to relook at given the long-term nature of the partnership that we enjoy with this particular client. However, again, I will go back and say, although distribution is the smallest and is showing a decline in this current year, I remain quite optimistic given the investments that we are doing and our focus that this will eventually be the fast-growing segment for us.
Can you guys hear me?
Yes, sir
Okay. There was some disconnect to us.
The current participant has got disconnected. Should we move on to the next question? Okay.
Yes, please.
The next question is from the line of Pankaj Soot from Satyawelt. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for the opportunity.
I would like to know, is there any reason to our external guidance of INR 2,000 crore top line and FY 2025 admin subsidy?
We need to go back. Please interrupt, sir. I would request you to please use your handset. Your audio is not clear.
Can I have any now?
Yes, sir. Can you please repeat your question? Thank you.
Yes, sure. Is there any reason to our FY 2027 guidance of INR 2,000 crore top line since FY 2025 admin subsidy for us, and we almost need to clock in 36-37% cash out for the next two years?
Yeah. As I indicated earlier, there is a revision in the sense that for this current year, it is a year of investment. Like I said, new bookings have a lagging impact of two to three quarters usually.
If this year we continue to produce the bookings that we intend to through our GTM investments, it should show up results in FY 2027 and FY 2028. Our aspiration is obviously to be north of 20% organic growth, but I feel quite confident that we should get to mid to high teens given the investments we are doing. We are building the sales engine, but it is probably prudent to have a discussion on it a quarter or two down the line to see the kind of results that we are seeing and give you a more updated status. We are going in a very, very deliberate and calibrated manner on how we will increase these investments. Like I said, we began this process two quarters ago.
It's showing very good signs with the potential of this quarter being the best sales quarter in the history of the company. I don't yet feel comfortable that it is completely predictable. I want to make sure that that happens before we continue to invest and accelerate. We'll do this in a calibrated fashion and would be able to come back and give you a more revised guidance as we go along here.
Okay. Sure. My second question is on the capital allocation part. Currently, I think we have around INR 120,000,000 to 130,000,000 crore cash on the books, right? What acquisitions are we looking at in terms of size? Our last acquisition was approximately $16 million. Now, even if we go for three times bigger, $15 million will still be left with almost INR 800 crore of cash on our books.
What's the thinking on that part?
We are very, very active on the M&A side, and we continue to evaluate different assets that fit our product roadmap and our strategic assets for the long-term growth of the company. We are seeing assets in sort of different ticket sizes. There are some bigger opportunities that are available as well, and we are evaluating those. I've seen this cycle play out in the past as well, where there were a couple of years we did not do anything, and then we did a bunch of stuff in quick succession. That should also give you, as investors, a lot of confidence that the company is extremely judicious in its M&A lens. I do feel like opportunities will come. When they come, they will come in quick succession as well.
We need to ensure that our IRR and payback thresholds are being met. We're building the company for the future. I am not going to get swayed by seeing what crazy prices other buyers are willing to pay. Hopefully, they will make a mess of it and come and sell it to us much cheaper.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Hash Darasia from Vallum Capital . Please go ahead.
Yeah. My question is on the growth side, mainly from the top-10 client perspective. I see if I compare it on a full-year basis, the top-10 clients have grown significantly versus the other clients. I wanted to understand, the growth this year has been much more tilted towards the large clients. What I want to understand here is what is the distribution of the growth among top-10 clients?
Is it concentrated to just two or three clients, or is it more segmented? This is my first question. Second is on the number of clients which we put out. If I see, there is a 55 clients decline when I compare to FY 2024 clients. What I wanted to understand here is if you can give me a bifurcation between how much it would be for MarTech and DAS and distribution. These are my two questions.
Sunny, can you take this question?
Yes, sir. I think most of our bigger clients have grown quite well. It is not two or three clients. I think majority of our clients in the top 10 have grown in a kind of equal fashion.
As far as bifurcation is concerned, look, I don't have data ready at this point of time, and we probably can provide you when we have a one-to-one interaction.
Thank you.
Sir, does that answer your question? Due to no response from the current participant, we will move on to the next participant. The next question is from the line of Pranal Nandu from Edelweiss Public Alternatives. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. So Bhanu, first a clarification, right? First, you mentioned that you're looking at a 6% to 8% growth. Then in a subsequent question, you mentioned that you're looking at mid to high teens. What is the top-line growth that in FY 2026 one should be looking at? Just a broader question on the growth, right?
Even in the last five years, we have grown at 20% despite one of them being the COVID year. As early as last year, we were very confident about this INR 3,000 crore number in three years' time, right? What has changed in our reading of the market, either on the sales side, the kind of effort that is required on the sales side, as well as on some of these products that we have, right? We call it adult, teenagers, and kids, right, in some sense. You talked a lot on the sales side of things, but could you also touch base on what has something changed in terms of how our products are progressing across year life cycle, right? Just in one year, a lot has changed for us, in terms of the outlook for the company, at least in the near term.
Can you just help us your understanding about all these issues?
Yeah. A good question. The first point about clarification of top-line growth, it is 6-8% for FY2026. What I was alluding in terms of mid to high- teens growth is in FY 2027 and 2028, where the investments that we are making in GTM will begin to show results in the next couple of years, as I have repeated on the call that the new bookings have a lagging impact on revenue. Now, your question on what has really changed that has kind of changed the outlook of the company. I would say that in terms of the opportunity, nothing has changed. I think there are a couple of things that have happened. I think there have been some execution challenges. U.S. was a very, very important market and is a very important market.
Frankly, we lost a year, year and a half there because we did not have the right leadership from a sales perspective. In the APAC region, similarly, our senior commercial leader, we lost her to cancer, and we had to find somebody else. There have been some people changes that had to be done, execution challenges that we are solving for. I think the other thing is in terms of the outlook that we had given, maybe we underestimated the effort involved, especially from a new sales perspective. I think we were always doing really, really well. Something asked about the LTV to CAC, and our sales and marketing cost as a percentage of revenue, they are quite modest compared to our other SaaS peers. We felt that sales efficiency that we had could continue to operate in that fashion.
When I look back, I do feel that we were consistently winning large deals, which helped that. My view on looking at those large deals is to look at them as cherry on top, but have a very predictable engine that continues to have a momentum of deals coming in, irrespective of a large deal or not. I am quite confident we will solve for that. I am very confident about a lot of the investments that we have done. Some of these things also get underestimated when things are going really, really well, right? As you have indicated, our growth was just phenomenal, over 50% over the last three years. When there are structural and fundamental issues, when the going is good and it is not addressed, they come back to bite you, and that is what seems to be happening. It is okay.
I think we are all in it for the long term. I'm very pleased with all the corrective action that we are taking. Personally, and even with the team, there is a very, very high degree of confidence. The stability and the fundamental strength that we are building in the company that position us really will position us to march forward to being a billion-dollar-in-revenue company.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question for today. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Bhanu Chopra for closing comments.
Yes. Thank you, everybody, for taking the time out to go through Q4 and full Fiscal Year. As I have reiterated, this is going to be a year of becoming AI-first, increasing our GTM intensity, bringing out AI-powered products that enable generating more revenue for our customers.
Your company is now very, very disciplined in as we go out and build the future for revenue generation for travel and hospitality industry. Thank you.
Thank you. On behalf of RateGain Travel Technologies, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.