Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Restaurant Brands Asia Limited Q4 FY 2025 Earnings Conference Call, hosted by Motilal Oswal Financial Services Limited. As a reminder, all participants' lines will be in listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions at the end of today's presentation. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator such as team staff, then zero on your touch-tone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Naveen Trivedi from Motilal Oswal Financial Services Limited. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Yeah, thank you. Good evening, everyone. On behalf of Motilal Oswal, I'm Naveen Trivedi. I would like to welcome you all to the Restaurant Brands Asia Q4 FY 2025 earnings conference call. From the management, today we have Mr. Rajeev Varman, Full-Time Director and Group CEO, Mr. Sumit Zaveri, Group CFO and Chief Business Officer, Mr. Gaurav Ajjan, Head Corporate Development and IR, Mr. Kapil Grover, Group CMO, Mr. Sandeep Dey, Brands President, Indonesia, and Mr. Siri Thomas, Brands President, India. I would now hand over the call to the management for the opening remarks. Over to you, sir.
Good evening to everyone. Thank you for joining the call. We will make this call very quick so that you have enough time for Q&A. I just will take a couple of minutes to walk you through the priorities of working business here in India, and then what are our priorities for the business in Indonesia. As we have been speaking in the last few calls, our priorities did not change, and they kind of continue in the steadfast way to get more traffic into our restaurants. The first pillar that we talk about every time is about traffic, traffic, traffic. This year that we just ended was no different than the previous year, as we continue to drive more traffic into our restaurants. That has been one of the key focuses: to get more people into the restaurant.
As we are seeing, more and more people are coming back into the restaurants to actually experience the brand within the four walls. We saw a dine-in traffic growth of about 9%. This is on top of our value campaign that we have started. The previous year, we had done a value campaign on the INR 99 combo or the crispy veg meal. This last year, we did a 2 for INR 79 and 2 for INR 99 crispy chicken and crispy veg and crispy chicken. The first campaign, which was the INR 99 value combo, drove about 5.2% traffic into our restaurants and dine-in. This last year, with the 2 for campaign, we drove another 9% on top of the 5.2%. That continues to work well. We also continue to build our café pillar.
In fact, today we have 90% of our restaurants as cafés. That's up from where we were the previous year at 77%. We pretty much put café into every restaurant that we wanted to put café. That's continuing to build that pillar as well. The third pillar that you will see that we have been actually doing for the last couple of years, but you will see an additional focus, a rigorous focus in this coming year, is on innovation. We will continue to build that pillar as well for the next few years, driving through value, driving through our café business, and then driving through innovation. The second pillar, which is Digital First Brands, this is a pillar where we continue to digitize both consumer-facing as well as employee-facing all processes into digitization. 90% of our restaurants now have self-ordering kiosks and table ordering.
Literally everywhere that this was possible to do, we have completed doing that. All future restaurants will continue to have self-ordering kiosks. That is a very speedy implementation of the self-ordering kiosks. Also, the app business that we started a few years ago, now that it has been in its—this will be the third year in the running that we have started building on it. The number of transactions that we are doing on the app is 3X what we were doing in the previous year. That one has moved really well, and we really believe that this is a strong business for us in the future. That is the second item in the Digital First Brands. Last time, I told you about profitability focus, that is to be fully focused on profitability on delivery business.
That we have moved that profitability by 1% in this year over FY 2024, and we continue to kind of drive that piece this year as well, and you will see those initiatives come through this year. The second piece that we wanted to, and we have communicated to you in the past, is about efficiency and our P&L efficiency, driving more EBITDA out of our restaurants. We have done that as well. If you just take the restaurants that we have opened in the last couple of years, which really do not have a history behind them, or basically new restaurants, and look at all the restaurants prior to that, which is FY 2023 and Q4, we moved the profitability of those restaurants by 1.7% on our P&L.
These focus on delivery profitability or running a profitable delivery business, more profitable delivery business, and then also bringing in efficiencies on our P&L. These will continue as well. Growing traffic in the restaurant through value leadership, café, and innovation, Digital First Brands through digital SOKs and table ordering, QR code ordering, and then through our app that we are building up, and then profitability focus on profitability within the restaurant, which is a four-wall efficiency that we bring into our P&L and our delivery profitability. Just coming to the Indonesia business, and Sandeep will talk more about that business. By the way, right after my two minutes, I'm going to transfer it over to Sumit Zaveri, who will walk you through all the numbers. I'm not sharing a lot of numbers because he's going to share those numbers with you.
Now, on the Indonesia business, we spoke about three things, right? Three buckets that we had. One was to bring in sales, right? To grow back sales post the geopolitical headwinds and bring more business back into our restaurants. We have seen some good recent—if you look at our business from November till April, we have pushed up our dining areas by 10%. Things are changing there. It is not just the Burger King business. If you look at the competition over there, the market in general is now turning. I think the bottom is over, and everyone's on the climb back to what numbers they used to have pre-geopolitical issues there. Good green shoot, very early signs.
There's a long road ahead, so I don't want people to jump to conclusions, but we have now seen a turnaround as we saw the dining areas come back into our business. The second piece that we keep talking about is rationalizing our restaurant portfolio there. We continue to do that. We had closed 24 restaurants the previous. Now, we have closed another eight, so there's a total of 36 restaurants that we have rationalized. We have got—and maybe this year we will look at a few more that are on our pipeline to potentially close. If you're not able to get some good deals on leases and so forth on those, we will look at rationalizing those as well. That was the second bucket wherein we are rationalizing, cleaning up the portfolio. The last piece is really the corporate overheads.
You have not seen a lot on the P&L in today's upload that you saw for FY 2025, and you have seen very little in FY 2024 as well. Because even though we have rationalized the G&A and brought down the overheads, there have been closing costs of restaurants as well as severances that have kind of addressed being on the P&L for those years. The run rate, just to give an example, we were over INR 65 crores in G&A as we had taken over the business. Today, we have brought that down to a run rate of INR 40 crores , so about INR 25 crores reduction. We are further looking at another INR 4 crores -INR 5 crores of reduction in this coming year.
That rationalization, bringing down, optimizing our overheads, optimizing our restaurant base, which is to close down non-performing restaurants, and then revitalizing and getting sales into our restaurants, for which we have seen some initial good results. That is basically the same plan that I outlined to you last time. We will continue to work that plan as we move forward. With that said, I am going to turn it over to Sumit Zaveri, who is going to walk us through the numbers. Over to you, Sumit.
Thank you, Raj. I'll just kind of talk you through the highlights of our financial performance for the quarter and for the full year. From the perspective of growth, we ended the year at a total store count of 513. For the full year, we grew by 58 stores. For the quarter, it was just three stores because a substantial part of our growth we had achieved towards the end of December itself. That is why it is just a small growth, incremental growth of three stores in quarter four. As far as revenue is concerned, good growth led by SSSG of 5.1%. For the quarter, we achieved revenue of INR 489 crore for the full year and 11.5% year-on-year growth.
If you really look at it in terms of translation of that into company-level EBITDA, we achieved INR 26.6 crores of company-level EBITDA, higher from INR 10.6 crores that we had done in the same quarter last year. That is almost like a two-and-a-half times growth in company-level EBITDA over last year. If we just—and I would really kind of just touch upon one more line, which we've been talking about as one of the levers of our efficiency translation, is gross margins. If you look at it from quarter perspective or your perspective, our gross margins were in the region of 67.7%, 67.8%. If you look at the trajectory that we've been taking consistently on slide number 10, you'll realize that we've been growing at that pace on a year-on-year basis, 0.5% to 0.7% year-on-year basis over the last three years consistently.
If we go back and when Gaurav talks about it, you'll realize that we would continue the same trajectory as far as gross margin improvement is concerned, even going forward over the next three to four years, to our target to get closer to 69%-70% over the next few years. That's something, it's a strong margin improvement trajectory that you will see us continue to deliver as we go along over the next few years. Coming quickly onto the full year numbers, just a highlight as far as full year is concerned.
We got to a revenue of INR 1,968 crore for the full year, very similar growth to what we achieved in quarter four, 11.8% year-on-year growth, and a positive full year SSSG of 1.1%, led by a strong traffic growth that Rajeev was talking about in the early part when he was talking about our overall performance, with company-level EBITDA showing a 52% growth over the previous year to INR 99.4 crore for the entire year. Quickly looking at the Indonesia part of the business, and I'll just kind of talk broad numbers here again. As far as EBITDA is concerned, we've been talking about rationalizing the portfolio, which we've kind of done. On a full year basis, we came down by eight stores and quarter four stores. Ended the year on Burger King at 143 stores, with an ADS of 18.5 million.
As far as Popeyes is concerned, 25 stores with an ADS of 14.1 million, with total revenue of 269.3 billion for the full year. We are really kind of wanting to take you through, if you will see it in subsequent slides as well. Burger King, we did report positive 2% SSSG for the full year. When Sandeep talks about it in terms of recent trends, we will really be happy to see that overall SSSG now starting to see positive at 5% overall and 10% on dining basis as well. Sandeep will take you through those. We are starting to see signs of recovery. I would not say that we have kind of completely got out of the challenges that we have been facing in Indonesia, but we continue to make improvements as far as Indonesia business is concerned.
Just since I've already spoken about the broad numbers, I'm not taking you through the financial performance slides that are already available in slide 13 to 15. Rather, hand it over to Kapil to take you through the marketing initiative.
Good evening, everyone, and thank you, Sumit. Let me outline the marketing strategy that helped us deliver a very strong quarter. First and foremost, as always, a consistent value strategy across three pillars of price point, digital app coupons, and a shareable value meals platform. These platforms of 2 for 79 and 99, the crazy app deals available on the app led by 99 meals, which is growing every quarter, and the thematic shareable meals bundle helped us deliver great value to our guests across different occasions and across different price points. Moving to slide number 18, as Raj mentioned, menu innovation continues to be driven by consumer insights and need gaps. Last year, we had innovations across burgers with the relaunch of the Junior Mutton Whopper, which makes it more affordable for our guests.
A new iced latte and Americano that stand on our Cafe menu, and the Pizza Puff, which is a guest favorite. Just to continue on the innovation conversation, I just wanted to share with the group that we recently launched a new range of Korean products on our menu with the Korean Paneer Burger, Chicken Burger, Fried Chicken Wings, and Fries. This is obviously inspired by a massive trend that we are all seeing on Korean culture, Korean music, drama. We took out a leaf from the authentic Korean cuisines, and we innovated on the process. We dunked our patties and chicken snacks in this delicious Korean sauce to give a very authentic, very high-quality Korean flavor in every bite. The burgers were launched with a premium brioche bun, so we upgraded the product there as well.
We are getting fantastic reviews from food bloggers, journalists, and Korean fans across the board. I will certainly have more to share on this in the next protocol. Moving on to BK Cafe, our 100% Arabica bean to cup, great quality coffee at a very affordable price. We now have 464 BK Cafes as of last quarter across the country, which is about 90% of our store base. We have clearly been one of the fastest cafe expansion and working systems in India in recent years. We continue to now build awareness. As Raj mentioned, the expansion part is done. We now are focusing on building awareness through social media, including the recent AI-based coffee fortunes activations done on New Year's. It got us great response. We had over 6,000 people participating and actually playing the whole program for reading their fortunes.
Now I'm on slide number 21. We continue our journey to build known diner sales via BK app. As I mentioned earlier, it's a way to give more value to the consumers through coupons and build frequency, but it also is laying the foundation for our CRM scale-up in the future. Our acquisitions continue to grow at a very healthy pace with app installs growing by over 28% over last year. We also saw a two-and-a-half times growth in our app user base and a 3x growth in orders via BK app. That's all from my side. I'll now hand over to Sandeep to share the Indonesia business update.
Thank you, Kapil, and a very good evening to all of you. Yes, there were geopolitical challenges. There were external challenges, but we have always focused on things which are within our control. We stayed laser-sharp focused on controlling costs. As Raj mentioned, we kept on driving efficiencies and at the same time focused on getting back traffic into our restaurants. Burger King is a brand here in this market. We have a competitive advantage of having a twin engine, twin engine of burgers and chicken. We continue to work on our strategic pillars of retaining our leadership in burgers and also continue to work on building credibility in chicken by offering great taste, by offering innovation, and strong value proposition to our guests across the menu layers and across the channels.
Yes, early days, green shoots, we have seen some great positive momentum in our business. That takes me to my next slide. This is a bit of an eye chart, but I want you to focus on two things. First, we are delivering almost about 1 million higher sales for the last five-six months. Secondly, as we speak of a normalized business period, which is the May month, without having any impact of seasonality, we have reached almost 98% of the pre-boarded level sales of October 2023. That is the good news, and we are confident of maintaining this momentum.
As far as Popeyes is concerned, we will continue to play to our chicken destination strength because we know that we'll not only win on taste, but we as a brand have the maximum variety of menu as far as chicken offerings are concerned. We have fried chicken. We have grilled chicken. We have multiple flavors in wings and boneless popcorns. We also have fried chicken sandwich, grilled chicken sandwich. So we win on taste, and we win on variety. The one thing which we have done recently is actually we have elevated our services by providing guests a very casual dining experience through table ordering, through table servicing, through serving the food in a particular sequence, serving the food in cutleries, and so on and so forth.
It's currently in a test phase, and we are gathering all the learnings, and then subsequently, we will scale it up across the restaurants. That's broadly from the Indonesia side, and I hand it over to Gaurav to share the overall outlook.
Yeah. This is Raj here. I'll hand it over to Gaurav in a minute. Guys, sorry, we uploaded the results a little late. We'll try to do that much sooner next time. I just wanted to highlight, if you have not seen the results or not yet downloaded the deck, just the highlight for India. Again, I'm just reiterating this. As of 31 March 2025, the year that ended, we added 58 restaurants year over year to reach 513 restaurants on that date. Additionally, 11.8% year over year increase in revenues at INR 1,968 crore of sales. That's 11.8% increase year over year. Average daily sales, SSSG, as we call it, the same store sales increase was 1.1% for the entire year and 5.1% for quarter four. Our gross margin, which ended last year at 67%, went from 67% to 67.7%. That's a 0.7% improvement year over year.
Our four-wall, our restaurant level EBITDA went to INR 206 crore, INR 206.8 crore, so almost INR 207 crore. That's up 21.2% year over year. The final number I'm going to share with you is the company EBITDA number, which last year was about INR 76 crore. That went up to INR 99.4 crore, and that's a 32% year over year increase in our company level EBITDA. I just wanted to reiterate those because some of you might be just downloading the deck. Over to you, Gaurav.
Thanks, Raj. Good evening, everyone. Once again, sorry for the slight delay in uploading the results and investor presentation. We will make sure that from next quarter onwards, there is a sufficient time gap. I am there on slide number 28, titled The Way Forward India Operations. Restaurant count at the end of financial year 2025 stood at 513. If you recall, our previous guidance was reaching 700 restaurants by FY 2027. We revised that to a more longer-term guidance. We are looking to open 60-80 new restaurants every year for the next four years. This will take us to about 800 restaurants by FY 2029. On the gross profit margin side, we ended FY 2025, or the gross profit margin for FY 2025 was 67.7%. As Sumit mentioned on slide number 10, we have increased the gross profit margin every single year that we have been there in the country.
We want to continue on this journey of increasing our margins. We are targeting an annual increase of 0.5%-0.7% over the next four years. This will take us closer to a number of about 70% by FY 2029. With that, I would request the moderator to please open out the floor for Q&A.
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 the 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 the question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Dhwanil Desai from Turtle Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon, everyone. Congratulations for decent performance in a very challenging time. My first question is that if I go back in time, since FY 2022, we have added almost 250-270 stores. Stores which are older than two years are almost now 80% of the total store count. Despite that, our ADS has remained in that range of 115-120. Why this dichotomy? On top of that, we also added almost 400 cafes, which adds an additional 8,000 ADS. We have not seen the increase in ADS despite stores maturing at FY 2022, 2023, 2024. Some thoughts on that?
Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Desai, for your question. Actually, if you take away the last two years that we built about 60-70 restaurants each, that's 140 out of 513. So the ratio is much smaller. Anyway, coming to your question, this last two years, as you've seen, especially the last year, the industry has run on negative SSSG. In that environment, to kind of hold on to our previous year's sales, that was in itself a very big challenge. We have done that. What's happening is we have seen a more and more increase in traffic coming into our restaurants. We are driving that as our initiative to bring more people into the restaurant and experience the brand over there, very successfully as well, right? We have also, on the other hand, had this whole goal of optimizing delivery profitability, right?
What we have done is in the past, there was a lot of discounts either coming from the aggregators or from the brands itself, and that drove a lot of traffic, but without a lot of profit. In the last two years, and especially this last year, we have started to focus on profitable sales. We have increased the profitability of that business by 1%. We continue to do that over this next year. The objective over there is not to just bring in the ADS over there, but also to bring in a profitable ADS over there. We will continue to kind of walk through that path. The final piece is the cafe. The cafe just came in, right? It is brand new.
If you look at the restaurants we opened two years ago, right, FY 2023, they have gone up in ADS by INR 2,000. If you look at the ones we opened in FY 2024, they've gone up by INR 1,000. I think in this current year, right, they're moving up about INR 1,000 per year. The new restaurant that just opened, they have, of course, a long way to go. As we're seeing, these are moving about INR 1,000 apiece. You will see that as our base becomes bigger, which is now that we are at 500 restaurants, we add more and more restaurants in the future. It will be a smaller percentage of the total base. Also, one of the strategies that we have changed with development is we used to open a whole bunch of restaurants in Q3.
We are now kind of spreading it out, and we'll have openings in Q1, Q2, Q3. That will bring in a few more quarters of sales into those restaurants sooner than later. You should see, and we will see, that kind of moving in the right direction and the ADS moving in the right direction. That ADS movement is a big pillar for us, a big opportunity for us. We are completely focused, as I said, on the three pillars to drive that with those three pillars. One is to continue driving value, to continue driving our business through our cafes, and then finally through innovation. Those will continue in addition to our digital that Kapil was outlining. I hope that answers your question.
Yeah. That's helpful, Raj. I've got one more question on the same line, is that we have done phenomenally well on driving traffic in our stores, right? In order for us to go to the next level of ADS, do we intend to move the APC value higher? What is the path towards that? What are the actions that we are taking on that front to increase our APC?
Yeah. We have a very good strategic plan you'll see in the coming summer and beyond to kind of address the business as we outlined it. The traffic is the hotline of the business. We want to continue bringing in more traffic. The traffic in most of the businesses in the industry have not reached pre-COVID levels yet. There is a lot of opportunities. Those people still exist, and they still want to experience the brand. The traffic will continue to be one of the big pillars for us to drive more people into our restaurants and bring them in. Yes, we have innovation, and you will see some of that coming in this summer and beyond, which will address exactly what you said. Thank you.
Got it. One last question on Indonesia. I think before these geopolitical tensions, when we were kind of climbing back, the idea was that around 21 million - 22 million will do the break-even for the Indonesia business. Since then, we have reduced a lot of costs. Two questions. One, has our break-even point come down? Since now we are near to that number, at least in May, and if that trajectory continues, do we see this year break-even, cash break-even in Indonesia?
Yeah. Thank you again, Mr. Desai. That's a good question you asked. Look here, we are positive for the first time in a given quarter. Q4 in Indonesia for Burger King business was positive 2%, right? That's why I said. By the way, April and May have been also strong. It is coming back. Has it come back to the levels we want? No, by far, right? It is starting to turn that way. We have started to see, and most of this traffic that is coming in, most of the sales that is coming in is at the restaurant. It's not through delivery. We are doing the same thing in delivery over there. We are optimizing delivery to make sure delivery business is profitable over there. We are more focusing on bringing people back into the restaurant.
Similar to India, in Indonesia also, we see a lot of traffic coming back into the restaurant, as I said, in this last November through April. If you take this entire period, we pushed up the ADS of our diamond business by 10%. Yes, we are moving in that direction. Also, if you look at the closures, we have done the overhead that we have reduced. Yes, they have brought down the break-even point, and we are kind of working towards that. When we reach that, we will be the first ones to let you guys know. Yes, we are marking towards hitting those numbers and making sure that we stop up the losses there. Good tailwinds now in the last quarter and a little more. We hope that these tailwinds will continue and people will come back.
We have done a UNA, which has got some very good information that we learned about how the people are coming back. We will use that study to kind of start driving that business back into its required pre-COVID, pre-geopolitical sales. Yeah, we are working on it, Mr. Desai.
Okay. Great. Wish you all the best. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, in order to ensure that the management is able to address questions from all participants in the conference, please limit your question to only two questions per participant. Should you have a follow-up question, we request you to rejoin the question queue. Next question is from the line of Pranay Roop Chatterjee from Burman Capital Management. Please go ahead.
Good evening, sir. May I order?
Yeah, absolutely.
Great. Thanks for the opportunity and good to have your numbers. Could you throw some color on the Indian demand scenario, right? Not just for Bharati, in general as well, because especially in QSR, anyways, outside of QSR, we have not really seen management teams really committing that there is a turnaround in demand, etc. If we look within QSR, we have seen a range of results, right? You have one player who is reporting double-digit numbers for the last two quarters. You have a couple of listed players who have reported flat numbers, and you have shown about 5%. What is your sense? Is there enough indicators or evidence that there is a turnaround in SSG in the QSR sector that you are seeing, or is it company-specific actions that you are taking that is driving some of these? It's still a wait and watch.
Yeah. Thank you for your question, Mr. Chatterjee. See, I'll tell you, you have to have a balanced strategy, which also starts from value. Strategy cannot be done overnight, right? You cannot suddenly implement something and then recognize the sales through it. This is a long-term strategy that we have worked from inception 2014. We continue to kind of drive that strategy when the market gets a little weak. If you have a strong value proposition that people know of, they keep coming back. We continue to drive that portion of the business. It is just not just that value strategy. There are several pillars that are outlined, understanding the cafe business and rolling that out on a speedy fashion.
I mean, we took a little over two years to roll out the entire cafe business, and we think it's going to be a strong long-run strategy for us, right? So that's another tool that we have put in our arsenal that continues to. You will find that we have been doing innovations. Kapil has been rolling out products for a while now, whether it was the boneless chicken or the high price or the chicken nuggets and so forth. So we have been doing this. But we have not been advertising or bringing it in forefront because we have focused on other stuff like value. Now you will find as we move forward that there will be a 360-degree approach to innovation.
You saw the Korean campaign just this last month, and that was a 360-degree campaign that did very well for the marketing and the operations team, did very well, brought in business. I think if you ask me this question, I'll just say reflect on the last two years. I said we did FY 2024, we did a positive traffic of 5.2%. On top of that 5.2%, we did another positive 9% in this last year on our diamond business, right? The focus is about building that business out. If you ask me, yes, doing a 5% and then a 9%, that's a 14% two-year traffic increase on your portfolio. Are we looking at next year? Yes, our plan is to continue that route and continue to build that traffic in the business.
We have put in these new levers, whether it's the cafe, all the cafes are done, whether it's the innovation piece that you will start seeing in there, whether it's the digital piece where Kapil was talking about the coupons and the other ways that we kind of drive our business through. You will see all these three things playing, and there will be other stuff that we will roll out and we'll talk about in quarter three and quarter four. A lot of things are in place, and we just stepped past on the same pillars. That's why we don't come every call and give you new pillars. It's the same pillars. It's just more work and more hard work to continue driving those pillars. I hope that answers your question.
Thank you, sir. I'll interpret it as that it's primarily strategies that you have executed over the last two years that is driving the growth, and you haven't seen any demand uptick in the wider market. That's how I interpret that. My second question is on your cost control, right? It's specifically for the India business. Now, while I know that there are several levers that you can use to expand your store margins, what I interestingly saw is that in Q4 2025, the latest quarter, if I add up all your store costs across stores, it comes to about INR 280 crore. I'm simply doing revenue minus the store reputable business. That's INR 280 crore. If I do the same math two quarters back, revenue minus disclosed store reputable, it's still INR 280 crore.
In the same period, you have added about 50-55 stores, right? You have added 50 stores over two quarters, but the total cost is flat. Which one is it? Is it option A that when new stores open up, there is a lag for when the total normalized per store cost actually comes into the payment, and hence we will see those incrementally come in for those 50 stores we have added? Is it option B where you have basically those costs are fully ramped up, but you have reduced certain specific costs like items?
The answer to this is not linear. There are so many things we are doing that you're welcome to come join Gaurav separately to walk you through this. He'll be very happy to walk you through this. See, there are a lot of initiatives that we are doing which are partially done, some of them only in certain markets yet, whether it's reducing the utility costs that we are working on that has been partially rolled out, whether it is about these SOKs which just finally got done in all the restaurants. There are several initiatives that we are putting in. There are DCs that we are opening on an annual basis that brings down the cost in certain markets. A lot of it is a lot of small, simple things that we do that continues to drive costs overall, right?
Those initiatives are not completely rolled out in all markets, and we can quickly do that. As they get rolled out, you find the costs coming down. The new restaurants, when they open, the top line is not—it takes about two years for a restaurant to reach the average kind of top line radius. They start off at lower kind of radiuses and then kind of climb up to the average. Those that are above average kind of sites, they kind of start off at their two-year low and then go up to much higher radiuses. You will see that there are multiple factors at work, whether it's our initiatives, whether it's the DCs we are opening, which are driving costs on the gross margin side, whether it's the volume of the restaurants we are opening, and so forth. Gaurav will take this down.
He's made a note for himself. Please reach out to him, and he will take the time to kind of walk you through this. It will take some time to explain all this to you. Yeah?
Sure, sir. Thanks a lot, and all the best.
Thank you so much.
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Aliasgar Shakir from Motilal Oswal Mutual Fund. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Thanks a lot, Raj and team. Looking at numbers in such a volatile market scenario, commendable. I have a couple of questions, first is on the India business. Now, you did speak about the areas we have worked to improve our ADS and SSG and why we were not able to improve our ADS despite all the efforts because of the slated growth that we have seen in the store addition. If you can just share some thoughts on how we see the future in the next probably three, four quarters. In this quarter, we've seen a big improvement already. I mean, in terms of your SSG, should we expect the positive momentum to continue? If you do the mixed mean kind of SSG, then what is the room we have in terms of ADS and margin improvement from your?
I'm actually looking at comparing you with Westlife and despite you having much lower ADS, actually your margin gap is not that big. So that's why I'm asking this question.
Ali, thank you for your question. I hope you're doing well. Look, Ali, I mean, I outlined our traffic over the last two years. That's no different. We continue to drive in that direction. We spoke about having laser focus on our last annual report on profitability. We continue to focus on that. Look, I don't want to make a forward-looking statement beyond what Gaurav gave you, the two items on a forward basis, but I'll share just with you. We have had a very strong April and, save a few days when we had this issue with the war, we have actually had a decent May as well. We continue in the track. We want to completely focus on our pillars, which is driving traffic into our restaurants and continuing to focus on both delivery and restaurant-level profitability. We have done that for the last two years.
We have shown it. Quarter after quarter, we have come and shown you our numbers, and we keep showing you positive numbers, improvements year over year. We do not think we will show you anything different. We will continue in that march in a forward way. That is all I can share with you. I do not want to make any forward-looking statements other than that.
Important. Understood. Very useful. Just one quick follow-up. Without giving me any forward-looking statement, just from a potential point of view, then if you are able to do a mixed intelligence SSG, will you have further room to improve your margin from both SSG point of view and efficiency point of view, or only it will be SSG-led margin improvement?
No, Ali, you're absolutely right. If the top line goes even up by INR 10,000 over the next little while, you will find the leverage all through the P&L, completely all the way to company EBITDA. See, the restaurant-level EBITDA is leveraged by several line items. The company-level EBITDA is leveraged by one item, which is the overhead, which kind of is in the long run believed to be more than anything but fixed, right? It's slight inflationary increases on an annual basis. You will find those leverages coming all the way down to the company-level EBITDA.
Important. This is very useful. Second and last question is on Indonesia. While certainly commendable in terms of the reduction in the losses that the company led in, when I see your presentation slide number 14, the improvement has more come because of the corporate G&A coming down, whereas the restaurant-level pre-index margins is that on a year-over-year basis from positive has become negative. If you can throw some light in terms of what has happened here despite having a 2% SSSG. I mean, you have made this clear that you will be very strict on lots of curbing the losses in Indonesia. Otherwise, we will probably move out of it. I mean, your thoughts on that?
Yeah. Ali, thanks. Again, good observation. Look, we have had some inflation in beef prices over there and also some currency depletion over there. You have seen those two things happen simultaneously, literally in the same quarter. You did see some impact of that. However, the pricing has been taken. It is not just us. It is uniform across the market. The industry has taken pricing to cover the inflation, and you will find that kind of washout over the next couple of quarters and kind of fall in track. Look, I think by reducing the overheads, you have now reduced, as I was telling to Mr. Chatterjee earlier, you have reduced the break-even kind of ADS. I think we are now seeing positive sales coming in. Look, no amount of cost saving is going to help that business unless the sales come back to where it used to be.
We are working on that. Obviously, as a company, we are astute on all options available to us to make sure the shareholders and the investors get the best bang for the buck on our decision. We will keep all those options open, as you've just mentioned, but we're working very hard right now to kind of capitalize on this increase in sales.
Important. Is this like a two or three-quarter time period in which you should see the improvement significantly coming through, or is it something which will take even longer?
Let's wait another quarter. Let's see where it goes. We'll have a chat post that. Yeah?
Sure. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Gaurav Jogani from JM Financials. Please go ahead.
Hi, sir. Thank you for taking my question, and congratulations on excellent execution. Sir, my first question is with regards to the CapEx per store now. Now, given we have driven multiple cost initiatives, what would be the average store opening cost for us in India and then Indonesia?
Yeah. Indonesia, we're not building any restaurants right now, so we don't have any latest costs. Sumit will share with you our cost here in India. Of course, we have done some, we are putting in a cafe now. We are putting in a self-ordering kiosk in all our new restaurants, right? When the restaurant comes in now, they come in with self-ordering kiosks. They come in with the cafe already being built in there. Over to you, Sumit, if you can just quickly.
Gotcha. You have been kind of sharing these numbers on a regular basis. We still continue to spend roughly around INR 2.7 crore to set up a restaurant in India. This is average cost, obviously not led by the format. There, depending on which format we concentrate on, the cost kind of would vary. On average, if you look at it across even from the perspective of balance sheet gross loss to store costs, realize that we have been spending around INR 2.7 crore. This is a number that has been now consistent for almost three, four years, I would say.
I've been able to kind of maintain this cost at these levels in spite of me really adding BK Cafe as part of our stores or this year adding kiosk as part of the store is because we've also brought in a lot of efficiencies on our CapEx cost line. We've literally been able to offset the inflation impact on the CapEx side as well as add more into our stores but still remain at an overall cost of INR 2.7 crore per square. That's literally where we stand, Gaurav, as far as CapEx portion India is concerned. We will continue to improve on this cost line going forward as well. We are working on several initiatives. I'll not go into detailing out the initiatives there, but we do believe that we should be able to further optimize these costs as we go along.
As we keep achieving some of the milestones that we are working on, maybe going forward in subsequent calls, we will start calling out the reduction on CapEx side that we are working on as well.
Sir, Sumit, just one follow-up. Given that there is a guidance for 60-80 restaurants that will be immediately open in a year, and I'm assuming there will be some refurbishment or some iterated CapEx as well. What would be the CapEx guidance for at least 2026 to 2030 years?
On the CapEx side, with respect to new stores, 60-80 restaurants that we are talking about, roughly INR 2.7 crores plus the deposits that we placed. Including that, it will be around INR 3 - odd crores. The large incremental Capex that we had, initiative-led, more or less the cycle of those initiative-led CapEx have now come to an end because we are working on cafes over the last two years. Last year, we also added the digital investments on the physical asset side and each of the stores. Those have now literally kind of come to an end. As we kind of went in to touch that, a little bit of reform if required, we have kind of done that.
Beyond the new store CapEx and maybe incremental CapEx on the digital side to the tune of around maybe anywhere between INR 10-15 crore, we do not expect anything more on the CapEx side over and beyond the new store CapEx, at least with the coming financial year. The incremental investment of CapEx cycle literally has now, I would say, we have literally completed that across the entire portfolio. We do not have any initiative that we would have on the CapEx side. Rather, now we would start working towards how do we optimize all these investments that we have done on the cafe side as well as the digital side. How do we really kind of start optimizing it on the business side and what our concentration would be there, which is honestly what Kapil in his presentation was also talking about.
For the initial slides, what Raj spoke about, that our concentration now is going to be really optimizing the return on some of the other investments that we've done over the last couple of years is what you will see us doing into this coming part of the financial year. Without really delving deep into overall strategy, you will see this literally evolving as we kind of go in into this year. Obviously, the way we look at it as Korean was the first step into where we kind of start to establish our safe credentials. You will see our strategy on a per se that's evolving on the product as well as on the digital side over the next few quarters.
Sure. Thanks for the details. Thank you, Sumit. Just last question from my end is you have really shown how you have improved the gross margins over the couple of years despite continuing on this value platform. Assuming that given that you will be targeting a 70% gross margin, should we build incremental improvement on the EBITDA margin as well or are they driven from the leverage? Would it be likely to assume that 40, 50, 60 improvement that you're targeting in the gross margin would reflect on the EBITDA margin strategy? Thanks very much for coming.
Yeah. Gaurav gave you, and I'll repeat that. Our intention is to move that gross margin number to about close to 69%-70% over the next few years, over the next two to three years, right? That's the intention. We will get it to that point. That money really rolls down all the way to the store-level EBITDA and actually, to be honest with you, all the way down to company-level EBITDA. That's the intention with that number, that line items. There are additional line items that we are working on, whether it's utilities, whether it is rents that we are working on, our total labor. Now the SOKs are there. Self-ordering kiosks are there in the restaurants. All these things kind of work hand in hand.
When you look at our P&L improvements, a 32% increase in company-level EBITDA year over year, it's coming from very small single initiatives. It's not one big arrow. It's a lot of hard work. I think this business really, I call it a business of pennies and seconds and grams and degrees. It's for a reason. It's a lot of small things that you work hard on, and it all contributes towards the EBITDA level.
Thank you, Sumit. Thank you. Thank you, Rajeev. Thank you.
You're welcome.
Thank you. Participants, to ensure that the management is able to address questions from all participants, please limit your question to only one question per participant. Next question is from the line of Atul Mehra from Motilal Oswal Asset Management. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, team. Am I audible?
Yes, Mr. Mehra. Please continue.
Thanks. Sir, my question is, when we look at the India business, older cohorts, maybe 2022 cohort or 2023 cohort, what would be the kind of restaurant-level EBITDA margins these cohorts would be making? I'm asking this in the context of the general time it would take for a store to mature. It could be reflective of steady-state possibility at the system level. Just maybe if you could share some insights on this.
Yeah. Mr. Mehra, I would advise that you spend some time with Gaurav to kind of go into the very extensive answer that he will give you because it's not linear again. See, number one is we don't have mature stores. We have stores that were open in 2014, which continue to grow. And you probably have stores in the industry that were opened 25 years ago, which are still growing. This is a kind of a business that continues to grow in many parts of the world. I mean, I've been running this business for a very long time. It's not that it will mature and then come to a stagnation. There's always the inflationary increase, but there's also increase in traffic from new traffic coming in, new initiatives like we put the cafe and so forth. That's the first part of the answer.
The cohorts are doing better. I just gave you a very simple example. We do not share cohort-level kind of gross margins and EBITDA level information. I gave you a small example just to let you know how the cafe business, which just started three years ago, right? How the cafes that were first open are up INR 2,000 over two years, and the cafes that were opened last year are up INR 1,000. They are growing at about INR 1,000 on the cafe side of the business. I am not promising that that would be the trend for the next five years, but that is what we have seen in the last two years, and that is all we can share with you what we have seen.
Yes, the cohorts that are more, I would say, more mature, if you will, assuming that's a better way of defining it, are more mature than the younger restaurants, the newer restaurants, are doing higher radiuses. If you do high radiuses and if your rent is decent, you do gross margins and you do restaurant-level profitability, which is much higher. Feel free to spend time with Gaurav without kind of sharing any detail inside. There's some information that we got to keep for comparative reason to ourselves. He'll show you how we work that platform out. He'll help you understand it better.
Sir, just to add to what Raj was saying, and since we keep getting this question consistently on vintage, I just want to highlight two data points from our presentation. One is, if you look at the year-on-year growth on restaurant EBITDA slide 10, we saw 9.7% growing up to 10.5%, which is the entire portfolio. At the same time, initial slides which Raj referred to, which is slide four, if you see, we did try to kind of reflect that the older restaurants grow at a faster pace or a better pace in terms of EBITDA. We have reflected that the restaurants that opened in 2023 on an annual basis grew at a pace of 1.7% on EBITDA over previous years.
To your question, really, while we are seeing the EBITDA, seeing the positive strategy growth, we are also seeing a better improvement in the restaurants that were opened prior to FY 2022. I'm just, without weighing into what the profitability is, just to still kind of give you a reflection of what's happening with our board system. We're just highlighting these two data points which form part of our presentation on slide four and slide 10, Mr. Mehra.
Got it. Got it. Okay. Now, just one other question more on Indonesia side. It is very encouraging that we are seeing financial growth returning. In terms of at a strategy level, what are the, in terms of deliverables from Indonesia for the coming financial year? I ask some of the context that we have a large India business which is doing fairly well. When do we kind of take a call which is more strategic on Indonesia in the sense of divestment or just doubling down on efforts in India completely and not adding any kind of rest of the world distractions? When do we really take that call which is a more strategic long-term call on Indonesia in terms of any timeline or any thought process that you could share would be very helpful. Thank you.
Yeah. Without, again, making any forward-looking statement, which is what it would be if I did make it, look, we are looking at this business very closely, right? From all points of view, we want to do the best thing for our business over there in terms of our investors and our promoters, stakeholders, myself included in there. We want to do the right thing over there. It's seeing some green shoots. That doesn't mean that we have closed other options. We're looking at all options. We will make a good call very quickly. I was telling this earlier on in the last call that we are looking at the next two, three quarters very crucially and very closely, and we will do the right thing for the investors in that kind of time frame.
That's encouraging. Thank you, and all the best.
Last question, please, from whoever. Thanks, Operator.
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Mr. Rishi Mody from Marcellus Investments Managers. Please go ahead.
Okay. Hi, folks. Am I audible?
Yes, Rishi. Please go on. Thank you.
Yeah. So just a quick bookkeeping one to start off and then get on to the operations front. India store addition guidance you've given is 800 by FY 2029. If I remember this correctly, we were supposed to add 700 by December 2026. Has the agreement been amended with Restaurant Brands International?
Yeah. We spoke about this, I think, a couple of quarters ago that because of COVID, we had rearranged an agreement with our franchisor. So this guidance that you're seeing is a reflective of that agreement that we came with.
All right. Second, on the operations front, on the India front, just wanted to understand. We changed the strategy on the convenience channel where we are focusing more on profitability. Now, I think we've done a bit on that. Just trying to understand now how are we going to ramp up the convenience channel plus also are we facing any issues with, say, rider availability or rider pricing? Just wanted to get your view on that.
Yeah. Yes, profitability, but profitability is the third pillar. The first pillar was about driving sales and driving traffic. What we have seen in the last two years is while we optimize our delivery business to make sure that it is only driving profitable traffic and so forth, we have seen a return of getting back into the dynamic business, which is a strong point that we kind of hang our hats on moving forward. It is a very strong dynamic business that is building slowly. We have got all the tools. I think Kapil spoke about the app business that is driving a significant amount of people into our business, which is going to help them in CRM in the future and kind of continue to build on that traffic. That is a healthy traffic when 30% of your business is known on your app.
We'll continue driving that piece of the traffic. For us, my primary goal is, and by the way, when you have a goal, it doesn't mean you're not doing the other stuff. My primary goal is to make sure that more and more business drive into our four walls, into our restaurant dynamic business. We want to focus on building that strong over the next five years. We want to make sure that our delivery business grows, but grows profitably. It grows with healthy margins, very similar to our dynamic business. That's two really broad goals that we are working on. In addition to P&L optimization, making sure bringing efficiencies on there, innovation on this side, digitization, all that will continue. These will be primary goals: to bring traffic back into our restaurants and, secondly, to drive delivery business on a profitable basis.
Okay, Gaurav. The final question on the Indonesia piece, right? You mentioned that Indonesia's responded to EBITDA margins decline because of beef inflation and some currency impact. I'm just trying to understand because our gross margins are expanded in Indonesia, if I'm not wrong, by about 180 basis points on a year-over-year basis for Q4. Our EBITDA, the restaurant-level EBITDA margin has declined by about 300 basis points. Just trying to tie the two up. I mean, our restaurant OpEx has also increased in the last couple of quarters on a year-over-year basis. Restaurant OpEx per store came up.
Yeah. Mr. Modi, just to be sure, your observation is correct. What we've been doing over the last, I would say, over the last two quarters in order to kind of support the recovery of revenues in Indonesia, we've also parallelly been spending a little more on the marketing side as compared to what you would have seen at last year. Last year was literally at the middle of the geopolitical scenario that we were facing. Since the time the geopolitical scenario started to get eased out, the new government, which we were talking about even last year as well, as that was kind of getting to ease out, we've really now tried to. We are working towards getting sales back, which is also the reflection that you are seeing in our ADS growth on overlap from almost from period November to first quartile of May.
There is that element of spend that we have in Indonesia in order to recover some part of the sales. It will settle down. Finally, this will literally kind of settle down back to the 5% marketing investments that we otherwise would put in the market, similar to what we have in India. It is that some of these investments were kind of front-ended in order to get the sales back to the pre-COVID levels of.
In terms of percentage of sales, the last two quarters, ANC spend, like you said, it will settle down to INR 5. How much extra?
It was around 8%, if I remember the numbers over the last two quarters. We had not spent that much of it.
Okay.
Yeah, you will see that slowly settling down. It's just to kind of just, and you will see that settling down over the next couple of quarters as well as we continue to bring sales back as far as we share in the business.
Okay, got it. Thank you. That's all.
Thank you. Thanks, guys. Really appreciate it. Back to you, Operator.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question of the day. I now hand the conference over to management for closing comments.
Yeah. So thank you, everyone, again, for joining in. I'll just reiterate that there were a few main performance KPIs that we delivered last year. Again, we are at 513 restaurants as of 31 March 2025, with 58 new restaurants year over year. Our revenues grew by 11.8%, which is INR 1,967,800,000. FSSG was up 1.1% for the whole year, 5.1% for the last quarter. Gross margin moved up from 67% to 67.7%. It's up 0.7 percentage points. Our restaurant-level EBITDA was up 21.2%, which is INR 206 crore. Our company-level EBITDA was INR 99.4 crore, which is up 32% over the last year. Thank you so much for your interest in the call today. Appreciate it. Have a wonderful evening. Thank you very much.
Thank you. On behalf of Motilal Oswal Financial Services Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.