Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to Redington Limited Q4 FY 2026 earnings conference call. As a reminder, this conference call may contain forward-looking statements about the company which are based on the beliefs, opinions, and expectations of the company as on date of this call. These statements are not the guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. All participant lines are in the listen-only mode, and there'll be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during this conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star zero on your touch-tone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. V.S. Hariharan, MD and Group CEO. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Thank you. A very good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to share with you our results for Q4 2026 and full year FY 2026. This has been our best quarter so far from both revenue and profit perspective. We recorded INR 33,269 crores of revenue, a growth of 25% year-on-year. The quarterly profit at consol level excluding exceptional items was INR 467 crores at 1.4%. Our best profit performance so far. We closed the year at INR 119,347 crores, nearly $13.5 billion, marking a Y-o-Y growth of 20% on revenue. A full year PAT growth excluding exceptional items was 17% and PAT margin at 1.3%. This has been a strong year for Redington, reflecting sustained momentum across our core markets and continued progress on our strategic priorities.
It is a continuing story of profitable growth across business segments and geographies. It is also a performance coming on back of several geopolitical challenges like the West Asia crisis that we saw during the quarter. Our performance was driven by resilience and defined by discipline. I'll get into a bit of geography and business unit perspective. From a geography perspective, India had a fantastic quarter. The business grew top line by 50% and the profit after tax by 41% during the quarter. The growth in India reflects our ability to conquer and execute in our largest market. Within India, we had growth across all business units. There was a good uptick in the PC business driven by demand due to anticipated component shortage, as well as large deals. There was strong demand in mobility with continued momentum in the premium segment.
With the cloud security, cybersecurity and IT infra investments in India paved way for higher growth in the quarter, as well as contribution from both the SSG side of the business and data center deals with new cloud operators. There was continued traction in upcountry expansion initiatives. We grew 45% in the upcountry part of the business and strong adoption of digital and platform-led distribution. In Middle East, the geopolitical tensions during the last month of the quarter pulled down the performance in March. We did see a demand spike for cloud and cybersecurity, both from government and enterprise segments. Africa continues to see encouraging momentum driven by expanding IT adoption and increased contributions from solution-led business, particularly SSG. Moving on to quarterly performance by business units. Most of the business units contributed well to this growth.
Mobility grew 19% year-on-year. It's about 33% of the top line now for this quarter, driven by strong demand in the premium segment and strong execution in the direct-to-retail segment in India during the quarter. While this segment remains volume driven, it continues to play a critical role for Redington in driving scale and partner engagement. Many new initiatives on mid-market enterprise segment reach, development of IR channel are underway to create future growth. On the Endpoint Solutions Group, primarily marked by PCs, this group grew at 28% year-on-year, contributing to 30% of the top line. PC demand was strong, partially driven by the component shortage, as I mentioned before, and anticipated larger price increases as well as large deals during the quarter of nearly INR 500 crores.
Again, I repeat INR 500 crores. AI PC penetration into the commercial segment continued to grow. It's 41% of the revenues in India from AI PC greater than 40 TOPS. TSG Technology Solutions Group had a growth of 34%, contributing to 19% of top line, driven largely due to timing of large deal executions. We had mentioned in the previous earnings calls, part of these deals moved from Q3 to Q4. Some of them got recorded this quarter. In TSG, all cylinders fired. Data centers, networking, server storage, and achieved the highest revenue ever. We did large deals of more than INR 1,100 crores in TSG during the quarter. Now coming to SSG, Software Solutions Group continued to have good momentum, grew by 31%. It contributes to 17% of the top line now.
For the full year, SSG contributed to 17% of the top line as well versus 15% in fiscal year 2025. SSG now represents a strong and growing share of our business and a higher quality earning stream, continuing to deliver higher gross margin and PAT compared to the group. We continue to expand partnerships with Tier 1 OEMs and hyperscalers, increasing our solution intensity in go-to-market and build joint business plans to drive wallet share. During the quarter, I wanted to call out we are building a lot of capability building initiatives, and several of these got rolled out that will realize future potential. Our next version of CloudQuarks platform, we call it 2.0 internally, has been rolled out this quarter. It has greater capabilities for digital lifecycle management of customers with analytics.
We are also executing automated platforms for renewals of subscriptions supported by customer success teams. On the AI front, many areas of progress. We formed an AI lab, our capability center at Chennai headquarter, deploying solutions for both internal and external use cases. We've launched an AI Exchange, which is like a marketplace with over 200 AI agents that brings ISVs and AI innovators and our customers through our partner ecosystem together. This has the potential to accelerate the adoption of AI agents by industry vertical through a distribution approach. We've also rolled out this quarter five AI learning centers in Tier 2 cities through our CSR program to create more AI human capacity in the country. Our professional services team in India scope and approach has been shaped to provide a range of productized services around the customer life cycle.
That's for some of the capability building initiatives. Moving on to operations. Efficient manager working capital and higher mix towards mobility solutions led to the overall lowering of working capital days to 30 days. ROCE was at 22%. Despite the investments we are making in the growth areas, OpEx control continues to be good and grew slower than revenue growth, giving us operating leverage. During Q4, there was a slight uptick on OpEx, a combination of factors, certain war-related premiums on both insurance and freight. One-off AR provisions in geos, all these led to a higher OpEx during the quarter. On a full year basis, OpEx to revenue declined by 17 basis. Coming to our subsidiary Arena. From a Q4 performance perspective, there was a loss of INR 44 crores, Redington portion being INR 22 crores related to exit costs on the Lira business.
The company's wholly owned subsidiary, Redington Gulf, carried out an impairment of the trade name classified as an intangible asset arising from its investment in the subsidiary in Turkey Arena. Based on the assessment taking into account challenging economic conditions in Turkey and revised future projections, an impairment loss has been recognized and disclosed as an exceptional item in the financial results. The impact on the group PAT after minority interest is INR 75.2 crores. In the previous year, exceptional item represents gain on divestment of Paynet, our step-down subsidiary. To summarize, FY 2026 has been a year of strong growth, transformation, and disciplined execution. We've scaled our core business, strengthened our solution capabilities, maintained capital discipline. Our core markets continue to deliver our solution business scaling rapidly. We're making the right investments for the future.
While we remain mindful of macro challenges, we are confident in our diversified presence, our evolving business mix, and our ability to deliver sustainable long-term value. I'd like to reinforce that Redington strength lies in the human capital, partners and vendors. The current quarter is a testimony to it. Spellbound performance in India, risk management and business continuity in the Middle East, despite the risks and dangers in building long-term avenues of growth in Africa through SSG. Following the onset of West Asia conflict on 28 February 2026, our Middle East operations were conducted under significant constraints.
You'll be pleased to know while the quarter was impacted by softer demand, supply chain disruptions, the withdrawal of war risk insurance coverage, inventory challenges, delays in receivables, our teams in the ground demonstrated strong resilience ensuring business continuity after multiple data center attacks where we had our own customers and partners as well, sustain in-house operations. We have initiatives that started yesterday, such as Tech Citadel, which is an alternative to physical face-to-face events between OEMs and partner customers. We're also seeing increased demand for cybersecurity and cloud products. We'll continue to look for opportunities and upsides in these tough moments while we continue to manage business continuity and downsides in these markets. The board has also declared INR 6 per share of dividend for the year ended 31st March 2026, which is 30% of profits.
We are very sensitive to our shareholder needs. We have additional capital needs for growth opportunities and are cautious about the evolving geopolitical uncertainty. Thank you for your continued support. We look forward to your questions.
Thank you very much. We will now begin with 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 Nitin Padmanabhan from Investec. Please go ahead.
Hi, and good morning. Thanks for the opportunity. Congrats on a very, solid performance in a very tough environment. I had a couple of questions. The first is, if you, think about all the challenges and the way things have evolved this year, How should one sort of, think about the next year, considering that India has been very solid this year? We possibly, benefited from some pre-buying and all of that this year, so, that's on one side. Well, on the other side, you have had, the, rest of the world business be relatively weak.
Now, do you think the growth sort of flips between from in India to ROW, with ROW sort of improving a lot more next year, and maybe India sort of growth sort of tapering down? That's the first one. The second is in the context of the large deals and the pipeline, How is the sort of the shortage, the price increases, sort of impacting that? Is that sort of Do you think that has a higher sort of impact from a margin perspective, or how do you manage that? Finally, on the Software Solutions Group, this business has scaled extremely well, now 17% of business.
Do you think that at this level, growth sort of tapers or, there are certain capability sets that we have been adding, which would help sort of sustain the growth as we go forward? Yeah. Thank you.
Thanks, Nitin. I will try and give some answers, and Krishnan, please jump in if I miss something. Let me start with the growth perspective. Nitin, if you looked at this year and the previous quarters, our India business grew very well, but we also grew very well in Middle East and Africa for the first 11 months of the year. The previous three quarters, clearly we recorded good growth in UAE and GCCL, we call it, in those regions, and Africa too. It is the crisis and the disruption in supply chain and a little bit of softening of demand in the third month of the quarter that led to a slower growth in Middle East. Obviously we don't know when the West Asia crisis will resolve or right now ceasefire.
To give a little bit of perspective on the coming year, clearly we continue to see good momentum and growth in India. We will see a little bit of softness for the first quarter. We expect the first two quarters in the Middle East region. Africa continues to be strong. As soon as the crisis is out of the way, based on, I mean, some of us were in Dubai last week, we got a firsthand feel for the market as well. Clearly, the government is coming out with a lot of initiatives to sort of support back demand, there are many initiatives locally. We do expect both consumer demand and some of the projects and enterprise deals that got delayed to come back.
None of us know when the crisis will be completely out of the way. We definitely see some softness this quarter and maybe a bit next quarter. If it gets resolved soon, we do expect to see Middle East coming back to demand. In terms of business units, we all know, this has been shared, due to component shortage, we have gaps in supply. We have gaps in supply on the smartphone side. We have gaps in supply on the PC side and on the GPUs as well. The demand is still very strong in many markets. That will somewhat drive our numbers and ability to fulfill numbers.
First half of the year that we have visibility to, the demand in India is strong and the demand in Africa is strong. Middle East, again, will depend on the supply chain disruption. I just give you a high level of how we look at the year out. In terms of large deals, and the pipeline, you know, the data center market in India is 1.5 GW and it's going to 7.5 GW in a few years. Clearly there's a lot of pent-up demand there and that is one part of it. Even on the on-prem, the co-location, the whole space has got a lot of demand.
It's a question of how much we want to play, at what margin, at what ROCE, and we've talked about it in the last few quarters. We'll continue to make those calls as long as they meet our requirement metrics, how much risk we take. Is the demand there? Obviously, it's very strong. In fact, some of the deals that have got closed the previous quarter will show up this quarter. They are significantly more than the numbers I talked about in terms of the size of the deals last quarter. Clearly we see a good pipeline there, but it's a question of appropriating and getting into deals that make sense for us from a profitability and ROCE perspective. SSG, tremendous room for growth still. I will go part by part.
The cloud and the software business has actually been growing above average. When we say 31% SSG, both cloud part of the business and the software is growing greater than 30%. The security part of the business is growing slower for us, and we need to have catch up there, both on market share, wallet share. We will drive security much harder in the coming quarters. Within cloud itself, we have great headroom for growth. A number of hyperscalers getting into the picture and their growth when we see in the direct business that they are working on. Clearly on a DTAM, the distribution TAM perspective, cloud has good upside and so does SaaS. With AI agents in the picture, we do start seeing some traction on the AI Exchange I talked about.
We've been sharing that. It got launched in the middle of March. We'll start seeing revenues on the AI part of the business, sometime during the year, and that will also start ramping up. The SSG business, we're still positive to sustain that momentum, if not grow faster than that.
Very helpful. Just one quick follow-up. During the COVID period when there were shortages, obviously working capital intensity went down, velocity of business went up, right? ROCEs went through the roof. You think that happens this time or it's different?
It is different. Partially because, one, there is also an AI trend happening in the market. The low end of There was a uniform shortage of supply. Here you're getting entry-level PCs and entry-level servers not being available and more higher priced products available. We are also seeing an uptick in end user demand, but not at the same pace that partners are stocking up, et cetera. There is a combination of things happening there, so it will be a bit different. We also don't know how long this demand cycle will last and when the price increases will stop. Something we're not clear even from the OEMs and the vendors.
In two to three quarters, I mean, the supply issue is probably gonna last for 12 - 18 months from what we hear. In two to three quarters, as people pull forward their buying patterns, there could be a change, but we don't know. We cannot call it right now.
Nitin, the biggest difference between COVID and now, COVID when there was shortage, there was a pent-up demand. There was a high demand on account of work from home, learn from home, et cetera. Today, while supply is short, the corresponding demand spike is not something that we generally see. Having said that, there are actually I mean, two sets of customers. Since the prices are going up quite substantially, there are some set of customers who say, "No, no, I would want to buy now and avoid a higher price increase in the next couple of quarters." There is an increased demand in that segment. Another set of customer group, they just want to wait for, say, another three, four, five quarters, and then wants the price to get corrected, normalized, and then buy. Overall net-net, the demand environment is okay.
In COVID, the demand environment was on the higher side. That also resulted in, while you haven't asked, I just want to touch upon, that resulted in higher gross margin in the COVID period. Lower working capital in the COVID period. As we speak now, we don't think that could be visible in the current scheme of things. That's our current assessment. While revenue growth will be there, that again because of higher ASPs, not units, because of the price rise. Of course the gross margin we think we'll be able to maintain, and working capital could stay where it is or maybe it could go up because we may have to give more credit, as Hari said, or we may have to stock excess just to avoid stockout situations.
Very helpful. Thank you so much and all the very best.
Thank you.
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Deepak Lalwani from Unifi Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, team. Congrats on the results. Krishnan, the first question is, can you please break up the receivable and inventory provisionings across India and rest of the world separately for the quarter and full year, and how we should look at it for FY 2027?
The overall inventory provision is well under control. For the full year, we have had an inventory provision situation of about 3 basis points. This is what has been our long-term average at about 5-6 basis points. AR, for the current quarter, is on the higher side, as Hari explained. There had been certain one-off provisions we had to take. For example, Saudi Arabia, in India, because there are some government receivables which has taken some time, et cetera. These are cautionary provisions. We are still confident of recovery, but it's going to take some time. It had already taken a bit of a time. Overall, AR provisions are on the higher side vis-a-vis our long-term average. Inventory on the other hand has been lower than what it was in the past.
Understood, sir. Could you just call out how should we think about both these line items for FY 2027? you know, akin to what we have seen in Saudi Arabia and your provisioning style there in the earlier quarters, do you expect some of this to reverse maybe in the first half or is it more second half led?
We think AR provision may get normalized. Some part of it could come back. We are unable to estimate when these collections could happen because it has already taken some time. Inventory provision I think we should be able to maintain. We don't foresee any big challenge on the inventory provision. AR, for the ensuing year, as a percentage, it could come down.
Noted, sir. Sir, my second question is specifically on the mobility segment, where we have seen that India has grown extremely well and premiumization continues. Mobility, even if you adjust for exo-four-o-phone, you know, if you knock out that element, in the rest of the world has not grown as fast as India is growing. Could you explain how we should think about the mobility aspect?
Okay. See there are two, three things happening here. Firstly, India is a smartphone market, but within the smartphone segment, and the premium smartphone segment, if I take for example the Apple brand perspective, Pro Max mix is not as high in India as it will be overseas. One of the reasons mobility has been not growing as fast in the overseas is the demand for Pro Max in some of the Middle East customer segments is far higher. As that gets normalized, we do see the premium segment growing as fast and coming back strongly.
Because if you look at UAE and KSA, there are a lot of premium customers who want to buy the most premium model of both Apple and Android. That's one of the phenomenon that will really change, and we expect that to get somewhat normalized during the year. Having said that, the component shortage will play a role in the premium phone segment as well. We'll have to continue to just fulfill demand based on the supply available. But we do see overseas can pick up, may not be Q1, but Q2 onwards.
There has also been some short supply in terms of supply from the brands. On top of it, March played a factor in Middle East where we couldn't function in the normal pace. Even though we did make some alternate arrangements in terms of importing into Ireland, Netherlands, Bombay, but still we couldn't catch up with what we would have otherwise done.
Understood. Sir, my third question is on the OpEx, which has been a little more elevated, because of the one-off of receivable, and it's still on the higher side. Could you just comment about OpEx, what has been some of the factoring costs here as well? You know, employee costs are also in that same breath has again gone up. Could you comment on the OpEx and, employee line item? Sir, could you speak a little bit about the dividend? The dividend this time has been a little low. Is this a direct signal that we're going to be using the cash flows for higher growth for 2027 and 2028?
Okay. First on the OpEx, employee cost has gone up. As we discussed in the past, mainly it's because of certain investments that we are making towards capability building, and that we think is important for future growth and more particularly the enterprise segment. That part of the increase will keep happening. There was also some element of increase on account of FX rate. As you know, everything we need to convert into Indian rupees and the INR 88 becoming INR 94 had advantage across, also had a disadvantage on account of OpEx. That's one another factor that contributed to the increase.
Third, is the increase which we think is more short term on account of what's happening in Middle East. We saw some increase in cost mainly on account of insurance, transportation, et cetera. The cost of doing business in Middle East is up. Then fourth is on account of technology-related investments, which again, like, I mean, the compensation we think is going to be on the higher side as we move into the future also because of the capability, this thing building. Overall, we are in control because the revenue is going up quite interestingly. OpEx, as an absolute amount, we think some part of it is more towards investment. That is, I mean, it's not the normal OpEx.
Factoring has actually come down in Arena. What would normally, I'm just reading out the numbers. For Q4 last year, it was INR 22 crores, which moved down to INR 18 crores in Q3, which is last quarter, is now down to INR 2 crores. The amount of factoring has considerably come down, and that has resulted in some advantage in the OpEx overall. But, I mean, it is more an interest cost increase as we discussed in the past.
Noted. Sir, could you speak about the dividend and growth aspirations of Redington for 2027 and 2028?
Sure. We have received inputs from shareholders in the past as well in meetings, both one-on-one and group meetings, that definitely if there are growth opportunities, both inorganic and organic, we should look at them. As we have signaled before, we are exploring inorganic opportunities, especially in the professional services area, on cloud and security. We are actively going through the discussion on what types of targets, et cetera. We're clearly considering growth opportunities there that can embellish and complement what we're trying to do with regards to SSG, and these will be directly in the area of professional services. That is one of the reasons we also felt that can we conserve some of the capital for these growth opportunities.
Obviously the West Asia crisis is something to watch out the short term for the next one or two quarters, and we should conserve cash for that as well. Those are the two driving factors. Clearly we have many growth opportunities in our radar that we wanna look at.
And just to complement-
No, go ahead.
There are also expectations of higher working capital requirement because of the intended large deals we expect, that's going to be more than what we had seen in the current year. Because of RAM shortage, as subset , maybe we may have to be prepared for higher inventory or higher AR days. We just want to conserve cash to make sure all these are seamlessly handled.
Thank you. Deepak, I request you to come back for a follow-up question, please. Thank you. Next question is from the line of Vijay Menon from Monarch Networth Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi, sir. Hi, thank you for the opportunity and congratulations on a good set of numbers. A couple of questions from my side. One, what kind of impact are you seeing on SSG and CSG due to this, you know, AI disruption with Anthropic and others coming up in cybersecurity? Are you seeing, the subscription model, you know, coming under threat? What kind of guidance can you give there?
Okay. Again, we have not clearly seen any specific. The way we look at all of these models that are evolving is, one, step one, people beginning to use them for creating AI agents that will complement what companies want to do, enterprises want to do. That's what I mentioned about this AI Exchange that we have created, where we have 200 + agents from our ISVs. Has it had a direct impact on subscription models and the SaaS products we sell? If I break them into three parts, clearly cloud continues to be on its frenetic momentum. Specific SaaS products that we sell, a whole range of infra software, design software products, we have not seen any letup on the demand of, on subscription of these products.
City clearly continues to have the momentum that it's had, but there are new products that Anthropic has launched recently, and we expect the other providers also to launch where they are, you know, their real-time threat detection and fixing. We'll have to see how much of these are standalone products or how much of these get incorporated into the SaaS and subscription products. It's too early to call or see anything in terms of softening of demand. Long term, clearly we see there will be a play for SaaS, the software as a service, and a play for AI agents, which is service as a software. That's why we are dabbling with both, so that if there is any softening in the first one, we are able to take advantage with the AI agents.
Short term, we don't see any impact.
Okay. That helps. Can we look at these frontier models as potentially OEMs going ahead? If they come up with products eventually, can they also be tie-ups which we can look at in the future?
Can you clarify a little bit more when you talk about frontier? There are many definitions of frontier markets.
Yeah, yeah. Basically, looking at anybody like an Anthropic or Claude, you know, if eventually they come up with models which are standard products, can we look at them as, you know, new tie-ups in the future like we have, you know, OEMs already working with us in these areas?
Absolutely. Absolutely, bang on. We already do this with Microsoft with Copilot and there is a lot of movement on how we market Copilot and how we reach mid-market customers and how they can use that platform to create AI agents and the whole office automation movement with Microsoft Copilot is a case in itself. Clearly, we will continue to explore the other LLMs and the other AI providers in terms of tie-ups. We're already in discussion. We cannot talk about it yet with a number of these, but you will see some of these announcements, and we definitely, we see that as a great area to focus on and grow.
Okay. That helps. This quarter and going ahead, can you call out what would be the ASP-led growth and volume-led? ASPs are quite high and they are looking to sustain also going ahead. What could be the mix in terms of ASP growth and volume growth?
See, it's difficult to mention. I'm just making a guess. A significant part of the increase would be on account of ASP, and the marginal increase will be on account of units.
Okay. We see this trend sustaining for the next few quarters?
Yes. That's the expectation.
Okay. Okay. Any kind of guidance on large deals for 2027? How are we looking at large deals and what kind of participation we can see there?
Let me tell you the past numbers.
Yeah.
While for the quarter, the total quantum of large deals are about INR 1,600+ crores. For the full year, it's about INR 2,500 crores, close to INR 2,500 crores. You can see what it was in nine months and what it is in Q4. Believe me, where we see the first two quarters of the current year, definitely this can only keep going up. This is a very interesting space, that's why one of the reasons why we said we want to conserve cash is to have sufficient capital to fuel opportunities like this.
Okay. Margins there could be, how many? Like maybe 20%, 30% lower to, you know, core business or how does it work there?
See, I don't think, in any way we can compare margins in the large deals vis-a-vis the core business. We have said this. The two metrics you need to keep that in mind. It's an incremental business, and hence there will be an incremental profit. Second, we are very particular on Return on Capital Employed, no compromise on Return on Capital Employed. Maybe gross margin could be lower, working capital could be lower, higher, all those are fine. No compromise on Return on Capital Employed. These two are the metric. In terms of margins, it's much lower. I mean, it cannot get compared with the regular business.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much . Thank you. Over.
Thank you. A request to all the participants, kindly limit yourself to two questions per participant and rejoin the queue for a follow-up question. Next question is from the line of Hitaindra Pradhan from Maximal Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, sir. I hope I'm audible. Sir, my first question is with regards to the war situation. If you can like, you know, give us what is our revenue exposure on the, you know, main markets, main impacted markets and, you know, any color on consumer versus enterprise exposure?
See, Middle East, as you know, has been a large part of our business. We are present in quite a lot of countries, and this time it's just not one or two countries, it's the region that is impacted. In terms of revenue and profits, about 30%-35% of our business happens from this market.
Sir, you mentioned earlier that, you know, there have been incremental orders from the government and enterprise side, especially from DC, even in this situation. Is that correct or?
That is more to do from the security and the cloud-related part. Right now when there are challenges in terms of IT security, obviously that part of the demand has been more. Overall, there is a logistics impact and the core business to that extent has got impacted. That's what Hari also mentioned in his initial brief.
The SSG part of the business, just to add, we see an uptick from the government and enterprise segment in the Middle East. The hardware part of the business will be soft till the crisis gets over and we recover.
Got it, sir. Sir, the second question is, you know, with regards to, a follow-up to, you know, your discussion on the growth in this inflationary environment. I mean, sir, correct me if I'm wrong. I mean, in this environment you mentioned like, now the prices are increasing and there has been some shortages. It is natural to assume that at least in the short term there will be, you know, the ASP growth will be higher and, you know, that would benefit our growth and our margins as well. You know, especially on consumer businesses and all. But you mentioned that you are tentative about the growth sustaining unlike, you know, what happened in COVID situation.
Sir, like at least in the short term, can I expect any uptick in terms of growth and that could taper off in the medium term? You know, how do you think about it, if you can just, you know, elaborate on that?
Hitaindra, sorry, I think I haven't communicated that rightly. We haven't said we are worried about the growth. We are positive about the growth, and we think this ASP increase, the price increase, is going to be a good tailwind for the business. The classic case is what you have seen as part of the Q4 numbers. What I was clarifying was we may not see a margin uptick vis-a-vis the comparison was with COVID. Because in COVID, we also had, while on one hand shortage, on the other hand, higher demand enabled us as a distributor for us to make more money. That situation, at least in the short term, we don't foresee. That was the point.
Thank you. Hitaindra, I'll request you to come back for a follow-up question. Participants, kindly limit yourself to two questions per participant. Next question is from the line of Nirban Mehta from UniCNS. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi. Thank you for the opportunity. My first question is on Arena. We mentioned we had some exit losses also in Q4, and earlier also we've mentioned that we would have these kind of losses. Going forward, how do you see Arena panning out? We've also taken some impairments. Secondly, how much investment is there in the balance sheet related to Arena? Only the INR 8 million that is left?
Yes.
Let me just give a perspective on Arena, how we see going forward. If you see what we've done over the last few quarters, we exited from the Lira phone business. We also exited from the other Lira mixed business, and we should have exited from all of these by the end of this fiscal year. Starting next year, our focus will be primarily on IT, which is PC servers, and of course, cloud as well. There is a good cloud business that's evolving in Arena. In that sense, if I look at these businesses, we're positive and they are largely US dollar-based business. The problem, of course, in Turkey is the conditions continue to be challenging. While the inflation has gone down, the interest rates are going down.
Given the Middle East crisis and the West Asia crisis, we do see a softening of demand further in Turkey. The conditions are not going to be less challenging. We'll have to do our best, and we have a smaller size, cleaner US dollar-focused business. Krishnan, you want to add color on balance sheet?
Yeah. See, this impairment, we have explained the rationale. It is more to do with what we saw in the last few quarters. There have been continuous losses. The business performance is not in line with what we had expected. The economic situation, as Hari said, continues to be challenging in that market and accentuated by the recent Middle East war and the oil price increase. We have to do what we can do. We have been exiting from the businesses that are not attractive, which depends on the local currency for borrowing, where the interest rates are still at about 42%, 45%. Those actions are taken.
Since there is no clarity in terms of an immediate turnaround, I think it's important we need to take a critical view about the investment that gets carried in the books and hence the impairment we have taken. Like you said, we still have about INR 8 million in the books. Since it's a listed company, as we speak now, the market value is about $75 million. If there are any significant corrections, it may call for the investment of current, I mean, book value also. Which we will take a view as we close every quarter, but the significant part of it had been taken in the current quarter.
Got it, sir. Going forward, since we have only the USD business left, do we see these losses coming down? I mean, my question is, a lot of this loss in this quarter is because of the exit costs or do we see continuing loss of USD business also?
There is a business loss. There are also some one-offs on account of exits. The business-related loss, while, I mean, not that, even the IT business makes good profit. I mean, really the environment is difficult. You can see that, I mean, between last year and current year, the business is down by half, and majorly because of our own conscious call, what was $1 billion is now $500 million . We expect this loss to continue. The quantum would keep coming down. Initially, our expectation was maybe towards the end of the current year, we will see profits. I think next year we will see loss, but maybe at a reduced level. The real turnaround in terms of profitability we expect in the subsequent year.
Got it, sir. My second question is on the TSG business. Earlier we've mentioned about some competition, but we've, you know, won large deals and we are doing good on that part. How do you see this space evolving now? How is the competition and how do you foresee it for the next one, two years?
See, TSG has many dimensions, Nirban. One is obviously the on-prem servers that we sell to enterprise and government customers with the big brands. Second is the data center, where you have neo cloud operators jumping into the picture. There is also an evolution of other kinds of data centers, we call it the edge DCs and AI factories, et cetera. Clearly, the data center part is a new business. The existing business, we continue to have competition from existing distribution players. In the neo cloud and the data center, we are also new to the picture and we are actually, I would say, doing better than a lot of our competitors.
It's a matter of like what Krishnan said, getting the right deals with the right ROCE and the right risk levels, et cetera. We see the data center part of the business is the one that will be a huge upside and getting our strategy around it. First is obviously the hardware. You have opportunities to work on power systems, cooling system, adjacencies. There's an opportunity to work on fulfilling the capacity of these data centers for colocation and managed services. There are many opportunities around the data center area, and right now we are constructing a plan on how to go after it, which part of it makes sense and how to invest around it. That will be our work around in the next few quarters.
Got it, sir. Thank you, and all the best.
Thank you.
Thank you. Participants, kindly limit yourself to two questions per participant. Next question is from the line of Sahil Doshi from Thinqwise. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity. Just firstly, just wanted some clarity again on the Turkey and the Arena business. Essentially this quarter, what number have you seen in terms of revenue? Is that the new normal base, or we should see further decline from here? In terms of factoring also, would this stabilize at this? That's my first question. Second question was related to the impact of the war, the Middle East impact. You've stated in the press release that we did see some softening in March. Do we think some further impact in this quarter to play out, or you don't really any expect any material impact because of the same?
See, Arena, the current revenue is the new normal. We hope the current factoring will be the new normal. We are working towards it, and we will do whatever it takes. The banking environment in that world is not easy, so I don't want to commit anything here. Middle East impact has been there for one month. Incidentally, that one month is our peak month for the year. I mean, it did have an impact in terms of lower revenue and accordingly the lower gross margin and incremental costs. This is what has impacted our profitability for the month of March. As Hari has mentioned upfront, we think the situation will continue for maybe Q1 to an extent in Q2.
All depends on how things gets resolved, and life coming back to normalcy, it's going to take some time.
Just to add, the trajectory seems similar compared to March. It's not getting worse or it's not getting better in this quarter.
Sure. That helps. Secondly, on the cost structure, Krishnan sir, you did call out the excess, you know, the increased expenses because of investments as well as the impact of the rupee on employee cost to an extent. Would it be possible to, you know, try and quantify how much is this, which is, A, front-loaded or something of that sort? Where do we expect at what levels in the following years? Because in the absence of improvement in gross margin, large part of the growth seems to be eaten away by this investment. I'm just trying to understand how should we think about, you know, the sustainable profitable number in that sense.
Good question, Sahil. I think we had already mentioned this. The OpEx, and more particularly because we want to create required capabilities in the technology space in the SSG business, is going to be more for some time. That need to be looked at more as an investment than as part of the regular, I mean, cost of doing the business. That elevated OpEx for next couple of quarters, maybe one or two years, would continue is our expectation. Forex-related thing may not happen. The AR provision, incremental AR provision may not happen. Incremental insurance or transportation cost on account of ME-related challenge, that may not happen. All those will get normalized in due course.
The capability building technology investment, in our view, we should not, we should not be conservative, miss this opportunity, and this investment will continue. How should we see the profitability? See, in our view, we should be able to maintain our operating profit. We should be able to maintain our return on capital employed quite strongly. That we are confident. That's one on account of the growth in the rest of the business. While SSG, there is a capability building cost which is there. For some time, the profitability could be subdued, but over a medium to long time, you will see SSG profitability being quite interesting. Operating profit and return on capital employed are the two metric.
In our view, outside of Arena, about 2.2%, 2.3%, 2.4% is what we expect as EBITDA subject to whatever is the composition of the large deal. We are quite confident in terms of the return on capital employed being maintained above 18%. As we speak now, it's closer to, I mean, it's closer to 20%. These two are the important metrics, Sahil.
Sure. That really helps. Thank you so much for your, you know, detailed answer. Thank you.
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Amit Khetan from Laburnum Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. My first question is on the Middle East business. What is the sort of inventory risk we have here? Is this fully covered by insurance? Are they distributed across multiple locations?
It is. You have asked a very interesting question. This is something which we would want to explain this clearly. We normally take insurance policies for whatever risk that we foresee, all insurable risks. Similarly, we have taken war insurance for, I mean, as part of our policy. As the war started, the insurance companies joined together with seven days' notice removed this risk coverage, and it was an unilateral decision. We had to manage. We did manage in the form of getting some additional cover from other insurance companies. Also, we did transfer of the thing, identification of new warehouses in the same location. Moved some part of the stocks from one place to the other in order to avoid open coverage.
There are a lot of things that had happened. I mean, full kudos to the team, logistics team there, in spite of the missiles going all around the place, the same place. We had managed it well. As we speak now, we think we have the proper coverage, and we don't foresee a challenge. In between the war period, yes, there was some increased tension.
Understood. Understood. My second question is, I think in the SSG segment, in the previous quarters, you've called out gross margins being around 5%-6%. If you could give some rough sense of how these gross margins differ between the different subsegments of, you know, cloud software and cybersecurity. Overall for the segment, how do you see margins evolving over the medium term, the gross margins?
Let me attempt the first part. It's harder to give a split on this, but the overall SSG segment, we are expecting and tracking above 5.5% gross margin. This can only get better as we get more into professional services. The cloud, see the normal work that we do on cloud security and software is resell. There will continue to be pressure on just the resell portion of the business. As we do more and more professional services, that'll create more stickiness and more additional gross margins. Harder to give a split between the 3%. Over a period of time going forward, we would like to maintain between 5.5% and 6% is our intent and plan, we are tracking so far.
Understood. Thank you.
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Deepak Lalwani from Unifi Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi, sir. Sir, could you Krishnan, sir, could you please help me triangulate three numbers? Number one is INR 467 crores of profit that you have, you know, reported in the PPT. Point number two, sir, is the reported profit which shows in the financial disclosures of, you know, INR 281 crores. Third is the number which, you know, we have reported post-minority at INR 391. Can you please help me triangulate all these three numbers, sir?
Okay. You put a very difficult question on me. INR 467 crores. Okay. INR 467 crores does not include Arena-related impairment, which is classified in the financials as an exceptional expense. I'll tell you the logic. If you recollect same quarter last year, we have had an upside in the form of Paynet sale. That was again classified as an exceptional income. This time it is an exceptional expense. If you go back to all of our, all of our decks and the explanations, we haven't included that as part of our reported pack because it was completely a one-off on the positive side. Similarly, we have eliminated the impairment, I mean, impairment loss from this, and that leaves us to INR 467 crores.
This INR 391 crores is including Arena impairment, because the impairment amount is about INR 75 crores for Redington . INR 281 crore. Where do you see this INR 281 crore? Are you talking about INR 287 crore?
Yes, sir. Sorry
as their profit for the quarter?
Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Sorry, INR 287 crore. Yes.
That is before minority interest. That became INR 391 crores because a part of the loss that we have taken in Arena that owes to the rest of the shareholders of Arena. If you adjust for it, the INR 287 crores becomes INR 391 crores.
Okay, sir. I'll probably take the maths from you once again offline. Krishnan, sir, could you just also call out that, you know, a year in the Turkey we had the INR 20 million receivable, of which we had taken INR 8 million. The INR 12 million was still at exposure. Could you speak a little bit about that INR 12 million there, and if there is any need for creating provisions on that, on that bucket?
As we speak now, no. There are some collections. Definitely the pace of collections could be better. We don't foresee any need for any additional provision at this point in time. We are quite okay. We can be better in terms of collection.
Understood. Just the final thing is, could you call out, given the wide range of, you know, revenues, and verticals across the Middle East, as a cluster, Saudi, GCC and the others, could you just call out how you're looking at the demand environment in 2027, probably vertical-wise and region-wise, if you can, please?
Okay. I will try and answer that, Deepak. Let me go. There are four geographies in Middle East Africa, four clusters we call them. One is UAE, one is KSA, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, GCCL, which has some of the GCC countries like Iraq, Kuwait, there's also the Levant countries, and the fourth cluster is Africa. The UAE cluster is the biggest and has seen the most impact due to the West Asia crisis. That's where we see good recovery once the West Asia crisis is out of the way. It was growing at around 20%, if you remember the last year or the previous year. Now within that, let's talk about the verticals.
Actually, all business units are firing there, starting with SSG and TSG, Software and Technology Solutions, followed by mobility, followed by PC demand short term because of the component shortage. The next would be GCCL, where there is a big opportunity with our focus on individual countries there. Surprisingly, despite the West Asia crisis, that area we have still seen growth, good growth, and that's probably a combination of some virgin territory that we've not been playing in. The SSG business was quite raw, and it has improved all of that. We saw through March and even as we speak, we can see good demand there. The upsides there are on SSG and TSG, the mobility in that part of the region is also doing well. That's the second.
Africa is the third. Africa has been doing considerably well. This year has been a very good year for us in Africa. Again, the star performers there are SSG and TSG. In the past, both on PCs and phones, we've been quite flattish because of arbitrage logistics that we compete with unorganized players. Fourth is Saudi Arabia. We talked about Saudi having a reprioritization by the government on investments, initiatives, et cetera, which actually created problems on growth. If you remember, year before last we were two years in a row we were growing at about 25%-30%.
The last few quarters have been challenged, and we expect some of that to continue because Saudi as a country is trying to juggle with all the different initiatives, priorities, Vision 2030, and really, what are the focus priorities. As we look at the IT part of the business, we do see a little bit of a softer demand in Saudi. We are trying to do best to retain our market share, which we have done. That's the order. Is GCCL and Africa we see continued growth. UAE will depend on how fast we recover from the crisis. Saudi will take some more time once we understand the IT priorities.
Understood. Some of the smaller countries like Qatar and Bahrain, where do you really classify them? As a part of GCCL or UAE?
GCCL.
GCCL. Understood. Those smaller territories are also where we've been gaining a lot of share is helping us, right?
That's correct. Also some of the Levant countries, yeah.
If I can give the growth percentage, it could be even more clear. UAE for the full year we grew at 22%. For the quarter we grew at 6%. As Hari said, this is mainly on account of the March impact, the Middle East war. GCCL for the full year we grew at 33%, full year. For the quarter we grew at 51% in spite of the war, which is the market share that he talked about. In KSA for the full year the growth was 5%, subdued growth. For the quarter it's a degrowth of 12%. It's on account of the Middle East war in March. Africa for the full year the growth is 13%. For the quarter it is 26%. That's quite strong.
Understood, sir. Thank you and all the best.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, we will take that as our last question. I will now hand the conference over to the management for closing comments.
Thank you so much for all your questions. Just wanted to emphasize that we feel we have really weathered through a very good quarter despite all the challenges we've had, and kudos to the team, the brands we work with and the partners. In terms of Q1, Q1 is normally a lower seasonality quarter for us, we are committed and we want to definitely sustain good momentum. Having said that, it is the lowest seasonality quarter for Redington normally, we'll do our best. Thank you. Look forward.
Thank you very much. On behalf of Redington Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.