Affle 3i Limited (AFFLE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to Affle 3i Limited Q4 and FY '25 Earnings Conference Call, hosted by DAM Capital. [Operator Instructions] Please note this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Anmol Garg from DAM Capital. Thank you, and over to you, sir.

Thank you, Manav. Good morning, everyone. On behalf of DAM Capital, we welcome you all to Q4 and 12-month FY '25 Conference Call of Affle 3i Limited. I take this opportunity to welcome the management of Affle 3i Limited, represented by Mr. Anuj Khanna Sohum, who is the Chairperson, MD and the CEO of the company; and Mr. Kapil Bhutani, who is the Chief Financial Officer of the company. So before we begin the discussion, I would like to remind you that some of the statements made in today's conference call may be forward-looking in nature and may involve some risks and uncertainties. Kindly refer to the Slide 26 of the company's earnings presentation for a detailed disclaimer. I'll now hand over the call to Mr. Anuj Khanna Sohum for his opening remarks. Thank you, and over to you, Anuj.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the call today. I trust all of you are keeping in good health. It is with immense pride that on April 5, 2025, Affle stepped into its third decade of transformational growth as Affle 3i Limited. This represents our forward-looking vision anchored on 3 core pillars of innovation, impact and intelligence. Our Affle 3i strategy is powered by the third 'i', the augmented, authentic, actionable Affle intelligence embedded across our Affle 3i consumer platform stack. We envision to scale our impact exponentially, unlocking intelligent use cases for advertisers and expand our addressable market multiple times, while achieving hyper-contextual personalization for consumers and enhanced productivity for our teams. Over the last 7 years, since we filed our DRHP in 2018, we have achieved over 13x growth in both topline and profitability and have delivered remarkable value creation for all our stakeholders. In FY 2025, we achieved revenue growth of 23% year-on-year, PAT growth of 28.5% year-on-year. And our CPCU revenue increased by 28.3% year-on-year. As global digital spend continues to rise, the shift towards performance-centric advertising is becoming even more pronounced, unlocking robust growth opportunity across all our key verticals and markets. With a solid foundation of over 2 decades behind us, we are aiming for 20% plus growth in FY 2026, and we will pursue a midterm 10x growth target. In Q4 FY 2025, we exceeded our performance target and achieved our highest quarterly revenue run rates, highest EBITDA, PAT and CPCU conversions till date. We delivered revenues of INR 6,023 million, a growth of 19% year-on-year. Our focused execution on higher productivity and continuous innovation enabled us to achieve highest ever EBITDA of INR 1,340 million and a record 289 basis points EBITDA margin expansion on a year-on-year basis. We also achieved highest ever PAT of INR 1,031 million, a growth of 17.8% year-on-year. Our CPCU business delivered 104 million conversions at a CPCU rate of INR 57.8, and we earned CPCU revenues of INR 6,007 million, an increase of 19.2% year-on-year. It must be noted that Q3 is generally the highest quarter for advertising budgets and Q4 typically sees a sequential dip of between 5% to 10% after the peak of the festive quarter. However, in Q4 FY 2024, we had an atypical quarter. We beat the seasonality trend for the first time. Now viewed in this context of seasonality and atypical Q4 FY 2024, India and global emerging markets were resilient in Q4 FY 2025 and on an adjusted basis contributed 71.1% of our revenues in Q4 FY '25, representing 15.9% year-on-year growth versus the atypical Q4 of FY 2024. Our adjusted performance trend is along the sustainable 20% year-on-year growth trajectory across India and global emerging markets. In Q4 FY 2025, we once again managed to beat the overall seasonality trend, and our overall performance was achieved with the outperformance in developed markets. On an adjusted basis, our developed markets outperformed and achieved 9.7% sequential growth in Q4 and contributed 28.9% of our revenues in Q4 '25, representing 27.3% year-on-year growth. Our overall growth is accelerated, particularly through our aggressive sales efforts across all regions, resulting in consistent addition of new accounts and logos. Our consistent trajectory highlights the strength of our business model and the expanding relevance of our platforms as we penetrate deeper across high-growth verticals. We are unlocking new avenues of expansion across all markets and strengthening our position as a trusted results-driven partner, operating locally across all key regions and closely aligned with the evolving needs of digital advertisers. We remain committed to investing in the next-generation technologies that enhance the efficiency, efficacy of conversion-driven marketing, while fortifying our AI-powered consumer platform stacks. We are proud to have recently received a new patent grant in both U.S. and India, marking our 13th patent grant to date, further enhancing our comprehensive Tech IP portfolio. The patent titled Method and System for Application Installation and Detection of Fraud in Advertisement augments our fraud detection capabilities, underscores our dedication to delivering transparent, high-impact user conversions for advertisers globally. Additionally, we received another patent grant in India, which was already granted to us in the U.S. before for Method and System for Application Installation and Interaction During a Podcast. This quarter, we have included 3 customer-approved case studies in our presentation. The first case study highlights our unique AI-powered capabilities in scaling the acquisition of high lifetime value premium iOS users. The second case study highlights our success in making urban mobility more efficient in developed markets with use of hyper-relevant automated creative strategy to achieve high ROI. And the third case study focuses on the e-commerce and shopping vertical, enabling deep funnel conversions focused on repeat purchases in global emerging markets. Affle continues to be recognized as a tech thought leader in the industry, and we became the first company to present 100 live AI agents at the Bombay Stock Exchange on 8th April 2025, and we registered the adjudicated records for both the Asia and the India Book of Records. Further, our platform was recognized as a top growth partner for both Android and iOS across 10 categories and a top ROI-driving partner in Singular's ROI Index 2025, as well as we won multiple awards at e4m MarTech and at ET BrandEquity DigiPlus Awards. Lastly, and also as discussed last quarter, to strengthen our governance, we have been onboarding new independent directors progressively since last year as part of the planned transition for the directors completing their term in 2025. This process continued in the current Board meeting with an approval to appoint 2 new independent directors. And thus, we have a total of 5 new independent directors added in the recent times. We remain steadfast in our commitment to uphold best-in-class governance practices and ensuring a strong, diverse and independent Board to guide our continued growth and the Affle 3i vision. With that, I now hand over the discussion to our CFO, Kapil Bhutani, to discuss the financials. Thank you, and over to you, Kapil.

Thank you, Anuj. Good morning, and hope all of you are keeping safe and well. We concluded financial year 2025 on a strong note, delivering an all-around performance with a robust growth in all 4 quarters. For the full year, on a consolidated basis, we achieved revenue of INR 22,663 million, representing 23.0% year-on-year increase. This was driven by broad-based momentum across key industry verticals across both India and international markets. In financial year 2025, our EBITDA stood at INR 4,832 million, registering 34.2% year-on-year growth with a margin of 21.3%. It demonstrated our combined -- continued focus on profitable and efficient growth. We achieved operating cash flow of INR 4,260 million, registering a strong 62.4% year-on-year growth. This significant increase reflects our strong operational execution and sustained focus on cash generation. We recorded PAT for the financial year 2025 at INR 3,819 million, an increase of 28.5% on a year-on-year basis despite an increase in our ETR. Speaking on quarter 4, on a consolidated basis, revenue stood at INR 6,023 million to register a robust year-on-year growth of 19%. This quarter, while we witnessed usual seasonality in India and emerging market combined, we maintained our India revenue run rate broadly at par with what we achieved in quarter 3 on both stand-alone basis and on adjusted basis. We recorded EBITDA of INR 1,340 million, an increase by a robust 36.7% year-on-year and 2% quarter-on-quarter. Our EBITDA margin improved to 22.2% of the revenues, up from 19.4% margin in quarter 4 last year. Coming to OpEx. For the quarter, our inventory and data cost was 60.6%, showing a marginal improvement over quarter 4 last year, driven by operational efficiencies. Our employee cost increased by 1.3% sequentially, but declined 2.9% year-on-year. This was driven primarily by investment in past investments in the integrated teams and strategies as well as adoption of intelligent automation and AI-supported workflows. These measures have contributed to more scalable operations and helped normalize human costs. Our expenses stood at 7.5% of our revenues and declined by INR 44.7 million on a quarter-on-quarter basis. This was primarily driven by higher business promotion activities in quarter 3, which saw a natural trending in this quarter. We achieved profit before tax of INR 1,239 million during the quarter, an increase of 23.7% year-on-year. Our profit after tax stood at INR 1,031 million, marking an increase of 17.8% year-on-year and 2.8% on quarter-on-quarter. Our PAT margin improved to 16.6% of the total revenues, up from 16.4% in Q4 last year. We continue to prioritize efficient working capital management. And as such, there was no material change in our collection risk. Building on our proven track record of innovation and impactful execution, strengthened by our strategic initiatives and robust financial position, we remain confident in our ability to capitalize on the emerging market opportunities. We are well positioned to sustain our strong business momentum through FY '26 and beyond. With this, I will end the presentation. Let's open the floor for questions.

[Operator Instructions] We have our first question from the line of Anmol Garg from DAM Capital.

A couple of questions. Firstly, Anuj, it's impressive to see that in a seasonally weak quarter, we have maintained similar revenue run rate as last quarter. So I wanted to understand that what has led to the strong growth in the developed markets during the quarter. And secondly, you said that we can do 20% plus growth in FY '26 as well. So would this be again more accelerated by developed markets? Or do you think that both India and developed markets will grow in line?

Thanks, Anmol, for your question. I think I did highlight in my commentary that this is definitely something like -- it's atypical for a company focused on advertising to do at par or better in Q4 versus Q3. Now we believe that our performance across India, global emerging markets have been in line with the expectations. So there is some seasonality effect for sure. I mean, Diwali, New Year, Christmas, all of that in October, November, December, definitely gives a boost to the consumer sentiment spending, and therefore, the advertisers target a lot more budgets there. But we are also not -- we know that, that is coming. So as an aggressive company, we are always trying to beat that trend. Now in a 20-year history, the only time we managed to beat that was in FY '24. This year, what we saw is that we were actually not expecting to beat it, but we were obviously seeing some very positive trends of the momentum that we had built last year in terms of pushing for greater sales and greater opportunities in the North America region and developed markets in general. And we saw that momentum carry us through, not only with existing customers, but also in terms of winning new customers and continuing the growth momentum. And of course, the base in developed markets is relatively smaller for us. So it was easier to tide over the pullback effect of the seasonality. Now this is just one quarter. But when I say we look at it on an adjusted basis, India, global emerging markets, developed markets, and we try and understand our trends normalizing it to any anomalies or atypical behavior in the last year, we see that there is a consistent pattern that we can absolutely sustainably aim for 20% growth in FY '26 and not calibrating it one way or the other in favor of -- more in favor of developed markets or India, emerging markets. We believe that in all our regions and verticals, we will be pushing for this kind of growth across the organization. And our plans and budgets for FY '26 are made with that thesis in mind. So I don't want to balance in favor of one or the other. We want to see broad-based growth, and we are working hard towards that. We believe we can achieve it.

Understood. Anuj, just to clarify, this 20% growth is organic, right?

Yes. We are -- I mean, we may consider selective and carefully picked acquisition targets through this year, but what we are talking about right now is organic.

Understood. And my second question is for Kapil. I wanted to understand that for FY '25, we have seen a lot of rationalization in our employee expenses. Now going ahead, do you think that we have still a tailwind from employee expenses or we can get some leverage from the data and inventory cost as well?

So as said in the previous calls also, we maintain that our expenses in FY '24 were higher because of the investment in the human resource cost, and we have drawn efficiencies in the current year. Having said that, we also have been maintaining that increase in human cost would be like a step ladder, right, investing at times and then leveraging the efficiencies. So yes, that is -- in the current year, we don't feel like that there will be a steep increase in the human resource cost. We'll maintain the current level of expenses.

So, Kapil, would that mean that margins should be flattish for the year?

So we have been maintaining that we will be pushing for EBITDA margins increase a few basis points every year.

We have our next question from the line of Deep Shah from B&K Securities.

Sir, the patents that we've announced, so if you could just help us explain a bit better on those. So we already had an mFaas platform, and this one is also to do with some of the audit checks or the fraud checks. So if you can help me understand better what is this and how is it different, how does it help us, that would be useful.

Sure. Well, that's a great question. See when we built our technology roadmaps, we always ring fence it with patents and protection of our IP, right? So you rightly pointed out, we have the mFaas platform, which is our tool that is doing predictive analytics to catch any fraudulent behavior in the entire ecosystem. And we intend to do that rather diligently throughout our history. We have been always working on that dimension. Now this is an important aspect of technology. And, therefore, many, many years ago, we had filed the patents to protect our IP in this area. And typically, the patent process, the granting of the patents from filing to all the checks and balances that it goes through, it takes several years for a patent to be granted, especially in the U.S. office and also in the India office, the patent office. So having won those patents now is a validation of the fact that, a, we have competitive moat. We have differentiated technology. We were early movers here. We were the first ones to conceptualize these aspects of tech innovation. And, therefore, winning the patent in the U.S. and the India market, 2 very important markets strategically for us, is a very important validation and also strengthening our intellectual property portfolio that we have. Does it mean that we will suddenly start making more revenues or whether we'll now start hiring lawyers and start charging all the ecosystem to say, hey, we had this patent and start giving us royalties. I think it is premature to take that dimension at the moment. But I think it is very important to know that we have a very robust patent portfolio, about 36 unique patents, which hopefully will give us protection across various jurisdictions, and close to 45-plus patents across different jurisdictions. But in terms of the unique patents, we have got 13 granted already, 36 in total filed And it should build confidence about our -- of our investors that these are all real innovations, which are creating real intellectual property moat for the company. I hope that answers the question, and it is just the timing of it. So when the conceptualization of the roadmap happens, there are a few dimensions to look at. There is product development. There is also intellectual property moat development with patents being an important tool in that.

Sir, generally, I don't know if -- maybe if you didn't give a quantifiable answer here, but generally, in your experience, what has been that duration between, say, reconceptualizing something to a patent being granted to be able to monetize it in a way that puts us in a much superior position, like if you could maybe quantify this, if it's possible?

It is not something to be quantified. It is actually all working in tandem at all points in time. So while the product is there and the innovation is there, of course, the market and the customers recognize that, right, because they see that, okay, no other competitor is supposedly bringing these kind of tools or capabilities or demonstrating it to the customers. So you start winning business and monetization advantage straight away. You start building a reputation for yourself straight away. Now filing a patent doesn't necessarily mean that you will get it, right? So to get it eventually validates it and strengthens the market thought leadership position for the company, and that wins confidence of customers and their ability to trust us with their data, with their business, knowing that this is an honorable stakeholder in this ecosystem. And to the extent that this ecosystem has any areas that need to be cleaned up, then Affle and its technology as a responsible citizen in this ecosystem is bringing honor and appropriateness to how we conduct ourselves. Now this will also help us as we go along in areas of data privacy or in AI. So building trust over 2 decades and building thought leadership with intellectual property and consistent innovation is what we are demonstrating. So how do I quantify that? A lot of our revenues here is because customers trust our company. Why do they trust our company is because of all of these credentials. And, therefore, it's all in tandem, and it is always adding to the strength of the company.

We have our next question from the line of Lokesh Manik from Vallum Capital. Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Lokesh, can you please be a little louder?

Yes. Is it better now?

Yes.

Just a couple of clarifications. One is on the employee expense front, although Kapil did mention it, the efficiencies coming from the previous year investments. Just wanted to understand that, is it a part of the QIP and the preferential issue in the sense that had we not had these money raised, we would have expensed through the P&L rather than creating intangible assets? So the cost efficiencies that we are seeing of about 200 bps would not be maintained. This is just from a view to understand whether this is structural in nature and we can assume employee cost at maybe 10% of sales going forward. That was one. Second was we have observed that revenue from the core verticals, like EFGH, have gone up now from 90%. Today you're saying it is 100%. At the same time, there's been a fall in the non-CPCU revenue. So is there any correlation there? Are they connected?

Thanks, Lokesh, for your questions. Allow me to take them. Regarding employee expense, while Kapil did provide the insight that FY '24 was higher due to the investments being made and the acquisitions being done. And in FY '25, we had already given guidance that we will create strategic integrations and efficiencies across all our business units and making sure that we achieve that outcome. So what you're seeing now, FY '24 versus '25 is an expected part. It has nothing to do with the QIP or preference issue or going through P&L or anything else. It is -- it was supposed to happen, it would have happened independent of any QIP or anything like that. Now also, I would like to mention that we are an organization that is an asset-light tech platform, scalable system organization. And in terms of using technology and technology automation for all our operations around the world is absolutely important criteria for all the management of the organization. So using augmented, authentic, actionable intelligence, automation, embedding it across every role and every function of the company is something that we do with a lot of energy and focus, which will continue to see this kind of efficiencies unfolding. So we are talking about 20% growth in terms of our business, in terms of revenues and so on, but we are also saying that our costs will not increase in the same proportion because we don't need to have 20% more workforce in order to make 20% more revenue. It's a tech platform-based organization with a lot of automation backing it up. And this will continue to yield greater efficiencies on the bottom line as we go along. Regarding your question on EFGH and the non-CPCU business, since many years ago, even pre-IPO roadshows, I've always maintained that the non-CPCU business is waiting to become CPCU business. right? So the non-CPCU business is now increasingly becoming CPCU business because those customers that were working with us on non-CPCU basis, we've gone back to them and said, look, this is our main line of business, and we want you here. Even if somebody is doing, let's say, branding campaigns, we are still going to them and saying, let's make it more ROI-oriented, more performance-oriented and measurable. To the extent that we have been one of the first people in the market, especially in the U.S. and also in India and other emerging markets, to bring performance-linked, ROI-linked CTV advertising, connecting it to households, looking at connected devices with a unique perspective, right? So I think the emphasis here is strategic in nature and having one clear sort of CPCU business, which is a consistent business. So any acquisitions that we are doing, anything that we are doing in our business, we are doubling down, tripling down on this business. We see a long, long runway for consistent growth here and a very large addressable market for many years to come. So like we're not trying to diversify or we're not trying to find another segment. We are saying, look, we are already diversified in the sense that the CPCU business across industry verticals, across geographies. So we are delivering broad-based growth and possibilities, but the CPCU business is where we are anchored.

Just last one, if I could squeeze in one. Netflix is talking about opening up their platform for performance advertising -- platform advertising in general. We've done something similar with Amazon in Amazon India here. So are you targeting that account actively or will this be a competitive...

See, this is a very strong indicator of confidence that established businesses, content platforms like Netflix, where they have paying subscribers. After they have achieved a certain level of growth, they realize that the only way to get long-term consistent growth on their user numbers and revenues is to unlock the advertising-based business model, which essentially means that instead of the user paying, let the user enjoy some content, but instead get an ad-funded model. This is, again, proving the robustness and the long-term resilience of our business model. Netflix to us in this scenario would be a publisher. It would be a partner with whom we'll be able to work with to say that, hey, we have a lot of advertisers, 75% of our revenue is direct from advertisers. And for those advertisers, maybe our platform could be buying certain impressions or clicks on Netflix by showing ads of our advertisers to the users of Netflix. So the Netflix would become a form of a publisher or an inventory source, which we can work with either directly by partnering with them or through other intermediaries in the ecosystem. So we see this as a positive dimension where we are going to see more unique inventory coming into the market and more possibilities to do consumer engagement to drive conversions. So this is actually all rather positive, and we will cross the bridge one step at a time.

Understood. But are we in any discussions with them?

I think it's too early to comment. It would be fair to say that it will be a natural course of business, either they will reach out to us or we are already in discussions directly or it is -- as long as they're doing any meaningful activity in the markets where we are present, I'm absolutely sure there will be some form of business.

We have our next question from the line of Vijit Jain from Citigroup.

My first question is on these developments around antitrust ruling on Google. From a broader market perspective, I would really appreciate your thoughts on how do you think this could change the ad industry in general if something comes out of it? That's my first question. And related to the developed markets, I suppose. I know you have a relatively small base in U.S. and it's also very domain-specific, slightly more gaming-centric than other industries in general. So how do you think, let's say, a mild recession scenario in U.S. plays out for you given your exposure to that market? And then I'll just follow up with a quick question with Kapil.

All right. Well, from a regulatory standpoint, antitrust ruling is just one dimension of the kind of rulings that these large walled gardens are needing to deal with. You will see all kinds of clipping of wings, if I may call that, from the regulators to keep a check and balance on some of these large industry players who are dealing with a lot of data, they're dealing with a lot of market share and their practices with respect to competition. I've always maintained that the adtech industry has over-calibrated on the level of spending that the advertisers are doing on the walled gardens and I expect that to become more broad-based in favor of the non-Google, non-Meta and non-walled garden platforms as we go along. And as some of their competitive practices come under check through such rulings and regulations. So I would just keep it to that, and I would let time unfold and tell that. But on a broad basis, I'm very much clued in, and we are watching what's happening. And I think this is all working towards a fair outcome in the longer term for every player in the ecosystem, and eventual beneficiaries would be the consumers and the advertisers. With respect to your question on developed markets, I would like to address it by first and foremost clarifying that Affle is a unique company, different from most other listed adtech companies. Why? Because they are deeply and heavily calibrated on the U.S. market, and they are deeply calibrated on the gaming vertical. If you look at any of the adtech companies historically, even any Indian ones that may have focused on North America as a big market, they become one dimensional: North America, gaming; North America, gaming. All their talent is focused on that. Affle is unique. Affle is deeply focused on global emerging markets, of course, anchored out of the advantages we have derived from India, and therefore, taking those advantages to other emerging markets, be it in Southeast Asia, Latin American markets. So Africa, Middle East and all of these regions, we are taking that advantage and growing. Now those advantages come in very, very competitively handy for us as we entered into developed markets. Now we are broad-based in terms of vertical, right? We are not as heavily calibrated on gaming as the other competitors are who are 80%, 90% gaming companies and now starting to think how should they do e-commerce or non-gaming verticals, whereas Affle has fundamentally been a broad-based focused on verticalization across EFGH categories. Even in the U.S. right now, we are focused on gaming as well as non-gaming verticals for our customers and fintech, e-commerce, and some of the case studies that we keep sharing consistently in our earnings reports already indicative of that. So we are fairly broad-based. Now U.S., as you know, is a very, very large addressable market, and we are clearly very small. So even -- and we are differentiated, right, with our CPCU business model and bringing in certain unique experiences and capabilities from emerging markets. I think it makes us very, very competitive in that market. So given our base is small, the addressable market is very large, I don't think a recession in the U.S., which is, again, speculative. As and when it will happen, we'll navigate it. But when it happens, I think the advertisers, they would be wanting to put their budgets to a CPCU performance ROI-linked business model. And we, with our smaller base, will go and fight out aggressively selling hard to make sure that we continue to grow even in a scenario where it leads to some kind of a recession. So I'm fairly optimistic, and I feel that we are in a very privileged position given the way we have balanced our business across verticals and across geographies.

Got it. Anuj, just a follow-up on the India business. So if I look at the -- I note the seasonality comment, and I can see that in the numbers as well on a Q-o-Q basis. But if I look at the India and EM business on a Y-o-Y basis, in the last 3 quarters, growth has somewhat slowed from -- on a Y-o-Y basis from 25% to 22%, now 16%. So any comments on that? I know you've already guided to 20% plus broad-based growth for FY '26. But what is driving this deceleration in the last 2, 3 quarters?

I wouldn't call it -- I wouldn't see it as a deceleration, frankly. I mean, I'm very, very comfortable with the way our team is executing and the way the market is responding to us across India and emerging markets. And regarding 20%, it's always been consistent in the last few years in terms of our guidance. And even this quarter, 16%, I've already explained that last year, Q4 was higher, and it was atypical for it to be like that. So when we normalize it and adjust it and see what is happening in the market, we are actually finding that our growth trends are sustainable at 20% plus, and we should be anchored on that. And that's why I've given you all of that clarification. And where is it coming from? It's coming from existing customers. We have very good coverage of existing customers. There are also active selling and aggressive selling happening to new customers, opening, unlocking new use cases and innovations that we consistently bring to the market. So, therefore, getting to 20%, I think, is a reasonable and real expectation.

Got it. My last question, just on the other expenses side to Kapil, I guess. Last quarter, I think you did call out 3Q has seasonal business promotion spendings, and I think some of that came off in 4Q. But broadly speaking, if you could talk about what is the steady state for business promotion spend for you as you look ahead? And what that number was for FY '25 because we obviously don't have the annual report yet, if you can share that?

So you can take the current year expense and other income as the normal for us for the full-year basis, not on a quarter-to-quarter basis because seasonality and spending on the events happen at different times. The events and marketing does not happen on a quarterly basis on a same pace. They are spread out in different quarters. Generally, in quarter 3, the marketing spends are higher. And yes, this was called out in the previous call also. And going forward also, we are saying we'll be looking at increasing the spends in the marketing side, but not to the tune of the increase in the revenue.

And so Kapil, if I look at the -- sorry, please go ahead.

I said you should look at the expense items on a full-year basis because the businesses have a seasonality in the spending also.

Right. So, Kapil, when I see the F '24 numbers, right, I think business promotions was about 2.8% of revenue for F '24. Could you share the number for F '25 what this number was? That will give me a sense of how to think about that part?

See, basically, our target is to spend about 3%, 3.5% on the OpEx side and 2% on the lower side for the marketing and promotion expenses, in a broad range of how we plan for it.

We have our next question from the line of Arun Prasath from Avendus Spark.

Anuj, my question continues on this gaming vertical. So ever since we acquired YouAppi, the growth delivered by the EM markets have been higher than the developed -- sorry, developed markets is higher than the EM markets. So this kind of gives us a sense that gaming has played a huge role, which is what you have also acknowledged. But does it also mean that in the emerging markets, the gaming is either not such a big vertical or we are yet to use the full might of the YouAppi platform in the emerging markets, and that gives us some kind of a growth potential going forward? Is it the right way to think about it?

Yes, it is the right way to think about it that in developed markets, the gaming is a much bigger vertical versus in the emerging markets. That is definitely one of the ways to think about it. Having said that, in the developed markets, the non-gaming verticals are also very large addressable markets, and they are underserved because most of the incumbent players have gravitated to gaming because that is such a big vertical there that everybody starts fighting that battle and starts wanting to play that tournament with their best talent and capabilities. And I would say that the non-gaming verticals are underserved and a bit neglected by the incumbent competitors in the developed markets. So when Affle goes into developed markets, we are seeing a better sort of competitive advantage for us when we go into non-gaming verticals. And, of course, with the acquisition of YouAppi, we've got some more strength in gaming with them, and we have integrated that into our core propositions. And we are taking that to market rather aggressively in India, other global emerging markets as well as in developed markets as one sort of integrated proposition focused on gaming. So I wouldn't -- I would leave it to the market forces to define, but I think what I want you and our investors to focus on is that Affle as a platform is verticalized into many, many verticals, classified in EFGH category. Gaming is one of our verticals. It is a very important vertical, and it is the most sort of competitively fought for vertical as far as developed markets are concerned and the incumbent players are concerned, who also are now starting to see how can they go beyond non-gaming and are starting to calibrate their tech stack and algorithms for non-gaming, which I think is an advantage for us because we are naturally addressing it.

Any possibility that what is our exposure to the gaming vertical overall at this point of time?

I think we, at this moment, do not go and break the contribution of the categories of EFGH, but I would say it is fairly balanced. Categories E, F and G are all reasonably balanced. And in category H, which is healthcare, hospitality, we are seeing it's catching up as well. But overall, I would say category E, F and G are all strong and robust sort of categories or verticals for us.

Am I safe to assume gaming will be our largest vertical?

Say that again, please?

Safe to assume that gaming will be our largest vertical among all this?

I think it would be almost at par with category E, which is e-commerce, entertainment, education. And category G would be almost at par with that. I think it will be hard to say. In some quarters, that would -- one would be more than the other, but it is all fairly broad-based and balanced-out. We are not over-calibrating one way or the other, but we are definitely pushing hard. Now things could change as we push harder in developed markets and we could win some really large customers in gaming and numbers could change. I mean, developed markets can create that kind of imbalance potentially. But at the moment, the way we execute, we are having sales teams, which are focused on different customer accounts and verticals. And so we do see a broad-based growth coming along, but it is possible. We may going forward, see some really massive wins and sudden upside, but we will talk about it when that happens.

Secondly, on the business development expense once again. So I'm sure that we are attending all the events globally, and there are only finite number of events. So I'm just curious why our BD expense as a percentage of revenue should be -- continues to be pegged to the revenue? I would assume at some point of time, it will flatten out. Just help us understand how to think about it.

Sure. There are many ways in which business development happens. So events are not only industry events that we attend, but also create industry events of our own in key markets, right, where we work with partners, curate our own events and call certain customers and so on. So the format of business development has evolved from doing 1:1 selling and knocking at people's offices and doing meetings that also happens. But I think the industry has evolved over time to curate events where there are multiple speakers, customers and there is a big -- like there's a forum so that people are looking for either traveling into for that event for a day or 2 and so on and so forth. So industry events is one, doing our own events is another dimension, doing events for a select group of customers, not everything would become like public. So there are private events, and then, there are events, which are industry, everybody knows about it, and then, there are private events that we are doing in smaller forums. So it is something that we would like to peg it closer to the revenue because each -- this is a tool that we give to all our regions and sales heads and the general managers for each of the markets to achieve the revenue, right? We are pushing them to go and sell more and get existing customers, new customers into these events and create the right forums to establish -- not just winning of business, but also establishing thought leadership of what we are doing going forward.

Okay. Understood. My one bookkeeping question to Kapil. Kapil, if you see our net working capital in FY '25 has largely remained flat as compared to '24 despite revenue growing 23 percentage. Is there any one-off or we have to -- we can safely assume that this is a way forward where our working capital requirements will continue to be decreasing on a days basis?

I still hold our old position that we require a 30 days working capital, though we are working at, say, about 10 days working capital at the moment. But yes, our business modeling is at 30 days model, but we continue to exceed our performance on the cash management and client management. And we hope to do so going forward also.

So what happened in '25, where we had some exceptional performance on the working capital side?

So there was -- the debtor days have reduced on certain clients, and we have been able to negotiate better terms with the paying side.

We have our next question from the line of Rahul Jain from Dolat Capital. Yes, Rahul, can you speak a little louder?

Yes. My first question is with web traffic moving away to AI tools instead of mobile desktop browser. Will that impact us in some manner near term?

Sorry, can you clarify, traffic is moving from mobile to?

AI tools.

All right. Well, I think at the moment, if you look at the overall ecosystem, I would say there's a tremendous amount of increase in devices, connected devices expected globally. So today, our reach is over 3 billion connected devices. We are aiming for realistically looking at how that will reach to about 10 billion connected devices over the course of this decade. And we see that there's a huge amount of human traffic increase, right, in terms of amount of time that is being spent online. And that goes to -- of course, went from the browser and search to app stores and apps to now there's another dimension of AI tools-related traffic. Now we are already having quite a number of patents as well as innovative use cases on how our use cases are evolving with intelligent use cases, not only using AI tools to serve our business more efficiently and better, but also to see how we are integrating the experience where you're dealing with a consumer directly, you're dealing with an AI agent of the consumer. For example, I believe that going forward, all of us would have a -- just like you have a personal e-mail ID, you have a professional e-mail ID, similarly you'll have a personal AI agent and you'll have a professional AI agent, which is work related. And we will be dealing with all of these kind of interfaces. One is direct to the consumer, another is dealing with the AI agent of the consumer and making sure that these engagements lead to monetizable conversions eventually because the -- let's assume that the eventual consumer has conversion of or a transaction with an advertiser, has to happen with an eventual consumer. But there is going to be another authenticated AI agent of the consumer who will be making certain decisions. For example, in your household, your fridge might decide to buy groceries based on a certain pattern that you may assign to it. We have use cases that we're building towards that. It's not necessarily an issue of supply or inventory. I think it is an issue of how do we attribute conversions, which may happen from authenticated AI agents acting on behalf of the consumer. And when that is established, I believe that the use cases that we're already envisaging, envisioning, trying and building and testing in our products will keep us in good stead. But the ecosystem is evolving. But if you are just looking at modeling our business, the first thing to model is how many connected devices will increase in the ecosystem, will that lead to more volume and more value of conversions happening online, on mobile. And if the answer to all of that is yes, we believe that we will have an increasing growth rate with advertisers' spends for conversion growing on our platform. And we will be finding a way to make sure that we navigate not only direct-to-consumer conversions, but also driving conversions through their AI agents. And at all points in time, one of the earlier conversations about these fraud detection, identity detection, it is going to be very important because we will also have a lot of fraudulent AI agents and tools out there. So all the IP that we have built around fraud detection and management will become even more relevant. So the need for a tech stack like the Affle 3i consumer platform tech stack will only increase for the ecosystem because the ecosystem will have more complexities to deal with, both on the good use cases where you have not only the human traffic, but authenticated, credible human-assigned agents acting on their behalf, a kind of traffic, but you will also have a lot of fraudulent AI kind of traffic as well, and therefore, a tool and a platform, which is automated to deal with all of these complex scenarios, is going to become even more essential for the advertisers than it is today. So I'm feeling pretty safe about the moat and the relevance of what we are building going forward, and we'll deal with these use cases competently.

Right, right. I understand the potential and all that. Basically, just to slightly clarify if the answer changes accordingly was that as the traffic moved from browser to mobility, similarly, when it moves from within mobility to AI, does the ecosystem on the ad exchange or back end would change? If that does not change, then I can understand your situation. And secondly, on the Optics AI, how much of that we have -- as you explained in your event, how much savings it's bringing on the content creation side? That would be helpful.

Thank you very much for asking those questions again. We think that most of the AI traffic will happen on mobile, okay, at the moment, right? The other devices, other connected devices, wearables or other embedded chips and so on, I think it will still take 5 years to become mainstream. For now, a lot of the AI traffic would still be on mobile, and therefore, the fundamentals of that engagement should be seen as an authenticated AI traffic, on behalf of the consumer, should be treated as no different from the consumer itself. So that's how we see it at the moment. And so I see no major sort of disruption on how we will measure conversions attributed back to that consumer, whether it is through their AI agent or directly by them. I think that conversion attribution will eventually go back to the consumer. So I don't see any fundamental change there. With respect to Optics AI, well, we, as a company, have always been receiving creatives from the advertisers, right? So we don't go and start making video ads or we don't start making banner ads. We receive creatives based on the brand assets of the advertisers. And what we do to them is to enhance them, augment them, authenticate them, ensure that those creatives are working -- are being targeted to the right users at the right time. And if we find that some of the creatives are working well in one consumer segment context, but it's not working well in another, then we would work with the advertisers in the past. And the cycle of going back to them, giving them feedback that your creative is not okay, can we have better creative, can be more creative. That has now become automated to the Optics AI. So the brand has to give us very little. And with that, very little that the brand tells us with some of the creatives that they give us, with Optics AI, we can create many, many more creatives that are contextually hyper-personalized to the consumer segments that we are reaching out to, right? So whether it is vernacular personalization or it is other forms of cultural contextual personalization, that is what Optics AI is doing. So there was no cost to us at the beginning. And now when we run Optics AI, again, it is a fairly scaled tech platform and the incremental cost to our tech infrastructure is not dramatic. I mean, we are doing it efficiently, and it is part of doing the business, and the ROI on how we run the conversion linked campaigns justify running it as part of our data and inventory cost. So it is not going to change the dynamics dramatically, but it will help to improve the performance and the value perception of our platform to the advertisers as well as the personalized -- hyper-contextual personalization to consumers will make advertising appear more like engaging content and recommendations to the consumers versus annoying ads.

[Operator Instructions] We have our next participant from the line of Samarth Patel from Equirus Securities.

My first question is how has the mix between new customer acquisition versus retargeting has evolved, especially in like India, emerging market, and developed market this financial year?

Thanks for that question. When we run our business as a consumer platform for driving conversions, we look at each conversion and the value of that conversion. And our goal is to make sure that our advertisers are appreciating the value of the conversion, therefore, paying us. Now typically, the conversion cycle works. Of course, the user might do a first conversion with an advertiser. But essentially, if you look at the case study that we shared, we emphasized today in one of the case studies that we are saying we're looking for high lifetime value consumers conversions for the advertiser. Now what does that mean? When we get a conversion for an advertiser, they would not only say, okay, what was the value of the transaction that happened, what was the conversion. They're seeing what kind of a user, what kind of a consumer has Affle brought to them. If it is an iPhone user, which has a higher lifetime value, the willingness to pay goes up. If it is a higher-value iPhone user, they're also looking at how many repeat transactions can they get from that user to quantify that lifetime value. Now how does Affle earn its money? We are charging per conversion, right? Whether it's the first conversion or the repeat conversion, we are charging for each conversion along the way. And we are going to the advertiser and justifying, hey, look, we brought you this consumer. If it is a first-time conversion, we work out the story in a certain way. If it is a repeat conversion, we're telling you, hey, we are defending because there's such a competitive market and whether it's e-commerce or entertainment. All the consumers are -- they're not loyal to just one app or customer -- advertiser that they work with. They are working with 2 or 3. I'm pretty sure on your device, you are having all the e-commerce apps, you have all the entertainment apps. So even though you are an existing customer to that advertiser, they are constantly conscious that they may lose you to a competitor. You can buy from an e-commerce site A or a B. So, therefore, we don't create a massive distinction here with respect to balancing it out. And in our case, we have driven close to 400 million conversions in the last financial year, right? Now I would say it's a fair balance of about 50%, 50% when I see it from the advertisers' lens where how many are new conversions versus how many are repeat conversions. But as far as we are concerned as a platform, all of those 400 million conversions, chances are that we have already done some conversion with those users in the previous year or during the course of the year for either an advertiser A or a B. So a lot of it is repeat conversions as far as our platform is concerned, whether it is from one advertiser to another. I hope I have not given you an overly complex answer. But from an advertiser's lens, I would say that in emerging markets, there's still much more pushing for new user acquisition. And in developed markets, I think the balance is a lot of times in favor of repeat engagements of the existing customers. So it depends on the maturity level of the advertiser and how much are they spending for new market share versus defending their existing base of customers.

That is really helpful. My second question is if you can help contextualize the 4Q growth across India, emerging market ex of India and developed markets. And what would you attribute as the biggest driver in each of this region?

You're asking only about Q4 or for the full year?

Yes, yes, for quarter 4.

In Q4, I would say, in developed markets, we saw broad-based growth coming from existing customers, new customers, new user acquisition, repeat. I mean, across the board, it was a good execution and momentum, right? We're carrying through the momentum of what we had done throughout for the last 1.5, 2 years. In emerging markets, I think most of the emerging markets, we saw the seasonality trend, where, hey, the budgets have been -- especially in LatAm, typically, you would find in Brazil and these markets, October, November, December across businesses, not only advertising businesses, across businesses, October, November, December is massive. And then Jan, Feb, March is generally the lowest quarter for the whole year, right? And this is quite consistent in Latin America. In Southeast Asia and in India, we found it more resilient. We could push for at least -- there were seasonality trends, but because we're also selling to new customers and we're also finding more growth, right? We're not just dependent upon the customers that we had in October, November, December. So yes, existing customers would have seen seasonality, but we are pushing for new customer sales, and therefore, getting more. So in India, we were able to neutralize the impact. In other emerging markets, we saw that even selling to new customers in Jan, Feb, March was harder because they just somehow all exhausted by having done a lot in October, November, December or it's just maybe a cultural thing. In developed markets, we saw consistent momentum leading to great growth, beating the seasonality trends. So that's how the results came. And overall, we are happy that we had a second time -- second consecutive year where Q4 is at least at par with Q3. And this is -- as the CEO of the company and as an industry experienced entrepreneur, this is not normal, all right? This is actually very good, but I'm sensitizing you for your modeling going forward. Please always keep the seasonality impact from Q3 to Q4. That is prudent. That's the right thing to do, and that's how we do our business planning. If we beat it, that's great, but we don't expect to beat it generally.

We have a last question for today from the line of Deepak from Sundaram Mutual Funds.

Yes. So I just had one question. So since Affle is a cash-generating company, and right now, we have more than INR 1,300 crores worth of cash in our balance sheet, I just wanted to understand, means, how do we plan to, let's say, utilize this in the next year or in the next 1 or 2 years? Do we expect any kind of buybacks or it would be more linked to any acquisitive opportunity that you might see so that you won't want to save it for those purposes? Just some flavor on the capital deployment.

Thanks, Deepak, for that question. We are an aggressive growth-oriented company, which is looking for sensible, consistent long-term growth, and that's very, very clear to us. Every asset of the company, whether it's an intellectual asset or a financial asset, will be deployed to its fullest capacity to maximize sensible, long-term, profitable cash flow positive growth. I'm super proud that our company -- in my commentary, I only commented on the P&L metrics, but I think my CFO commented also on the cash flow metrics and seeing over 60% growth in cash flow from operations versus previous year is something to be deeply proud of. And I really think that our company is doing exceptionally well, not only with, of course, deploying the cash towards greater growth in the business, but also through the business that we are doing, we are a very disciplined unit about how we generate cash. And I think that is -- it's beyond any accounting standards, like cash is cash, right? I mean there's only one way to report it because it exists. And I think that is super important to drive home. And your question is valid. At the moment, we are looking to deploy every single asset of the company, cash included, towards delivering greater growth because we are on a 10x growth plan in the medium term. And we would be working really hard and making every asset of ours work really hard to achieve that.

As there are no further questions from the participants, I now hand the conference over to the management for closing comments. Over to you, sir.

Well, thank you very much. And this is a very meaningful year for us because it's our first year of the third decade. And the last month was very special. It was the first month of our third decade. And I want to assure you that we have put in a tremendous amount of energy to propel ourselves towards the 10x growth that we are eyeing for in the medium term. And we are strengthening the foundations of the company like never before. We are building greater sense of pride, purpose and ensuring that the entire organization is aligned towards this goal and believing in that every step of the way. So with that, stay tuned, and we look forward to your continued support and to the next earnings call. Thank you.

Thank you very much, sir. On behalf of DAM Capital, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.