Amagi Media Labs Limited (AMAGI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

February 12, 2026

NSEI IN Communication Services Interactive Media and Services earnings 59 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Operator

operator
#1

Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the Amagi Media Labs Limited Q3 and 9 Months FY '26 Earnings Conference Call. 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. [Operator Instructions] Please note that this conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Baskar Subramanian, the Managing Director and CEO, for the opening remarks. Thank you, and over to you, sir.

Baskar Subramanian

executive
#2

Hi, everybody. This is Baskar, Co-Founder, Managing Director and CEO of Amagi. And I have Vijay, our CFO, as well in the same call. We are extremely excited to have you all as part of this today's morning presentation about our first quarterly results post IPO. Thank you very much for joining us. So we would like to start with a small presentation for all of you. If you go to our website, you would see an investor presentation as part of the Investor Relationship website, web link that you would see there. I would urge you to download that, the Q3 one, which we can download there. And we intend to kind of walk you through that from an introduction of the company standpoint. So we'll do that right now. If you look at it -- if you go to Slide #2 of our presentation, I wanted to introduce Amagi. Amagi is a media technology software company, primarily working with TV channels, content creators, studios, news, sports producers across the globe. So that's our primary market that we really work with today. Amagi's fundamental value that we add is to provide a single software platform on cloud infrastructure, which covers what we call glass to glass. starting from the camera screen -- camera to the final screen where consumers watch content, we provide an end-to-end capability for our customers. So this is primarily a B2B, a business-to-business business that we do today. And all of this is running on a public cloud software. And we start going for anywhere from production until the point of viewership of a customer, we pretty much manage all the software on the cloud. That's what we do as a company. And if you look at it, primarily, we simplify the complexity for our customers in terms of running all their operations on a cloud instead of a hardware base of how to look at things, right? Now I'm extremely excited because this is something that we started 10 years back as a journey in terms of building a new cloud vision, and this has kind of come to fruition. In fact, we operated the Super Bowl just about 72 hours back for all of the U.S. was watching content through an Amagi's infrastructure. Super Bowl is like the IPL finals for us, which is the NFL football league in the U.S. that we actually operated. As we speak, Winter Olympics is happening on Amagi's Infrastructure. We do the Grammys. So we continue to do some of the marquee live events and live news content across all of the U.S. today, and we continue to expand this in Europe and in the Asia Pac region as well. So that's the primary work that we do as a company. Going to Slide #3, just to give you context of how we look at our business. We segment our business into 3 units. The first one is called Cloud Modernization. This is essentially -- because this business is all about customers, TV channels who are actually moving their existing on-prem infrastructure, which is all in hardware, data centers, people and real estate to a complete software environment, which is what we do today with a lot of the large TV networks worldwide. So that's our first part of the business, what we call Cloud Modernization. The second part is what we call Streaming Unification, essentially where we enable our customers to distribute their content worldwide. The third part is we enable what's called monetization, essentially enable our customers to make money through advertising. We don't participate in the advertising ecosystem. We are not an ad network, but we enable technologies which allow our customers to connect with ad networks and make money in the process. So our business is always -- this is the way we report our financials as well. You will see it as we move forward on this front. If you go to Slide #4, the biggest -- I think the biggest growth area going forward and the biggest investments we're making as a company is in AI. And I'm sure every company today is transforming, and this is a big transformation happening in the media business as well, right? Media is going through one of the biggest transformation and AI is going to be a big, big lever for that. What we see is the fundamental value for us at Amagi because we are a platform for our customers, we have a significant opportunity to go solve the cost of human cost in terms of productivity improvements that we can provide. And that is going to be the biggest opportunity for us. Amagi is already investing in an end-to-end capability, and we are in discussions with multiple customers. We are design partners and proof of concept starting to happen in our business already. So we are very, very excited about the whole AI opportunity in front of us, and this will be a significant opportunity for us from a TAM standpoint as well going forward. If you look at the market itself, the market that we play today is the television market, where when we talk about TV, we talk about both traditional television transforming as well as the streaming television, which is a big part of what Amagi does today, for example. The biggest tailwind of this business for us is that only 10% of the TV channels have moved to the cloud. All others are in hardware, and there are billions of dollars. If you look at it, almost $16.9 billion of TAM is today sitting a large part in hardware. Only 10% has moved to the cloud, and we see a significant opportunity going forward as the 10% moves towards the 100% over time. And that's the biggest opportunity that we're really following through today. And this would be the biggest tailwind for us as a company going forward, and that's the future that we see for ourselves. If you look at it, our customers are content creators. So what do they do? They take the content, drive this content, and they want to take this content to as many people worldwide. So it's a global business. So they want to take their content globally worldwide. They want to distribute to as many places. Once they distribute it, more viewers watch their content, more advertising or subscription revenue that they can make, which in turn drives more content. This is the flywheel of our customers. And we're extremely fortunate at Amagi that we provide an end-to-end capability for our customers starting from taking their content into our systems till the point of enabling them to make money through the monetization efforts that we provide. If you look at it, these are the Northstar metrics that we track as a company. If you look at the content that's coming into Amagi system, it's continuing to grow. We have 800,000 hours. There is 8 lakh hours of content that's coming into the system which is almost 64% year-on-year growth that we've seen in this whole thing. Which essentially tells you that more content that people -- customers are trusting us with more and more content, which drives the larger part of the business. But a very -- it's a leading indicator fundamentally for us to kind of track internally. We are reaching more places in terms of deliveries that we are delivering today with about 9,000-plus deliveries that we're doing. We are actually getting to distribute in 408 locations and platforms that we actually distribute today worldwide in about 40-plus countries, and we continue to do that. And if you look at the ad impressions that we have delivered, we have delivered almost close to 13 billion impressions over the last quarter, which is almost 60% growth year-on-year. All in all, directionally, the numbers look good for us, and we are very happy with where we are from a number standpoint and what we see going forward as well. So for next slide on Slide #7, I'll ask Vijay, our CFO, to provide a commentary on how the financials existed in this particular quarter and what we see going forward as well.

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#3

Thanks, Baskar. Good morning, everyone. This is Vijay. Like Baskar highlighted, we had some leading sort of indicators that were pretty healthy. Now we are going to talk you through how these manifested in our financials. So I'll start off with revenue, then move to margins and wrap with cash. So on Page 7, if you look at the graphs on the left side, for the first 9 months of FY '26, revenue grew 30% year-over-year to INR 1,109 crores. In Q3, revenue increased 22% to INR 404 crores. We saw pretty much secular broad-based growth across all the 3 segments that Baskar highlighted a few slides back. Just want to highlight a couple of call outs with respect to Q3 growth. One is that the quarter benefits from seasonal strength given holiday advertising flows. And two is on Q3 year-over-year growth due to accounting recognition, revenue from one of our top 5 customers was fully recognized in the first half of FY '26, whereas in FY '25, it was spread across all 4 quarters. Because of this, first half of FY '26 looks stronger, while Q3 and Q4 growth rates will appear softer. This is just a timing impact and does not change our full year revenue and demand, right? So overall, good story on revenue. Turning to the costs on the right side of the page. We've got 3 primary cost buckets: Employee Costs, Communication Costs and other Operating Expenses. Communication Costs primarily reflect cloud infrastructure as our software runs on public cloud platforms and is largely linked to revenue or scales linearly to revenue. Employee and most of the costs are fixed or semi-fixed in total, right? So in total, approximately 2/3 of our cost base does not scale linearly with revenue. This structure kind of allows revenue to grow faster than total cost. So for the first 9 months, if you look at it, our operating costs grew 17% against a 30% revenue growth. And in Q3, costs increased only 14% versus a 22% revenue growth, right? So the key takeaway on this slide is that revenue growth remains strong and broad-based, while costs are growing at roughly half that rate. So that difference, as you all know, is the operating leverage that we see in the business. And you'll see that manifest in some of the margin expansion that we'll highlight in the next slide. If we move on to Page 8. So this page has all the detail on the margins. As we highlighted on the previous slide, operating leverage is clearly translating into bottom line expansion. In Q3, if you look at adjusted EBITDA on the left-hand side, it doubled year-over-year to almost INR 58 crores, with margins expanding to 14.3%. For the first 9 months, EBITDA reached approximately INR 116 crores with margins at about 10.5%, reflecting sort of improved flow-through as revenue scales. At the PAT level, the progression is sort of equally visible. If you look at the right-hand side, Q3 PAT increased to INR 31 crores with margins at about 7.7%. For the 9-month period, PAT was at INR 37 crores. There were some timing and onetime items in the quarter like we discussed earlier, including the seasonal effects. If you normalize for these, we view steady-state EBITDA margins at approximately 10%, which we believe is more sort of representative indicator of the underlying profitability in the quarter. The key takeaway is that we are demonstrating that our growth model is significantly flowing through to operating leverage and is inherently sort of margin accretive, right? If you move on to the next page, let me turn to cash here. This slide sort of walks through the conversion from EBITDA to free cash flow. In Q3, adjusted EBITDA of INR 58 crores translated into an operating cash flow of INR 124 crores and a free cash flow of INR 118 crores after roughly INR 6 crores of CapEx. The conversion in the quarter was supported primarily by improved collections and a little bit of working capital normalization. For the first 9 months, operating cash flow on an underlying basis was INR 47 crores. Reported cash flow is negative INR 76 crores, primarily due to onetime IPO expenses and buyback related to ESOPs in the first half of the year. Free cash flow also was negative INR 96 crores, driven by those same onetime items that I highlighted, which impacted the first half. We ended the quarter with about INR 803 crores of cash and investments on the balance sheet. We went public in Jan, so this balance does not reflect the primary raise that we had in Jan. So to sum it all up, we had strong double-digit growth in revenue backed by expansion in margin, and that pretty much is a wrap on the financial slide. Before I hand it back to the operator, just a reminder that in our IR website under quarterly results, you'll see a shareholder letter, which has detailed sort of Q&A on each of these items, which provides a more comprehensive and holistic update. But in the interim for any live Q&A, I'm going to pass it back to the operator so that we can start queuing up the questions. So operator, back to you.

Operator

operator
#4

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Vivekanand from AMBIT Capital.

Vivekanand Subbaraman

analyst
#5

I have two questions. The first one is on your customer acquisition. You have added 40-plus customers in the last year. And this seems like you have seen some growth acceleration as far as customer count is concerned. What are the factors driving customer addition acceleration during the current quarter? And how should we think about it, say, if one takes a two, three year view on customer addition? That is question one. And the second question is the gross margin that you have in this business, you commented on EBITDA margins, 10% being the number that one should look at as a guiding post. Thanks for that. Just to understand this better, how should we think about the buildup of this 10% coming in from, say, gross margin and other costs?

Baskar Subramanian

executive
#6

Thank you very much for the question. This is Baskar. I will address the first part of your question, primarily in terms of customer addition. Just to give you context, right? Again, our business is largely a vertical market business, essentially working with only the media and entertainment customers worldwide. So it's a fairly concentrated set of customer list that we really go after fundamentally. I would like to highlight a couple of things that you need to look at, right? One is if you look at it, the market transformation is starting to happen. I talked about cloud modernization, and we are seeing acceleration of that trend line of customers wanting to move to the cloud. I think that's a clear trend line that's driving some of the customer acquisitions that you are starting to see, number one. Number two, if you look at it is, obviously, streaming has become larger. We are starting to see outside of the U.S., starting to see progressions, be it in Latin America, we're seeing it in Europe and in Asia as well as we're starting to see acceleration of customers wanting to move to streaming platforms and actually starting to build their own streaming capabilities from a business standpoint. That's the second biggest leverage that we see from a market standpoint. And all of this, if you look at from an Amagi standpoint, if you look at it, our sales cost in the S&M is pretty much consistent. So we are not really dramatically -- it's not unlike a horizontal SaaS businesses. Amagi's business is a vertical business, which essentially means with the same amount of sales teams, we're able to deliver more efficiencies going forward. Why is the health of the logos important for us as we kind of move forward in terms of number of logo acquisition is if you look at it, ours is a net retention-driven business, NRR-based business. And we had actually talked about 127% NRR last half year that we actually demonstrated, and we continue to see that as an important trend line. Now as more and more customers come in, these are our foundational customers for the next 2 to 3 years for us. So the health of both we track as a company, both the NRR metric and the number of customer acquisitions that we're making, which is a good balance as we move forward to maintain our growth and profitability. That's the directional call that we take as a company. I will hand over to Vijay for providing you an EBITDA commentary on that.

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#7

Thanks, Vivek, for your question on the gross margin EBITDA. Just one clarification. The 10% is not a steady state in fullness of time. The 10% is for the 14% that you saw in the quarter, we believe if you exclude the onetime sort of tailwinds that we had, we think that the steady state for this quarter is around 10%. Now you had asked about the building blocks of where this would come from if you think about in fullness of time. If you look at vertical SaaS companies worldwide or software companies worldwide, you'd see that they operate at scale at about 25% sort of margins. And the reason they do that is because a lot of your growth is land and expand. So you get into a customer and you start growing. In our DRHP, you'll see that we have roughly 45% of the top 50 media and entertainment companies. So, we've seeded a lot of these costs, both on sales and marketing and R&D. And as these customers continue to grow and because of our NRRs being healthy, these costs don't scale linearly to revenue. So you see secular leverage across sales and marketing, R&D, which is a good chunk of your costs. And those would be the sort of two primary areas from which you'll start seeing leverage.

Vivekanand Subbaraman

analyst
#8

Okay. Understood. Just a couple of follow-up questions. Would you be able to disclose the 1 million-plus clients, which I think you had disclosed in the DRHP and any further color on the growth of the top 10 clients or, say, top 5 clients, whatever you wish to provide?

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#9

Yes. So on the $1 million annual revenue number, it's because it's an annualized revenue number, so we found it more meaningful to disclose it on an annual basis, not on a quarterly basis, and we'll be making that disclosure when we do the FY results. On greater than -- on the top 5 customers growth, it's not a specific metric that we've disclosed. And at the right time, we'll make that available, but it's suffice to say that our overall sort of Arc would be reflective of the growth that we are seeing in the top 5 or top 10 customers.

Vivekanand Subbaraman

analyst
#10

Okay. Just one small feedback. If it is possible to include some more metrics in the KPI sheet like headcount broken across, say, sales and tech and others. I think that is a metric that we would like to track on a periodic basis as well. If you can include that in your KPI disclosures. I saw the shareholder letter has an annexure KPIs. But if you can make it a bit more richer from a cost structure and productivity standpoint, it will really help us.

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#11

Feedback taken, Vivekanand. We'll see what we can do to incorporate.

Operator

operator
#12

The next question comes from the line of Kawaljeet Saluja from Kotak Securities.

Kawaljeet Saluja

analyst
#13

I have a couple of questions. First is for Vijay, your revenue growth seems a little bit light. I understand the explanation that you had given. Let's say, if you had to adjust for the timing difference of revenues from your top 5 clients, what would the underlying revenue growth have been for the quarter?

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#14

I think we would be around the 25% to 30% range Kawal.

Kawaljeet Saluja

analyst
#15

And when you try these numbers, is it on rupee or largely U.S. dollars? So let's say, if I had to just translate this into dollar numbers, what's the range that you're looking at?

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#16

This is constant currency. So I think we wouldn't see much of a departure. So 25% to 30% is a reasonable sort of ZIP code to assume for that as well.

Kawaljeet Saluja

analyst
#17

Got that. And second question is on the customer additions seems pretty good. What is the LTV to CAC and maybe gross profit margin payback period? If you can just give a directional sense, that will be very helpful in understanding some of those aspects as well.

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#18

So Kawal, this is -- as you can imagine, we are limited by the amount of metrics we cannot disclose. But our model lends itself to scaling a good chunk with our existing customers, right? And that's why you see significant leverage, especially in sales and marketing and other costs. And given the sticky -- I'll speak about it in LTV terms and CAC terms. Our sales and marketing is the biggest area of leverage. If you look at sales and marketing expenses as a percentage of revenue, they've gone down from approximately mid-40% a couple of years back to about in the 30% range, right? So that's an area where we've seen significant leverage. On the LTV side, given our NRR, we typically -- and given the mission criticality of our platform, our logo churn is very minimal, low single digits. So those metrics are healthier than what you'd see in the sort of top quartile, but it's not a metric that we officially disclosed.

Kawaljeet Saluja

analyst
#19

Got that. Just a couple of more questions. One is on R&D. So that's an investment which is absolutely necessary given the current pace of changes. So what would your R&D spending be as a ballpark? I know you don't disclose that in the financial numbers explicitly, but fair to just give us a directional sense of what your R&D expenses would be? And is that something which will keep on increasing? Or is that something on which you get a leverage given the investments that you've already made and help your margin expansion in the future?

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#20

Yes. So R&D is an area that will continue to get leverage, Kawal. So I think when we disclosed the first half, it was around 23.4%. I think as of December quarter, it's at about 21.8%. So we'll continue to see leverage because of our platform strategy. That said, we don't also capitalize any of our sort of AI expenses all incurred. So on one side, on the platform side, we'll be harvesting R&D that will generate leverage and hopefully fund some of these AI investments. So long-term mental model is to continue to see leverage in that area.

Kawaljeet Saluja

analyst
#21

Okay. The final question is for Baskar. Baskar, there is a rising debate or rather not a debate. I think investors seem to be voting with their money on the future of SaaS business given the substantial progress on GenAI. Do you want to weigh in on this topic, maybe with a specific focus on the relevance of Amagi at a time when the cost of custom build applications may decline significantly?

Baskar Subramanian

executive
#22

I think, Kawal I think the first thing is I think AI, we are extremely bullish about the whole AI wave that's starting to happen. And for a couple of reasons. If you look at it, as I really point out, we are a vertical software company, where the deep understanding of the domain and the customer pain points is super critical here. So it's not a custom application software that can be vibe coded, if you will, right? So clearly, there is a lot of technology from a domain understanding standpoint. It's not -- obviously, we use a lot of our own print for code generation. But if you look at it, the key value that we see ourselves is because it's vertical, we see a huge opportunity in front of us to be able to use the platform to demonstrate more value for our customers. For example, already, our customers are starting to adopt better tool sets in terms of Agentic infrastructure and software that we are providing to them so that they are able to see much more human productivity value out of the systems. And if you historically look at the media business, it's been a very capital-intensive and more importantly, human cost-intensive business. So we see a significant opportunity in front of us to deliver better experiences for end viewers, but more importantly, better human cost productivity for our customers. And we see that as a significant opportunity in front of us, Kawal. And I truly believe this is going to be a big transformative for the media industry and for Amagi to lead that particular trend for our customers. That's the way I see it today.

Operator

operator
#23

The next question comes from the line of Manish Adukia from Goldman Sachs.

Manish Adukia

analyst
#24

Congratulations on the listing. I have a few clarifications from the shareholder letter. The first one, when you talked about the negotiations that you saw with some of your largest customers, can you maybe help us understand is that in the regular course of the business where I don't know on an annual basis, et cetera, there are pricing negotiations? Or is that like one-off? And how -- and what drove these renegotiated contracts with some of your largest customers, that would be helpful if you can provide some color there.

Baskar Subramanian

executive
#25

Yes. I think I'll ask Vijay to go through the specifics. Just to give you a Manish, overall, how we see this whole thing, right? So if you look at our customer contracts, typically, it's about 3 to 5 years. So literally, predictability is kind of designed into the business, both for our customers and for us because if you look at it, lots of stuff that we do is mission-critical software. It's essentially, that drives for need for our customers to get stability and for Amagi to get stability as well. So that's the way we kind of drive these businesses today from a contract standpoint. On specifically, is there a specific thing that Vijay, you want to address on the customer?

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#26

Yes, Manish, to your question on whether it's routine, I mean, we do opportunistically evaluate customers based on their scaling and look at -- we do have the normal lapping of contract end dates. But with the top 5 customers and top 10 customers, we constantly look at our sort of concentration and then try to make sure that both from a customer obsession standpoint and a commercial sort of feasibility standpoint and balancing the two, we try to maybe sort of extend the contract for a longer duration because these are long gestation period contracts. The top 5 customers wouldn't be routine course of business. It's something that we've intentionally made a call to look at our concentration risk and derisk that a little bit. Today, it's at a good 40% for the top 10 customers. So that's a call that we intentionally make. But I mean, what we are aspiring for here is making sure that we lock in long-term secure revenue instead of short-term optics on price increases.

Manish Adukia

analyst
#27

Right. And maybe I don't have fully got the answer to Kawal's question earlier. So did you mention that without this impact, you would have grown mid-20s on a Y-o-Y basis? Or did I miss that number?

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#28

That is correct. Yes. 25% to 27%, yes.

Manish Adukia

analyst
#29

Understood. Very clear. And the other big on revenue that you also called out, if you can also explain that where you mentioned the timing impact from revenue for one of the largest customers. What exactly was that?

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#30

So the timing was mostly the first half, what we saw was one of our large customers, we have a perpetual license contract. There's a grandfather contract. According to Ind AS, you got to have an output method without getting into the technicalities of it. The rev rec for that is based on channel go-lives. Last year, what happened was that the channel go-live was followed a pro rata schedule through the year. So all quarters were evenly balanced. This year, it came up in a more aggressive timeline to rev rec all of the year stuff in the first half of the year. So what that meant was that the first half of the year, you had to dial down 2 to 3 points. And the Q3 and in Q4, you'd have to dial it up 3 to 4 points in order for it to kind of make sense on a total basis. Does that help?

Manish Adukia

analyst
#31

Yes, sure. And last question on this topic. When you mentioned 14.5% reported adjusted margin versus about 10% underlying steady state, of this 430-odd basis points of the various one-offs that you called out, if you can maybe give like a qualitative pecking order of which one had the largest impact and so on?

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#32

So one was the seasonality, Manish, on the revenue side. And then we had a couple of -- I mean, you've seen our operating cash flow, our collections was pretty robust as well in Q4. So some of our reserve rates on the ECL methodology improved, but those will be sort of the 2 broad strokes and the biggest sort of tailwinds that got the 4 points delta.

Baskar Subramanian

executive
#33

And this is also the largest quarter for us, Manish, in terms of -- because it's the festive quarter across the globe. I think given some parts of the business, which gets a tailwind from advertising, so this becomes a bigger quarter for us as a company.

Manish Adukia

analyst
#34

Got it. Very clear. The next question I had was on managed services. If you can just maybe give us a rough sense of what proportion of your revenue now is managed services? And maybe for the benefit of the broader audience on the call, if you can help us or remind us how is your managed services may be different versus what typical services companies do?

Baskar Subramanian

executive
#35

Okay. Maybe I'll give a color to the whole thing and maybe we can give you specifics. But Manish, largely, if you look at it, we are a technology company. So essentially, given our customer cohorts who are large enterprise to mid-tier enterprise customers who need it, we provide a thin layer of the service, which is really literally a very, very small percentage point, but I don't think we disclose that number, but it's actually not even meaningful from a number standpoint. This is essentially an idea is to kind of provide some sort of a human layer for them to kind of have because there are hundreds of millions of dollars of content passing through the system. So we need to be able to provide them some sort of a 24/7 capability so that they can feel comfortable because our SLAs are sometimes 99.99 to 99.9999, right? So almost like 6 9's liability, for example. So to manage that is a very, very thin layer. It's extremely -- I don't think we can be tracking internally in terms of the percentage because it's too small.

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#36

Manish, just to add, obviously, low single digits to Baskar's point, but this is an area, given our cloud modernization segment and the runway that we see that, this is an area where with the help of AI, we see some of the biggest sort of opportunity as well. And so what is ahead is much larger than what we have today.

Manish Adukia

analyst
#37

Very clear. Just last question, would you be able to give any kind of, let's say, forward, if not guidance, aspiration of what next 3-year revenue CAGR may look like for the business? And where do you think margins may settle over, let's say, a 3-year period at EBITDA margin level?

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#38

Manish, it's -- I'm sure you'd appreciate that it's hard to give prescriptive guidance at this point. But our endeavor would be to kind of consistently deliver the growth rates that we've delivered over the last couple of years and replicate the margin trajectory that we've seen over the last couple of years and over the next 2 to 3 years as well.

Operator

operator
#39

The next question comes from the line of Omprakash Kavadi from Avendus Spark.

Omprakash Kavadi

analyst
#40

Congratulations to the management team for the public market debate and good luck for your future in this journey. A couple of questions. Firstly, on the market. So if you just step back and then see how Amagi is positioned in the market with respect to the 3 segments, the cloud modernization, streaming and monetization, could you give me some color on how the market share has been for Amagi in the recent years? And how do you think about that on a go-forward basis? And maybe a small bit of a color on how are we positioned versus competition? Where do we exactly differentiate? I have a couple of follow-up questions on that.

Baskar Subramanian

executive
#41

Yes. Thanks, Omprakash. Thanks for that, actually. A couple of things that you need to look at it from our business standpoint, right? First, if you look at it, the 3 business units we talked about, one is cloud modernization. Second is streaming unification and third is the monetization of the marketplaces. So look at the first part of our business. Historically, Amagi has built technology over a decade right now to be able to enable large enterprise broadcasters to move to the cloud, which I think is a significant barrier to entry for anybody, right? Literally, Amagi has kind of built it over time and built it as a cloud-first solution that doesn't exist in the world today, right? So literally, Amagi is kind of leading that trend in terms of building one of the most complex and comprehensive solution for the TV networks to go forward. And that has been the reflection that you see in terms of some of the largest media companies today running their Winter Olympics or Super Bowl or all of that, that you see today is because of that trend line of what the technology has been able to deliver for our customers. So that's a big moat for us, if you look at it, Omprakash. The second thing that's happening in the streaming business, if you look at it is, Amagi, again, starting 2017 was a pioneer in providing ad-supported models and streaming television technology for the whole of U.S., for example, that we started. We continue to be a dominant player in that particular business. And we continue to -- as you've seen, the number of distributors, we were at 350-plus distributors around the DRHP and RHP filing to what you see right now is about 48 distributors that we're actually supporting today, for example. So we continue to be aggressive in terms of taking our customer content and be able to deliver and distribute worldwide globally. And that's a continuing trend that we see. The third part in our growth that you would have seen again is the number of impressions of ad impressions that we're delivering, which has been a record growth that we continue to see as well in terms of 60 percentage plus growth over the last year to get to 13 billion impressions. So all in all, I see that we have a very well-rounded growth trajectory that's kind of starting to play out. And that's essentially because of the platform strategy, which has been consciously taken by the company. And what I mean by that is a glass-to-glass strategy. Our customers want to gravitate on a single vendor who could actually provide them their whole mission-critical platform from an end-to-end standpoint. And Amagi continues to deliver on that particular promise. And all the innovations and the AI investments we're making right now is to strengthen and fortify this and maybe supercharge our customers in terms of human cost reduction. So that's the future of how we see it. We continue to see grabbing more and more market share from our competitors. Our competitors come in 2 buckets. One is traditional hardware vendors who are moving to the cloud. These are the companies which are public listed, 50-plus years in the business, continue to kind of transform. We have a second cohort of customers who are cloud-first -- competitors who are cloud-first who are coming in. But as it's small for -- from an Amagi standpoint and from a sophistication and the platform strategy, Amagi is quite ahead in terms of the market position that we're taking. So that's where we are, Omprakash, in the company.

Omprakash Kavadi

analyst
#42

The other question is on pricing and slightly connected to the previous participant's questions also. I'm more trying to understand -- I mean, you already indicated in the shareholders' letter that there has been a renegotiation with one of the largest customers and all that stuff. But has there been any phenomena where with respect to the recent advancements, what we are seeing with respect to technology, be it AI, whatever name we give it to. Has there been some pressure on the pricing with respect to the workflows, what we get involved into with respect to these advancements in technology in general, not just the large customers or the mid customers?

Baskar Subramanian

executive
#43

Not really anything specific that I can call out, Omprakash. At least for now, we've not had any conversations related to really in this particular direction of thought process right now. And obviously, we'll keep you updated as we see progress, but nothing really that I'm aware of that has come to our notice. The second part, if you look at it, is in terms of price, again, we serve a mission-critical part of an organization's operations. So essentially, here, price is important, but that's not the only driver for our customers. Our customers really look for reliable forward-looking partners who can provide them stability in their operating environments. So that's a big driver. And obviously, price comes next to that extent. That's the way our customers value this whole service and the business that we provide for them.

Omprakash Kavadi

analyst
#44

Yes. Okay. The last question is maybe probably to Vijay. So how do we think about the ESOP expenses going forward, Vijay? Some color would be helpful on that.

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#45

Yes. Thanks for that question, Omprakash. So I mean, ESOP expenses is an area where we also have seen some leverage. So in Q3 FY '25, I think we indicated this in the shareholder letter that it was roughly 8.4% of revenue. That's gone down to about 6.6% of revenue. As a percentage of revenue, given that revenue will obviously scale sort of quicker, we expect these to kind of be a little more tempered and then follow the trajectory that we've seen over the past year in the coming years as well.

Operator

operator
#46

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from the line of Rishi Jhunjhunwala from IIFL Capital.

Rishi Jhunjhunwala

analyst
#47

Just one clarification on adjusted EBITDA margin. So Vijay, you said 14.3% has about like 4.3 percentage point tailwinds, which are one-off on the cost side and probably some seasonality related to it. And so one should look at it at 10%. When you say 10%, is it also adjusted for the labor code provisions, which is in the nature of 170 basis points in this quarter? And so effectively, it is even adjusting for that? Or if we adjust that, ideally, the EBITDA margins would be like 11.7%?

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#48

So that adjusts for the labor code provisions, Rishi, you're right. We had to do a one-time catch-up. Also, this is an evolving area where we are continuing to partner with our auditors and look at best practices to kind of pin down the size. But the short answer to your question is it's adjusted for that. We'll be able to provide clarity on the run rate impact of it as we go as things evolve in the subsequent quarters. But right now, it's embedded in that number.

Rishi Jhunjhunwala

analyst
#49

Okay. So the 10% includes that. It should not be 11.7%.

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#50

That is correct.

Rishi Jhunjhunwala

analyst
#51

Okay. The other thing is just in terms of how your business plays out through the course of the year, right? So I think if you really look at it, in 1H, our revenues were probably growing north of 30%. In 3Q, in INR terms, it has grown at slightly higher than 22%. So just want to understand -- and these are year-on-year, by the way. So ideally, seasonality should reflect in there. So just wanted to understand, one, typically, is there a sharp seasonality on a sequential basis that plays out? You said 3Q is a stronger quarter. And secondly, on a Y-o-Y basis, do you see the growth rates, which direction the growth rates will go from here?

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#52

Yes. So if you look at it, I mean, over the last 2, 3 years also, we've hovered in the 25% to 30% sort of ZIP code, Rishi, because there are some base effects due to one-off contract negotiations or a big event like last year, you had the U.S. presidential elections or Olympics and this year, you have the Super Bowl. So our business, like you said, is not worth looking at quarter-on-quarter sequentially, it's more year-on-year. Again, this quarter, if you look at it, the 30% that you saw in the first half was amplified by sort of 3 points because of the accounting adjustment that we spoke about. If you put that back here, that's the 25%, 26% that you'll see in Q3. To your overall question on seasonality intra-year, what we typically see is that 45% of our revenues kind of comes from the first half and 55% of our revenue comes from the second half. Of the 55%, good chunk is in like 27%, 28% is in Q3. So Q4 typically tends to be a slower quarter because a lot of the ad spends go to Q3. But that's how I would think about phasing across the year in terms of seasonality and mix in terms of revenue.

Operator

operator
#53

The next question comes from the line of Bharat Gulati from Dalal & Broacha.

Bharat Gulati

analyst
#54

I just had a question on our cloud modernization business. Just wanted to get a deeper understanding in terms of what exactly do we offer to our customers in terms of cloud modernization given that we are a SaaS platform and not an infrastructure as a service player. So we don't provide them with a raw infra that to transform them to a cloud native or a cloud-based company. So do we help onboard them on to hyperscalers or preferred cloud providers and then transfer relevant workflows to our platform or just a deeper understanding on how that business works?

Baskar Subramanian

executive
#55

Okay. I'll give -- maybe given the interest of time, I'll give you a quick snapshot, but I think there's more information that we could -- it's on our website and others that you can look at, Bharat. But again, just to give you context here, right? Primarily, if you look at it, cloud modernization journey is for TV networks, largely -- these are really mid- to large enterprise TV networks who have historically run their operations with data centers of their own, running applications and all the software for their operating environments to sit in that particular office or a real estate that they've actually owned. Starting from -- I'm sure you've seen an OB Van, which actually stands out at a stadium or what the news journalist today, for example, use example. So starting from that, a lot of things are owned and operated by the media companies themselves, which has been a pretty expensive proposition for them. What Amagi does is to replicate all of that operating environment on a cloud software infrastructure, yes, these are all running on hyperscaled cloud providers. So our job is not a services job of modernizing them. So I would want to kind of call out that it's not a consulting or a service job where we're moving something from X to Y. That's not what it is. They are moving the operating environment so that we provide all our software, which replicates what they used to do on a hardware environment in their offices, now move to a complete on-demand infrastructure on the cloud where it actually happens. So we do not own hardware. We don't -- obviously, we run on public cloud infrastructure, which is leased on behalf of our customers. So we are a software company running on the cloud, replicating the environment of an operating environment for our customers so that they can run these operations completely in a virtualized infrastructure. That's the core value that we provide. In the context, we also convert CapEx to OpEx for them. So they don't need to buy for a 5-year amortization cycle today, for example, people don't need to buy hardware. So they actually buy on a subscription basis as we move forward. But you should look at it as a critical infrastructural component when they look at it from an operating behavior standpoint for us. So it's not a SaaS application, a generic app application. This is an operating environment for them. This is almost like the ERP for the business, pretty much running their business on our software. That's the way to see this.

Bharat Gulati

analyst
#56

Fair enough, sir. Got that. So just a follow-up on that. So typically, customers who would come in as cloud modernization revenues for us would then convert to unified platform revenues going forward once they're onboarded to our platform. Would that be a fair understanding?

Baskar Subramanian

executive
#57

Absolutely, Bharat. I think you are spot on, on that. Right. What is the first part of the journey, right? People want to modernize themselves so that they can actually bring into the new world. So all our customers eventually have the journey of coming into the cloud with the fundamental motivation to go into streaming big time. If you look at it, the growth of every media business today is going to be in streaming. So that's the biggest journey that people are going through. Amagi is the only platform in the world today to provide a unified capability across their existing traditional operating environments moving to the cloud and eventually enabling them to stream to the new world and globally going across and be able to monetize. And that's the power of the platform that we are able to leverage today.

Bharat Gulati

analyst
#58

Got it, sir. Got it. Just the last question in terms of margins, sir. So typically, even in the CNBC interview that you've given, you said that margins will move up to typical SaaS businesses in that 25% to 30% range. So is this purely leverage that would come from the employee cost going down as a percentage? Or would it also be our gross margins would see an improvement? And if you can just help me understand how would that work out?

Baskar Subramanian

executive
#59

So directionally, if you look at it, right, look at it, we have continued to demonstrate operating leverage in this business. And if you go back to our reading prospectives, go back a couple of years, 2.5, 3 years back as well, you will see that play out very thoughtfully. So this is not any artificial sort of infrastructure. The whole -- the business lends itself for operating leverage. And you would definitely see, for example, both cost of sales and marketing and cost of R&D and gross margin. Directionally, we've kind of proven it over time, and you will continue to see that from a directional point where percentage of revenue would continue to go down, right? That's the fundamental core operating leverage that the business will continue to happen. Having said that, this is not coming at some artificial cost of growth because I think as a company, we want to, in a longer term, balance growth and profitability, very, very kind of mindfully about this whole thing. And that's the reason if you look at it, like what Vijay pointed out, we don't capitalize anything and yet we have a good amount of R&D spend in AI that we continue to do because we believe that's going to be a big part of the future for our customers and hence for us as well as we move forward. So we are -- I think we are quite comfortable with the investment thesis, the growth plan in front of us and the road map of what we're trying to continue to innovate on. And that's the way I see it.

Operator

operator
#60

The next question comes from the line of Rohan Nagpal from Helios Capital Management.

Rohan Nagpal

analyst
#61

Just a question on the pricing and the way it's playing out. So I think in terms of the metrics that you put out in terms of number of channels going live, number of ad impressions shown, et cetera, that growth is much higher than the growth that we're seeing in revenue. So would it be possible to get a sense of how much of this revenue is coming from customers who have, say, perpetual contracts, which is not linked to usage or output? And how much of that is coming from, say, variabilized contracts?

Baskar Subramanian

executive
#62

Okay. Directionally, if you look at it, and I'll give an answer and then Vijay can give some details on that -- color to that right now, right? So if you look at it, direction, I don't think anything with the purposeful contract. There's no such overhang in the system fundamentally, right? What we show as metrics is the leading indicator of how the strength of the business is, for example. And I would kind of urge you folks to look at it in that context where these are leading indicators of the strength of the -- now I was kind of indicating that if you look at it, largely, there is no overhang because of any perpetual license or otherwise here. All the metrics that we deliver as a North Star for the company is largely leading indicators. And obviously, these are not reflective of what happens in this quarter. These are all things which we think will flow through over the next years that's coming forward. And that's the way we see this whole thing.

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#63

And Rohan, just to kind of zero in on your question, I think these, to Baskar's point, are leading indicators, and they're not one-on-one reflective of like the price because there are other sort of layers in between in terms of yield, CPMs and other things and just contract duration and other sliding scales that come into play before something manifests into revenue, including the customers' own trajectory. It would be suffice to say that a lot of our growth comes from customers adopting more products than pure sort of price accretion, if that's the question behind the question. We've been largely able to kind of hold price, but we are seeing a significant sort of uptick in volume adoption, which is what's driving the growth.

Operator

operator
#64

The next question comes from the line of Prateek from Bandhan Bank.

Prateek Poddar

analyst
#65

This is Prateek from AMC. Am I audible?

Operator

operator
#66

Yes.

Prateek Poddar

analyst
#67

Yes, sorry. Just quickly, what's your indirect cost base, normalized indirect cost base? Is it around INR 240-odd crores? Is that a fair understanding? Just a clarification, please.

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#68

Our indirect expenses as a percentage of revenue is roughly ...

Prateek Poddar

analyst
#69

Maybe -- this includes, by the way, ESOP costs, I'll have to remove that also, I guess.

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#70

Yes. So it's around INR 220 crores, yes.

Prateek Poddar

analyst
#71

Yes. Perfect. Okay. That's one. The second is just Baskar, on the price reduction. This is an enterprise-grade platform, right? I'm still slightly unclear as to why was this -- I mean, why was there some bit of price cut? Or was it a retention strategy? Or just maybe you could -- obviously, you've mentioned a bit in the letter, but just if you could double click here, it would be helpful.

Baskar Subramanian

executive
#72

Yes. Largely, I think, see, one of the things I think for us, from a business standpoint is longevity matters in terms of scale, right? So essentially, we want to be able to have quite a predictable growth and profitability curve as a company over the next few years. And that was the reason and the high motivation for us is to get our customers to sign up for longer-term contracts which allows longevity and continuity as well as predictability as we move forward. And that's been the driver for us in any of the decisions we make is largely driven by long-term needs rather than any sort of short-term benefits. And we'll continue to do that as the practice across all our business points.

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#73

And Prateek, as customers kind of get to -- this is Vijay. As customers get to some sort of threshold scale, we fold them into what's called an enterprise agreement, which are typically longer gestation contracts 3 to 4 years. And as a result, to Baskar's point, you're looking at lifetime value more than short-term optics of in-year price or per product price. This is normal business practice, as I'm sure you're aware, in terms of how software gets priced. So it's a matter of business, and to Baskar's point, we want to be predictable, durable long-term revenue growth company. So that's a ...

Prateek Poddar

analyst
#74

This is BAU, right? In the sense, look maybe 2, 3 quarters ...

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#75

Yes.

Prateek Poddar

analyst
#76

Yes. So all I was saying was that this business as usual, right? 2, 3 quarters, let's say, one of your clients becomes big and you big and you again pass on some or reduce the prices. That's an ongoing exercise, right? There's nothing new in this.

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#77

It is ongoing. What is unpredictable is the number of customers that will reach threshold scale in a quarter. That could be lumpy.

Prateek Poddar

analyst
#78

Okay. So maybe a lot of customers are ...

Vijay Namonarasimhanprema P.

executive
#79

We have more customers reach threshold scale for us to do a lot more enterprise agreements. And in some quarters, just because of timing, you may not have as many customers. So that would be the bumpy piece. It is BAU in the broader -- when you look at it in a trailing 12-month basis. But intra-quarter, there could be some ups and downs depending on when customers hit threshold scale.

Prateek Poddar

analyst
#80

And last question is on acquisitions, right, given the cash balance which you have. You called out acquisitions could be a strategy. Any broad markers which you can place as to what would be the guardrails for acquisition, et cetera?

Baskar Subramanian

executive
#81

So largely, again, just from an M&A standpoint, we continue to -- we have a fairly active corp dev strategy in place. Obviously, we're looking at it mindfully as a company. Again, we don't do anything irrational. Like the question is not for anything. We're not forced to do it tomorrow or any sort of urgency to do it. We continue to see good opportunities coming by, and we are actively involved in interactions and conversations across the industry to look at explorations. Having said that, do we have any kind of very specific in mind? We don't have right now. Obviously, as soon as we have anything that we will come back to the streets to kind of give indications. But today, we don't have anything which is kind of in the bag or close to any sort of acquisition today, but we continue to be active. I think we can give you more color to this conversation over the next few quarters as we kind of pan out the strategy and going forward. Today, we don't have anything active to tell you about today.

Operator

operator
#82

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question for today. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Baskar Subramanian for the closing remarks.

Baskar Subramanian

executive
#83

Thank you very much, shareholders and investors who kind of joined the call today. We are very excited about building a pretty long-term, sustainable media tech worldwide leader from India to the world. And thank you for being part of this journey with us and hoping to kind of make it all successful for all of us. Thank you very much, folks.

Operator

operator
#84

Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Amagi Media Labs, that concludes this conference call. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.

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