Info Edge (India) Limited ($NAUKRI)

Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Info Edge India Limited Quarter 4 FY '26 Earnings Conference Call. Joining us today from the management, we have Mr. Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder and Vice Chairman; Mr. Hitesh Oberoi, Co-Promoter and Managing Director; and Mr. Ambarish Raghuvanshi, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to draw your attention to the detailed disclaimer included in this presentation for good disclosure good order sake. And can you note that the conference is being recorded, all the participant lines will remain on mute will, and there'll be an opportunity for Q&A after the presentation concludes. Now I would like to hand over the call to Mr. Ritesh brave for his opening remarks. Thank you, and over to you, Hitesh.

Thank you, Vineet, and a very good evening, everyone, and welcome to Info Edge's earnings call for the fourth quarter of FY '26. We will begin with an overview of our stand-alone financial performance, followed by business highlights for each segment, along with our commentary on the strategy for each business. We will then take questions. For the stand-alone business in Q4 of FY '26, billing was INR 1,057 crores, a Y-o-Y growth of 7% and revenue was INR 805 crores, a Y-o-Y growth of 17%. Operating profits at a stand-alone level grew by 39% year-on-year to INR 323 crores, and the operating margin stood at 40%. The stand-alone business generated cash from operations before taxes of INR 621 crores in Q4 of FY '26, a Y-o-Y growth of 16%. The cash generation from the recruitment business was INR 619 crores. The non-recruitment businesses at an aggregate level generated cash of INR 37 crores in Q4 of FY '26. For the stand-alone business in full year FY '26, billing was INR 3,178 crores, a Y-o-Y growth of 10% and revenue was INR 3,052 crores, a Y-o-Y growth of 15%. Operating profits grew by 17% year-on-year to INR 1,138 crores, and the operating margin was 37%. The stand-alone business generated cash from operations before taxes of INR 1,469 crores in FY '26, a Y-o-Y growth of 12%. The cash balance of Info Edge, including wholly owned subsidiaries at the end of March 2026 stood at INR 4,963 crores. Continuing the track record of progressively improving shareholder distributions, the Board has also approved a final dividend of INR 3.6 per share for the year. This adds to the total dividend payout of INR 8.4 per share for FY '26, a 40% increased dividend payout versus last year. Moving on to the segmental performance and starting with the recruitment business. In Q4 of FY '26, the stand-alone recruitment billings grew by 10% to INR 811 crores and revenue grew by 14% to INR 581 crores. Recruitment billings, including ZEM and DuSelect grew by 9% to INR 838 crores and revenue grew by 12% to INR 608 crores. The operating profit for the stand-alone recruitment segment improved by 22% year-on-year to INR 340 crores, and the operating profit margin was 58%. Cash generated from recruitment operations was INR 619 crores, a Y-o-Y growth of 16%. In full year FY '26, the stand-alone recruitment billings grew by 10% to INR 2,374 crores and revenue grew by 14% to INR 2,256 crores. Recruitment billings, including ZM and DS grew by 9% to INR 2,461 crores and revenue grew by 13% to INR 2,343 crores. The recruitment -- the operating profit for the stand-alone recruitment segment improved by 14% year-on-year to INR 1,277 crores, and the operating profit margin was 57%. And cash generated from the recruitment operations was INR 1,513 crores, a Y-o-Y growth of 13%. The key operating highlights for the year. FY '26 was a year of moderate growth for the recruitment business after a strong second half of FY '25 with Q4 FY '25 billings growing at 18% Y-o-Y. Growth slowed down to 9% in Q1 of FY '26 and remained in the 9% to 11% range across all quarters of FY '26. The year was impacted by geopolitical headwinds, tariff-related uncertainty and a generally cautious hiring stance amongst corporates, both in global demand linked sectors such as IT as well as domestically oriented ones. The softer hiring environment was also reflected in the JobSpeak index, which grew at 7%, 8% Y-o-Y for the full year. At a segment level, in Q4, billing for tech, IT and BPM segments combined grew at 6% year-on-year. GCCs degrew by 1% and recruitment consultants grew at 8% and other sectors combined grew at 14%. Quarterly numbers can sometimes be influenced by renewal timing for large accounts. Full year figures are a more reliable representation of underlying trends. For the full year FY '26, tech, IT and BPM combined grew by 8% year-on-year, GCCs grew by 10%, recruitment consultants grew by 6% and other sectors grew by 8% IT services directly 10% of billings grew 10% Y-o-Y in FY '26 versus 8% in FY '25. Other sectors directly, which directly account for 29% of all billings grew relatively slower at 8% in FY '26 versus 14% in FY '25, the moderation largely reflecting broader economic conditions and sector-specific factors. The Naukri job seeker services business reported INR 53 crores in billings, a Y-o-Y growth of 33% with 60% operating profit margin in Q4 of FY '26. For the full year FY '26, it reported INR 176 crores in billings, a Y-o-Y growth of 19% with an operating profit of INR 98 crores and a 57% operating profit margin. Naukri Gulf billings in Q4 of FY '26 were INR 41 crores, growing 9% year-on-year, a step down from the 20% growth this business had been delivering before regional disturbances in the Middle East Operating PBT margins were 42% in Q4. For the full year FY '26, it reported INR 126 crores in billing, a Y-o-Y growth of 16%, with a INR 41 crore operating profit and a 35% operating profit margin. Jobhir continued to operate on a freemium model with a focus on select markets. Platform metrics remain healthy and revenues continue to grow. The business remains in investment phase, and we're making good progress on monetization. On the job seeker front, the Naukri platform now hosts approximately 115 million resumes and added an average of around 21,000 resumes per day during Q4 of FY '26. Marketing expenses were lower by 13% year-on-year in Q4 despite continued investments in Jobhair and other smaller businesses as they scale up their monetization efforts. As a result, the operating profit margin improved by 400 basis points to over 58% in Q4. Excluding Job Hair, the recruitment margin was around 61% in the quarter. For the full year FY '26, the operating margins slightly improved to 57% at a stand-alone level and to 59%, excluding ChobHair. Moving over to the Real Estate segment. In Q4 of FY '26, billings grew by 2% to INR 163 crores, whereas revenue grew by 36% to INR 144 crores. During the quarter, we have rationalized the warranty provision related assumptions linked to certain products in the 99acres business, where we endeavor to charge based on delivered leads as opposed to the tenure-based subscriptions. The trend over the last few quarters during which these lead-based products were formalized has now provided us with a more credible basis for the estimation of such a warranty. Accordingly, a portion of the accumulated provision over the last 8 quarters have been reversed, and revenue for the quarter as well as for the year stands increased by INR 20.5 crores as a result. This is not material under applicable accounting standards and hence has not been separately disclosed in the financials. This is a onetime reversal and is not expected to recur in the future at this point in time. Operating profits in Q4 were INR 3 crores, whereas the cash generated from operations in 99 acres was INR 22 crores in Q4 of FY '26. In the full year FY '26, billings in 99acres grew by 10% to INR 497 crores and revenue grew by 19% to INR 488 crores. Operating losses were INR 559 crores and cash losses from operations were INR 5 crores in FY '26. During Q4, we undertook changes in the 99acres sales organization and tightened certain key processes and the adherence to these processes to set up the business for sustained long-term growth. This had a onetime transitional impact on Q4 billings. We expect billings growth to recover in Q1 once again. 99acres continues to strengthen its traffic leadership with its web traffic share growing to 49% in Q4 of FY '26 from 46% in the prior quarter. On the app, we command 54% of overall traffic share -- app traffic share and 67% share now of iOS app traffic times share. The overall market share of 99acres in April -- in March was 51% and in April, 52% traffic share -- sorry, traffic times share. Supply momentum remains strong across categories. Live resale income rental listings from brokers grew 35% year-on-year and live new project listings grew 28% year-on-year during the quarter. We continue to gain fresh supply share across residential, resale, rental and commercial segments in both the owner and broker channels. Taken together, consistent traffic share gains and improving response growth over the past several quarters now reflect continued market share expansion in both traffic and revenue terms. Q4 was a reset. The underlying business trajectory remains intact, and we expect growth to recover going forward. Moving over to the Matchmaking business. In Q4 of FY '26, Jeevansathi billings grew by 21% to INR 39 crores and revenue grew by 19% to INR 36 crores. The business incurred an operating loss of INR 3 crores and generated cash from operations of INR 4 crores in Q4 of FY '26. Our matchmaking portfolio, including Jeevansathi and i combined reported INR 49 crores billings, a Y-o-Y growth of 23% and combined operating losses were INR 7 crores in Q4. In full year FY '26, Jeevansathi billings grew by 28% to INR 142 crores and revenue grew by 26% to INR 138 crores. The business incurred an operating loss of INR 4 crores and generated cash from operations of INR 15 crores in FY '26. The Jeevansathi plus business combined reported INR 182 crores in billings, a Y-o-Y growth of 29% and combined operating losses reduced by 50% to INR 15 crores in FY '26. Jezathi remained focused on improving sales conversions and ARPUs during the year. The market continues to be competitive with leading Matrimony platforms investing in marketing and offering higher-than-usual discounts. This has led to some pressure on pricing. However, our ability to withstand such an environment has improved substantially, particularly in the Hindi-speaking markets. The business is now the market leader in terms of users logged in every day in these markets. IL grew at 30% plus year-on-year during the quarter. The dating market has been relatively less competitive in the last couple of years, which presents an opportunity for apps under the IL umbrella to grow even faster. Aka, the Malalam-focused app is now growing at an even higher pace. Moving on to the education business. In Q4 of FY '26, billing was INR 45 crores, a Y-o-Y decline of 13% and revenue grew by 11% to INR 44 crores. The business delivered an operating profit of INR 6 crores and generated cash from operations of INR 11 crores in Q4 of FY '26. In the full year FY '26, billing was INR 164 crores, a Y-o-Y growth of 1% and revenue grew by 13% to INR 170 crores. The business delivered an operating profit of INR 13 crores and generated cash from operations of INR 22 crores in FY '26. AI-driven changes have in search behavior have been affecting Shipsya's traffic for several quarters. In Q4, this translated into a more direct billing impact as reduced referred search traffic from Google affected client deliveries. We expect this headwind to persist over the near term. To navigate this and sustain growth, Shiksha is investing in domestic counseling capabilities and AI-driven voice spots to scale and implement these -- complement these efforts. As adoption and monetization of these services improve, we expect them to progressively offset the AI-led impact. The study abroad segment in the education business saw softness in certain markets, particularly the U.S. and Canada, driven by evolving student preferences and broader macro factors in these geographies. We are actively broadening our destination coverage with increased focus on the U.K., UAE and Continental Europe to better align with where student demand is moving. Let me talk you through our business strategy and our key focus areas for FY '27 now. The recruitment business, the core Naukri strategy is centered around 3 variables: hiring volume, our share of hiring and revenue per hire. We are focused on improving all 3. In the premium segment, we are deepening focus through targeted offerings, including Naukri top-tier IM jobs and -- his while growing employer branding solutions to improve monetization. In the mid-level segment, where we are the clear leader, AI-led capabilities are enhancing recruiter productivity and workflow automation, while job marketing, data products and assisted services are improving revenue per hire. In the value segment, job is expected to play an increasingly important role over time. The success there depends on building real-time labor matching and simple workflow solutions suited to the informal economy. Naukri's B2B growth drivers are broadening as a result, while organic volume and pricing remains the foundation, newer offerings like AI REX, our agent AI offering for recruiters, Tent Pulse, our data offerings for our customers, branding solutions and premium products are expected to contribute meaningfully in the near term. Job hair adds a further growth there over the medium to long term. Beyond the core B2B business, our job seeker Services segment has seen meaningful revenue acceleration and improved profitability following the transition to Naukri 360. The shift to a self-serve online-first model has driven the online revenue mix from 27% to 53% in the last 15 months, while monthly active users have been growing, paid users as a percentage of MAU of the monthly active user base have also risen from 1.2% to 2.2% over the last 15 months with meaningful headroom ahead. Naukri Gulf has delivered 20% plus billing growth over recent years and progressed from breakeven to a 35% operating margin business. The structural opportunity in the Middle East remains intact, and we see a strong runway for continued profitable growth. Moving on to the real estate business. 99acres has consistently expanded traffic share by approximately 0.5 to 1 percentage point per month over the last 12 to 18 months. In residential resale, daily fresh supply is up 40% over the last 2 years. Our supply share has crossed 50% and response growth has nearly doubled. In new projects, the market estimated at approximately INR 5,000 crores to INR 5,055 crores. We are seeing early momentum with responses now growing 30% year-on-year after being flat last year. The recent rollout of 99 shots in NCR as to drive deeper engagement in this segment with expansion to other major cities planned in -- for FY '27. Rental and commercial are also seeing faster growth in response. Operating gains in supply, traffic and responses typically translate into billings with a lag. In FY '26, we cautiously made forward investments in 99acres to strengthen its competitive position and become a clear market leader. With the heavy lifting now behind us, we expect growth to accelerate, operating leverage to play out and the business to turn cash generative in FY '27, if all goes well. In the Matchmaking business, Jeevansathi has now delivered 20% to 30% Y-o-Y billings growth over the past couple of years and is nearing breakeven from -- after operating losses of INR 120 crores a few years ago with a close to 45% plus profile share in Hindi-speaking markets and AI-driven recommendations matching and driving our focus on building a more dominant position and driving higher monetization. The IL business recorded INR 39 crores in billings in FY '26 with over 30% Y-o-Y growth and reduced operating losses. RDK within the Malani market is now growing at 40% year-on-year and is a meaningful contributor to our IL revenues. The matchmaking portfolio is positioned to sustain healthy growth while contributing to overall cash flow. The Shiksha business continues to face headwinds from AI-driven changes in search behavior, which have affected traffic and billings. To navigate this, we are pivoting towards counseling and marketing services, including AI-driven voice spots to complement domestic counseling efforts and diversifying destination coverage and study broads towards markets like the U.K., UAE and Continental Europe. We expect these initiatives to progressively offset search-led headwinds as monetization matures. Across all our businesses across our businesses, whether matching job seekers and employers, homebuyers with properties or individuals seeking life and education decisions, we have proprietary data. We track millions of daily interactions and apply deep AI and ML capabilities to improve recommendation quality, reduce friction and deliver outcomes that go beyond what a typical listings or SaaS model can provide. We do not view AI as a disintermediation risk. If anything, it strengthens the case for platforms like ours with our proprietary data sets, 2-side network effects and deep domain context to deliver better matching, automate workflows and make the experience meaningfully productive for -- more productive for both sides. Gone well, this translates into higher engagement, stronger outcomes and a greater share of customer wallet over time. Accordingly, we have been consistently increasing our investments in AI over the last few years across infrastructure, people and tools. In Naukri, what makes our approach distinctive is that we build intelligence on both sides of the marketplace, not just what a job seeker wants, but what an employer needs and how urgently they need it. This 2-sided data depth is a foundation of effective matching and it's a capability that has been built over the years and cannot be replicated quickly. Our key AI priorities for FY '27 are: one, enhancing matching personalization and productivity. We are continuously improving our ML models to deliver better outcomes for job seekers and recruiters alike. On the employer side, we are getting better at identifying hiring intent such as distinguishing urgent hard-to-fill roles and routine ones so the platform can match accordingly. On the job seeker side, we are progressing from search level recommendation search led to recommendation-led discovery where relevant opportunities are surfaced proactively. These efforts have already delivered 15% to 30% efficiency gains across various parts of our businesses. We are also constantly scaling up AI-powered features. Generative AI has unlocked a new class of features that we were -- that were not previously possible. Several features launched over the last 1 year are already gaining healthy traction. AI-powered mock interviews are used by 1.5 million users monthly. AI-generated resumes are now powering 3 million profiles monthly and AI-generated job descriptions are widely used by recruiters, amongst others. Our focus is on quality of outcomes, our volume of activity, making candidates more hirable and recruiters more effective. This year, we will deepen engagement and expand the breadth of these features. We are also continuously working hard to produce AI-first products so that we can unlock new revenue streams. We are building products that go beyond feature additions. AIX, our agent recruitment platform automates end-to-end hiring workflows for enterprises from job mandate intake to candidate shortlisting, meaningfully reducing the time to hire with over 1,000 clients onboarded and 30,000 job mandates already on ARX, early adoption is encouraging. Enterprise sales cycles for AI tools tend to be longer, and we are pacing accordingly, focused on deepening outcomes within existing large accounts, key accounts before scaling them further. AIX is both a product innovation and a nascent revenue stream at this point in time. We also continue to embed AI in our internal processes. Generative AI is enabling faster product rollouts, scalable content creation and more efficient marketing with several recent campaigns built entirely in-house using AI-led tools. Across our business, the logic is consistent, better AI-driven outcomes drive higher adoption and higher adoption translates into higher spending from customers. That is the foundation of our monetization approach. The focus for FY '27 is on converting what we've already built into adoption and revenue. ARX has been like rolled out to 1,000 clients, and we have now 30,000 job mandates on ARX, significantly reducing candidate sourcing time. Scaling its client base and deepening usage within existing accounts is a near-term priority. The ultimate measure of success, however, is how meaningfully we can reduce the end-to-end cycle -- hiring cycle time for enterprise clients, and we continue to track this as a key metric. Premium X, our dedicated database for premium candidates and data products such as Executive intelligence and TalentPulz represent additional monetization opportunities as we expand their reach amongst enterprise clients. In 99acres, our AI recommendation is engine is driving 10% to 15% improvement in unique interest with monetization expected to follow as a platform as platform engagement strengthens. At Jeevansath, AIpowers recommendation matching the pricing end-to-end monetizing benefits are already flowing through and will continue to build over time. The priority for FY '27 is accelerating adoption and converting product progress into meaningful revenue. Thank you. And now we are happy to take questions.

Anand, we already have a few questions. Maybe we can start.

First question is from Kaushik from Bank of America.

Can you hear me? This is Sachin Saka from Bank of America. I have 3 questions. First question, again, I want to understand a little bit more on the color on sentiment in hiring. When you talk to corporates, what kind of comments are we hearing in terms of how they are thinking on hiring given what's happening in AI? And would be great to get color across GCC, IT sector and non-IT sector Second question, let me actually go through all the 3 questions, and then I'll pause to take answers from you. Second is obviously on 99 acres. Clearly, we're seeing good execution, good margins. I wanted to understand anything specific which happened in this quarter like competition was down or low marketing? And directionally, how should we think about the sustainability of operating profits from these levels? And third, I would love to understand how are you guys thinking from an Info Edge Ventures point of view, if there are any incremental opportunities we are seeing in India to invest from an AI perspective?

Yes. See, the overall job market, I think the sentiment continues to be subdued. It's not a hot market. It's a luc market. Of course, there is hiring happening in pockets. But -- so for example, you mentioned GCCs. The smaller GCCs continue to hire, but the larger ones, some of them have been sort of -- the headcount has shrunk over the last few quarters in some cases. The non-IT market has also slowed down a bit for us over the last few quarters. We, of course, expanded our coverage. We are now in more cities than earlier. We have many more clients, but ARPUs are still low. So the overall sort of hiring environment is like -- it's not a hot market. It's not as if companies are sort of under pressure to hire quickly. They are taking their time. They're hiring for certain positions. positions like in machine learning and AI, there, we're seeing massive growth. A lot of companies want to hire this kind of talent. But -- and so amongst the GCCs, at least, there is pressure on the larger ones to sort of become -- for people to become more productive. But let's see how this plays out over the next few quarters. I think a lot of this is also linked to the economy and to what's happening globally and not just AI. So if the Indian economy picks up, we expect the non-IT sectors to start hiring once again and to start hiring a lot more people than earlier and attrition rates to pick up. But that will have to -- that will depend on how the economy plays out over the next few quarters. And also, I guess, once there is the uncertainty around the geopolitics sort of if things get better on that front, that should also help in the medium term. As far as 99acres is concerned, we've -- I think the team has done an incredible job of growing traffic share over the last few quarters. We've added at least 13, 14 points to our traffic share over the last few months. We are now a clear leader in almost every city, right? We have -- we estimate we have a 52% traffic. Our latest number for traffic share for April is 52% time share. And our response -- the responses we deliver, ultimately, our revenue is a function of the response we deliver to our clients. In the resale and rental segments, response have almost doubled over the last few quarters. In the new home segment, which is where we were a little slow, which is almost half our revenue, traffic responses started growing. So response grew by 22% in the new home segment last year. In Q4, it grew by 33% -- so we are confident that we'll do a good job in 99acres this year. The monetization follows the lag. And once you get to 50%, 52% share, it's not easy for others to catch up, right? And that's where we are right now. And if we continue to add -- if you add a few more percentage points of share this year, I think we'll become a very, very strong leader in this market.

Sanjeev, you want to take the question on Ventures.

Sorry, on AI and ventures. See, we just did a sort of enumeration just last week. So out of our 130-plus companies we've done since 2007, which are nonstrategic investments, today, a little over 50, maybe 50, 51 are deep tech or AI first, right? Increasingly, almost all the companies that we see now have got element of AI and very many of them are AI first. And we are not going out and looking for AI companies. This is what we are finding, bubbling up underneath. So clearly, the AI space is very, very active. The government on deep tech, the government is putting a lot of effort and investment in INR 100,000 crore RDI fund. There is a INR 20,000 crore fund of fund startup. There's a INR 10,000 crore AI fund that the government has put. So a lot of government effort, a lot of private capital coming in. A lot of youngers are trying. So there's a lot of action in AI. Our difficult task is to figure out who will succeed, who will fail behind who is going to moat, what can replicate. You are not finding too many foundational models there. So it's not as if you're investing behind LLMs. But it's an app layer. And there, you've got to ensure that there's a moat and you have a barrier to entry and you can actually succeed and not be disrupted 2 years later. So that's a long and short of AI.

Got it. Very clear. Just one small follow-up to Vineet -- sorry, to Hitesh. This follow-up is more on competition on 99 acres. Are we seeing anything change from a competitive perspective, which is allowing us to sort of move to 52% traffic share and continue to increase or it's purely driven by strong execution?

I think our team would like to believe that it's our execution. See, we've done, I think, a lot of things right over the last few quarters. We've been very focused on a few things, and we've done a fantastic job of execution. I don't want to get into the details here. But I think a lot of the credit to the team for having done a really good job. I think See, as far as our competitors go, see the in the broker business, and we compete with Magic Bricks and housing. In the new home business, we compete with Meta and Google. And in the owner business, we actually end up competing with Magicks Housing and no broker to some extent. My sense is all these -- of course, Meta and Google continue to be are very, very strong players. They are -- and it's -- the new home market is a large market. And we are only now beginning to sort of make serious inroads into that market. It's a very big opportunity in the medium term us'sN500ro, INR 400 crores, INR 500 crores TAM. And we do only about maybe INR 240 crores, INR 250 crores in this segment. But our response has started to grow. We begin to get a few things right. Like I said, 20% -- 22% response growth last year, but 33% growth in Q4. Hopefully, we'll be able to monetize better as we go forward. In the secondary market, retail and rental, we've succeeded -- we've managed to grow our customer count substantially over the last few quarters. We have managed to grow our supply share substantially over the last few quarters. And we -- our traffic in every city now in every city. Earlier, we used to be leaders in 2 or 3 of the big cities, but now in Delhi, Bombay, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, almost -- in almost every big city now, we are traffic leaders and supply leaders and leaders in terms of number of customers and increasingly on revenue as well. Competition has -- there have been a few issues with competition. There have been leadership changes at housing -- at both Housing and Magic Wicks. Housing, they sort of -- they give out their numbers publicly. So I think their burn is now close to INR 200 crores, INR 250 crores a year. And they sort of lost a lot of ground in my view, in India. So maybe it's no longer as exciting for them as it was a few years ago. And in the owner segment also, we have made substantial progress over the last few quarters. So 99acres is 3 owners to list. And we monetize only a small percentage of owners who list their properties on 99acres. So there's substantial headroom for growth there as well. And our supply share on the owner segment has also increased substantially over the last few quarters.

I'd like to add something to that. You see 99acres does not report to me. The operating businesses don't report to me. They report to Hitesh. But what I have observed sitting on the side of the operating businesses is that I think a fantastic team, a huge clarity of thought in granular detail and therefore, execution on what the market wants, what the customer needs, what competition is not doing, where the gaps are and then executing relentlessly. And I think exceptional team and talent, and I think a fantastic leadership by Hitesh. Hitesh has probably spending the bulk of his time last couple of years on 99acres, leading from the front in the trenches.

Next question from Vivek from AMBIT Capital.

Yes. So on recruitment, we hear of high-value jobs being generated, especially related to AI. Does this indicate a shift in the market to perhaps more premium but lower volume hiring? Hitesh, in this segment, is LinkedIn really a threat? That's the first one. The second one is on the non-IT segment. You did touch upon this in your answer to Sachin. There doesn't seem to be a very meaningful competitor to you here. So is it just a macro weakness? Or is there something that you believe you can do more to accelerate growth? You've been putting in a lot of effort recently. You've tried to improve the quality of search, increased presence in Tier 2 and 3 cities. And I think you're also offering free trials to SMEs. So just wanted your thoughts on the non-IT segment and what you can really do to accelerate growth? And the last one is on job health. What are the key metrics of success that you're tracking there? And where do you read the progress in regard to those metrics? And when do you see this becoming meaningful for your recruitment segment?

The premium segment, our sense is right now the premium market, and when I say premium, I mean people who earn more than, let's say, INR 25 lakhs, INR 30 lakhs a year. That segment has been growing faster than the mid-level segment for the last few quarters. A lot of new jobs are being created in AI and machine learning, data engineering and so on. But these are not like leadership level jobs, right? These are not like jobs I crores and INR crores, INR 2 crores, INR 3 crores. There are some of those as well. But the bulk of the hiring is in the INR 20 lakh to INR 40 lakh, INR 50 lakh segment. Naukri is equally strong. So Naukri has significant market share in this segment. And both IM jobs and -- his are also reasonably strong in this segment. And of course, we are also doing a lot of work to improve our share in this segment. Yes, LinkedIn is a competitor. But LinkedIn is even stronger when you want to do very senior level hiring, when you want to hire people who are not looking for a job, people who are passive. We've also done a lot to improve our experience for these users and these customers. We've launched Naukri top tier on the job seeker side. We've launched Premium X on the recruiter side. We have got His, which is our premium. IMJobs is a premium offering, and they are very strong. And we've grown high-risk well over the last couple of years, and -- his now has now significant share in the premium tech hiring market. So we are -- I think we've been working hard to sort of improve our offerings in this segment, we are confident that we will continue to grow our share even in this segment going forward. So while this segment -- I agree with you that this segment is going to grow faster than the mid-tier segment, but our share in this segment will continue to grow over time is what I feel right now. In the non-IT sort of market segment, see, what -- the market has slowed down a bit. That's our sense. We are doing, of course, a lot more than earlier. Not only have we expanded our coverage and our reach by opening more offices, setting up shop in more cities. We've launched a freemium model to attract SMEs on the platform. We are using machine learning to improve our AI models for matching for the non-IT segments we operate in. That's an ongoing thing. But slowly and steadily, we're making progress on that front as well. There, I think the real issue is volume. I think the volume hiring is not picking up as yet. Maybe it will in the next couple of quarters, who knows. But right now, I think there is stress there. In the value segment or in the jaw hair sort of market, we are making very good progress. We were trying to get our model right, and we focused on Delhi NCR for some time. And I would -- and today, we are, I think -- of course, there is -- the competitors in this market are smaller in size, but we are leader in traffic in Delhi NCR, and we started monetizing now in Delhi NCR, and now we are taking this template to other cities. So this year, we will become a little more aggressive in Mumbai and Bangalore markets as well. The metrics we track are similar to what we track in Naukri traffic, time spent on the platform, number of jobs, number of customers, number of applications per job, stuff like that, right? And all these metrics, we are making good progress. And of course, now we start monetizing. It's a small business right now but it's a start-up. So we would like to grow it 100% year-on-year for the next few years. It will take some time to become a meaningful contributor to our revenue because the base is very small. But I think it's strategically very important for us. And it will help us tap into a brand-new market, which can grow at a very high rate for several years. One of the companies in China, I don't know if you're familiar with Canon, they work with more than 6 million customers, and most of them are SMEs. About more than 40% or 50% of 50% of the revenue comes from SMEs. And they are very profitable, and they've grown and the over $1 billion, I think, in revenue. It will take a few years. India is not that large. The Indian market is not that large. But I think that's the right model to follow for this segment. There are several things which make the segment and this market different from the Naukri or market -- and that's what Job is trying to solve.

Just 1 clarification related to the opening comments. You said something about one-off INR 20 crore accrual in -- was it in 199 acres? And does this impact your billing or revenue -- could you repeat that? I just couldn't understand what .

Yes, yes, that was the 90 acres. Basically, we had provided -- we wrote back some earlier provision and that did not impact billings, but it impacted revenue and also profit for this quarter, unit, do you want to elaborate on that to me? Sure.

So Vivek, basically, in 90 acres, we have a some small part of the business, which is cost per lead model. So in that model, we were creating roughly around 20% as warranty provision. Considering that for 20% of the leads, we will have to issue refunds to our customers in case the lease are not satisfactory. But -- and then we -- over last 8 quarters, we studied those trends, and then we came to a conclusion that actual the refund that we have to issue is significantly lower than what we were building provision for. So as a result, we have made 2 changes. One, we reversed the extra provision, which was not used as of December in the last quarter, that led to some one-off onetime gain. And second, going forward, instead of creating this 20% provision, we will be now provisioning it at 5%. So these are 2 changes. So that led to around INR 20 crores of higher revenue in this quarter, which obviously has slowed down to profitability as well, but that was more like one-off in this quarter in 90 acres.

Okay. Understood. So then this quarter's billing performance is not impacted by that. It's only revenue and segmental we do.

So billings have already been accounted for -- so this has already been -- it's already part of billings. But think of it that way that you collect INR 10 for a customer for this kind of business. But for recognizing revenue, you were taking 20%, which is INR 2 as provision and INR 8 was going to revenue, right? So that, too, over the last few quarters, combined the value of that equivalent of 2, we have reversed it back in this quarter.

Okay. And okay, that's correct. So this performance of 1.9% billing growth was -- you mentioned that there is some change in the way you are carrying out the business, which is lower, right? .

Yes, yes, we undertook some changes in our sales organization, and we tightened some processes around basically billing is invoicing, right? Those are now -- so we tightened controls around watching into the future and stuff like that, right? Customers are willing to pay us in advance, and we've sort of clamped down on some of those things. And I think this is a good thing to do, and it will help us in the future. We'll have a onetime transition impact on Q4 billings.

Okay. So this is not likely to repeat in the next coming quarters? Is it the onetime impact that you mentioned about it because logically, last year's base will have, let's say, those advanced collections, but now perhaps you're not going to collect money in advance, even a customer wants to pay. Is that .

Yes, we made it -- we basically tightened the controls around all this a bit.

Thanks, our next question from Kunal from Bannantine.

My first question was on job. Like can you talk about the competition there? Like we looked at Sapna a couple of other plays what is their business model? Is it similar to us? Like I understand they have been monetizing as well if you can throw some light on how we are thinking to monetize -- that was on job there. Second was on 99 acres, when you say this onetime adjustment that happened in this quarter about the write-back then like from a sustainable point of view, what is -- how should we look at the profitability of -- like what is the impact on the profitability because of that? And is it that the profit number that you see may not be sustainable in Q1. That is the second. And third, like we've been talking about the job seeker as a product growing at a fast rate -- can you talk more about which are the sectors in which the relevance has increased. Any more nuance on which kind of drop sequels are finding the product more beneficial ties across broad-based for all the sectors. These are the 3 questions.

Yes. So our business model is in dogs not really different from Aplite Work India except that perhaps we are more premium than they are -- so we allow due to list for free and then we charge only in some markets and in some categories. Like I said, our focus right now has been -- or at least for the last few quarters has been to get our product market fit right and to become a clear leader on traffic in CR. And now that we've achieved that objective, we are monetizing aggressively and we're trying to monetize more obesity and NCR and then and we're taking this template to other markets. But the model is not very different from work India, for sure, overall model. 99acres, this or this -- because the provision has been reversed, it resulted in INR 20 crores of extra revenue in Q4, and that has flowed to the bottom line as well, right? It's what I'm -- it's not expected to occur again. And as far as job seeker offerings go -- we've launched -- so the 360 offerings in Naurki for all segments and for all categories and for all kinds of job seekers. And we've seen growth across the board. It's broad-based. We've seen higher growth across all segments, across all categories.

Next question from Swapnil from JM Financial.

My first question is with respect to your deferred sales growth numbers. And it seems that there has been a significant disruption in those strains across all your segments. Does that mean that your revenue for the next year right across all the segments would see a significant dip because the deferred sales number itself is down. When we look at from a good perspective last year, it was 18% in Naukri, for example, and now down to 12%.

Sorry, Vaneet do you want to take that?

So defer sales revenue is a function of billings growth. Last year, when you looked at the higher deferred sales number because last year the growth rate of Naukri business billings was actually higher. So quarter 3 operating at a 15% quarter 4, it grew at 18%. So therefore, the deferred sales buildup was also higher. And therefore, the flow-through to revenue was higher. Therefore, this year, you see higher revenue growth. Some part of it, what you mentioned is right, that this year because billings relatively slowed down vis-a-vis last year second half, so that effect will flow through to revenue over FY '27, like basically, the way we like the way we account billing to revenue is, it is amortized over 365 days. So that flow-through will happen. Other thing to note is that like Hitesh mentioned, our candidate services business, B2C business that's growing faster. So there the tenure of the product is shorter. So like in Naukri, typically, you'd sell for 12 months revenue gets recognized over 12 months. in B2C business and that business is going faster, they are the generally the plans are 3 months, 6 months, 1 month. So the recognition is quicker. So there, the flow-through of billings to revenue is immediate. So that also plays a part. So it's a mix of both. That's how 1 should look at it.

Got it. The second question is with respect to our B2C revenue growth, indeed. I mean this particular item has been -- has grown at around 33%, a significant number. Any particular reason that this growth is visible right now, and it was not earlier. Any changes that you would have done in your proposition for the candidates?

Yes. It's -- we've done a whole bunch of things. So we've launched a lot of new offerings. Some of them are AI, like I spoke about, ASM makers, they have more interviews, AI agents for job seekers. And two, also, we made the model more self-serve. So earlier, there was a lot of selling involved as in telecalling. And now there's a lot of self-serve and that's also helped as sort of grow our revenue faster.

And any forward-looking guidance on this particular piece? Can you -- if you can -- how do you expect..

To be honest, I've also been surprised myself. This business used to grow at 18%, 20% per year, but after making these changes, it's now start doing at 30%, but it's only even 1 quarter. Now of course, the team is very bullish, but let's see this sustains.

Got it. And just the last thing on the employee cost side. So for the last couple of quarters, I think there has been some dip in employee count, and that has led to a bit of margins also. Are there any specific measures that you have taken to drive some efficiency gains over there?

So everybody wants to use more AI inside Info Edge also. So every time they ask for an AI budget, you also tell them to sort of just like our customers, we want to be the can you hopefully become more efficient and more productive if you're using -- since you're using AI now. So we've implemented a lot of -- so there are some -- I don't know, there are hundreds of air projects going on in the company right now as we speak. And I'm sure we're getting some efficiency because of what we're doing inside the company because we're using these tools because we are doing things in a much more manner earlier. We don't expect a major reduction in head count going forward. We've just sort of but yes, people are becoming more productive than earlier because of these tools. We have not laid off any 1 or anything of that sort. We've -- but just we are just encouraging everyone to do more than what they were doing earlier.

Yes. If I can just comment that, I think there's generally an efficiency drive within the company to just look at virtually every new higher order rehire very, very closely. So there's a strong emphasis to just ensure that every hire is adding value. And your other point about the job seeker business growing strongly. To some extent, this might be a function of just countercyclical to what's happening in the economy, generally, with the slowing job hiring market, you're bound to see a little bit more inbound interest in the services, which you offer for jobs seeker, the paid services. So yes I think that's a function of what's happening broadly in the hiring trends in the economy.

Just a quick clarification. I mean, what would be the contribution from this job services to your overall billings?

The jobs seeker business, I think revenue last year was about INR 170 crores, 6%, 7% of the billings.

6% to 7%.

6% to 7%. Full year growth even in the Job seeker business was only 19%. It's only in Q4 that it grew by 3%.

There's a question in Chatbox.should we usatethat? .

We get that here. Yes. Sunny, this is for you. So there's a question from Avnisha. What is the aim behind starting 2 new funds, Karkadooma trust and B8 you'd like to take that one?

Yes. So see, 1 is to a fund which we are investing in growth stage in inventory, we felt that it was out. We had the capital. We had the team to utilize the capital and the opportunity. And 1 is to continue to invest in deep tech. So we had got earlier investor in deep tech through our subsidiary of our offering forage called Red stock. And then through fund called capital to be right? And when that fund ran out of first check money, we decided to allocate a fresh pool of capital, and that's how we're doing these 2 funds.

So the next question is from Pratik from HSBC.

So my question was to attach on the hiring sentiment. So for the color. Just wanted to follow up on that. How are you seeing the sentiment over the, let's say, 6 months? Is it improving? Is it worse, in the IT business, what you're looking at, if you look at the LTM attrition trends, right? Probably in the last 2 quarters, it has fallen a bit, right? So -- and this is a trailing 12-month attrition that we get from IT comes probably from the fall, it's actually higher fall, right? Even we are hearing at GCC companies, you also mentioned that it is a phenomena called job hogging, right, because of the -- how the -- how everything is happening around AI. So first, I wanted to understand like how are you looking at sentiment is it improving, stable or has deteriorated from last 6 months? Yes, I have a follow-up question after that. .

Yes, I would say it's been like stable. So if you look at jobs seek also, I think it's been like in that 4%, 5%, 6% range. So yes, so I would say it's been like stable more. In some markets, in some sectors, maybe there's more hiring happening than earlier. But on the whole, there's not much improvement.

And this, I think, earlier, you had to -- you used to mention about the margin side, the way the business would grow from Naukri way you think about the margins, right? Obviously, the growth has slowed a bit, right? So how should we think about margins rate? Would -- have you guys probably changed the thoughts there and probably margins will sustain as they were in SP690211960 Should be that kind of margin should we look at or probably something changes?

So there are 2 big areas where we are still investing in ruin our recruitment business. One is Jobhai and the other is AI. And we don't want to starve these 2 areas of investment. So we'll continue to invest in both job and I important for us for the long term. Now my sense is that if we are able to grow our top line by in double digits. Margin should -- but the margin should remain the same. So if you're able to grow at 10% or more, we should be able to maintain margin in Naukri. And if we grow faster than that, then margins, maybe margins could get better going forward. If we -- on the other hand, the county slows down further and NOK crores are 7%, 8%, then it will be hard to sort of -- then we may sort of lose a little bit of margin in the short term.

Yes. And is also on your 99acres business, right, I understand 4Q was 1 of our aberration, right? However, before that, you guys were doing at somewhere around mid 15% billing growth, and also now you have a higher market share commentary is not more bullish. Should we start building in higher than 15% growth? Do you think that would be a right estimate for next year? And should we start seeing that from the first quarter itself.

Seems easy to make projections about what could happen over the next 3 to 5 years and about what will happen next quarter, right? But our goal in 99acres, actually, our goal should be if you ask me -- given where we are today because we made substantial gains in share. Over the last few quarters. We should now be aiming to get to 60% share. That should be our first goal. And revenue, like I said, will follow with the lag, and we've been gaining share for a few quarters. And I think the business should now -- I mean we did -- our billing last year was about INR 500 crore -- INR 497 crores, INR 498 crores. We should aim to at least double our business if you ask me over the next 3 years. And if we are able to do that, then we should be able to generate at least a 25% to 30% EBITDA margin as well, right? That should be our medium-term goal in 90acres. We have an opportunity. It's a large market. we are, after a long time, clear leaders, our competition is struggling and we have momentum. We've had a hiccup in Q4. Hopefully, things will get back on track from -- in Q1. In the short term, there could be some the market will slow down a little bit, something else may happen codons. But over a 3, 4-year period, I think we have now laid the foundation of building a second -- a solid second vertical inside Info Edge. And the team is also confident that they can deliver. And in these kind of businesses, once you get this kind of lead over your competitors, it's not easy for the for them to catch up. So medium term, this should be our goal for us.

And last one. So I know you guys are a little conservative on M&A, but in this area of 190 nice, would you guys also be open to kind of consider if there is any M&A opportunity, right, just to kind of for the industry sector where Naurki's business normative, right? So would you be okay doing that?

Yes. I mean at the right price for the right asset, why not? .

Sorry, we bid capital as a follow-up question. Way we go ahead and ask a question. .

Two questions. Number 1 is on AI racks. Hitesh, last time, you had spoken about some of the mandates that you've got on AI racks how you are now taking it to more and more customers. Just wanted to understand better in terms of client adoption and billing and tie. Have you initiated those conversations yet? Anything that you would like to share on this one? That's number one. The second one is I appreciate the rich color you gave on an. Just wanted to understand whether the traffic share gains also help you in the new home segment? Or is it primarily lead gen for brokers, which get stronger and stronger. And further to this question, if you can answer what else are you doing in the new home segment which can help you gain share from the horizontal media portals, global media portals.

AI, so we've been working on our agentive offering for a while, and we were sort of figuring out the go-to-market. So initially, we tried to -- we did a pilot with a few customers, and we try to sell these offerings to a few recruit. But that was creating a lot of friction, and it was taken out of time. B2B adoption is harder, B2C is easier. So we've changed our approach. And now -- and what we've done is we made ARX available for free to a lot of recruiters on our platform. And we are asking them to try it out to sample to see the difference. Our old age is listen AI to turn recruiters into super recruiter. So that's the positioning of the agentic AI offering [indiscernible] become more productive and to get job faster and better. And that's the fewer take it right now. And we are seeing -- it's a new offering. So like any new offering, there are some only your doctors. And we are seeing that on the platform now. So close to -- I mean, a few hundred customers have already -- have recruiters, lots of hundreds of recruiters that have been experimenting with it, and some are using it, of course, a lot more than others, and close to 30,000 mandates now gone through ARx. the product also is under constant development. We're trying to improve as we get feedback from clients. So now this is something, which we are very excited about because, again, it's early days. It's a new offering. We know whether it will succeed. But if it exceeds then again, it increases TAM for us, right? Because like we've said this in the past in our heads, we targeted take a 1% from our clients. But if we are able to -- if we now make -- if you're able to be reuse more productive, and this take rate can actually go up over time, right? So even if hiring volumes don't grow, our revenue can still go. But it's early days but we are very excited about this offering and fingers crossed on this one. Similarly, we've launched -- and this -- the Talent Pulse offering is a little older because we launched it a while back as we get more and more data and as we get better in modeling, our offering is improving. So again, in Talent Pulse, what we're doing now is we're making it -- we are monetizing it, and we have a lot of revenue from talent pulse. We did about INR 30 crore, INR 35 crores last year from our talent use offering. We are making it available to more customers to us that's who they can try it out, and we've launched new variants, and we are -- and again, this is a business we think we can grow much faster than the overall Naukri business. And again, it increases the TAM for us. So these are the -- these 2 offers are excited about. Additionally, we've also launched premium X premium search inside Naukri. Early days, that's free right now. We're not charging for it. But the idea there is to grow our share of the premium hiring market because that market, like I mentioned, is probably growing faster than the mid-level, mid-tier hiring market right now. So again, very difficult to say what's going to happen in the short term but over a 3-year period. It will be great if we can make a few hundred crores of incremental revenue from these offerings. That would be our aim. In the 99acres business, new home business, yes, when you grow your share of the secondary market, the new home revenue also grows because a small percentage of users of buyers on the platform open to both, right? So there -- so when they come to the platform, they're not sure whether they want to buy a new home or to moving sort of apartment. And therefore, a percentage of them end up sort of becoming leads for our new home clients as well. So that -- so as you gain higher -- and then, of course, also the new home advertisers as you gain more market share, they see you as a platform, which they need to be on. right, because that's where all the traffic is. So it helps, of course, you need to keep working on your new offerings. And to answer your question around what are we -- what extra are we doing on that front? See, one of the things we're excited about is our 99 shorts offering. We've rolled it out in NCR. We worked very hard last year to launch this offering in NCR is like think of it as an Instagram of real estate projects. And so you can see apartments, you can see get details of projects, walk throughs. It's all video, right? So you can -- it's always like getting a test drive for a new car sitting in your home. You can see projects, and you can see apartments and -- you can see here residents talk about, you can view resident reviews and stuff like that. So early days. It's been -- but I like the content, you can try it out yourself. We are going to take it to more cities this year. If this product takes off, then this could dramatically change the experience for new homes on 900 acres for our users. And if that happens and if you become a destination site for new homes and if we become the place where people start their new home search like we are for ray to move-ins apartments, then this business could grow much faster than it has grown over the last few years. Separately, we're also working on using -- we have a large database of both owners and buyers on our platform. And we are working on we are trying to leverage AI to sort of do a better job of reaching out to these people on our platform for new launches. But that's early days on that one. But I think even that will sort of work out in the medium term for us. So we are working on a bunch of offerings in new homes. Our response, like I said, in Q4 for new homes was up 33% Y-o-Y.

Thank you, Vivek. And Vineet there was a last question for the evening we have

Thank you, everyone. On behalf of Info Edge, we now conclude this conference call. You may disconnect the lines. Thank you for joining.

Thank you. Have a great evening.

Thank you so much, everyone. See you next time. .