Redington Limited (REDINGTON) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
August 4, 2022
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Operator
operatorLadies and gentlemen, good morning, and welcome to Redington India Limited Q1 FY '23 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Rajiv Srivastava, Managing Director, Redington India Limited. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveGood morning, everyone, and welcome to our call for quarter 1. You would have seen our numbers that were disseminated yesterday, and we are pleased to report another strong quarter of sales and operating margin growth. Redington achieved record revenue and operating margin for any first quarter of the year as our continued investments in technology capabilities, partner relationships, and our comprehensive breadth of offerings begins to pay off. You would have seen that on a global basis, our revenues have grown by 25%. This is on a net accounting basis. On gross, it will be 27%, while our EBITDA has grown 34% and PAT has grown 33%. And this actually points to the fact that continuing demand -- growing demand for supply chain orchestration is driving strong financial performance across our global business. We know that tech adoption has been at an accelerated pace across pretty much every segment of the market that you can come across, though there was a softening of consumer demand this quarter. But apart from that, across enterprises, across MSMEs, mid-market and government education, tech demand has been fairly robust. And this -- and we continue -- and we continue to anticipate a reasonable demand environment and expect to sustain revenue -- strong revenues and margins from our recently implemented operating improvements amidst the backdrop of geopolitical and financial uncertainty. We know that shift to digital has been strong and continuing. In fact, I've said this in the last -- shift to digital is a macro trait, either a growth shift or a survival paradigm for most companies right now, including governments and they improve efficiency, they improve productivity, and they allow you to do much more in your businesses. So that's something which is playing out in a very good way, and we are trying to leverage to our advantage as much as we possibly can. Also, the fact that the economic environment in the geographies that we operate in has been fairly all right. Even though the global GDP growth, the global growth was dragged down by IMF, in this quarter, between last quarter and this quarter, the growth was dragged down from 4.1% to 2.9%, but still in the economies, in the geographies we are operating in, every country has seen or has been guided a very positive growth -- GDP growth for the rest of the year. So I think that plays to our advantage. Also, the fact that in most of the countries that we are operating in, the demand is led by investments by governments, investments by organizations in those countries and also a huge amount of consumption that is taking place in these countries. So I think both of those are playing to our advantage right now and that's helping and supporting us. I'm going to -- and just to let you know, our growth has been fairly broad-based this time. All the regions that we operated in, India, Middle East, Africa, Turkey and South Asia, every region has pretty much played out in a good way. Every region has contributed to the growth. Also, every region has contributed to -- and every product category, so we've had a broad-based growth by region. And we've had a broad-based growth by categories of products, which is IT, whether it is volume or value, mobility and our services portfolio. So all of that has turned out to be extremely reasonable in this quarter. Let me step back and stop over here. You've seen the results, and I'm opening up to any questions or any comments that any of you might have.
Operator
operator[Operator Instructions]
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveJust so you know, I've also got my Chief Financial Officer -- Global Financial Officer, S.V. Krishnan on the call with me, and our financial analyst Deepika on the call.
Operator
operator[Operator Instructions] The first question is from the line of Nitin Padmanabhan from Investec.
Nitin Padmanabhan
analystCongrats on the strong quarter. I have quite a few questions, but I'll just ask two and fall back in the queue. The first is Redington has always prioritized risk over growth, right? And if you just look at the landscape over the next to a few quarters from your lens, do you think that growth comes risk at this point in time. And is there any change in philosophy in terms of how you manage risk, right? That was the first question. The second question is on, obviously, the working capital, which has gone up. If you could give us some breakdown on receivables, inventory, payables and what led to such a quick sort of shift in working capital days. The broad assumption was that it will be a little gradual, but it's been quite quick. So just wanted to understand the context there as well.
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveOkay. Let me give you a color to both the questions, and I'm going to also requesting our Global CFO, Krishnan to chip in afterwards on that. To your question about risk over growth or growth comes rest, I think it's always going to be a very balanced sort of portfolio for us. We are a company which is very focused on what's going on in the market. In every single geography, every single country we operate in, we have to always assess the opportunity landscape and what it takes to get to that option landscape and balance it to what. We are never going to be reckless because that's what has given us growth over the last so many, many years. And we are going to be very outside in and maximize the context of the market opportunities that are coming in. Just to give you one example of that, Nitin. And like I said, it's a great question because it really plays to the way in which we operate as an organization. In the last quarter, we started to see a shift from the work from home and learn from home started to reduce, whereas the consumption in the offices, small and medium enterprises, enterprises, large customers, government, education, schools and universities all started to go up, and we had to shift our model and pivot our model to make sure we capitalize on that. Now that's a no risk strategy, but it's maximizing the market opportunity from a growth perspective. So we are always going to be balanced. There are countries right now in our portfolio, which happen to have a higher risk profile, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Egypt, all of them, okay, and we are making choices to make sure that we stay in the right direction there, okay. So that's from a risk as a growth perspective. We are very balanced, but we are very, very focused on maximizing the market opportunities in a very good way. The second is working capital has gone up. Clearly, it has gone up. If you recall in the last conference that we had same time a quarter ago, we had guided that our working capital will stick in the range of 28 to 35 and right there, it is -- and it's sticking at the early part of that curve. We know that the global markets right now, whether they are financial markets, geopolitical economic landscape, all of them, all of those are little disrupted right now. We do see that interest rates are hardening up. We see inflation is going up. We see commodity prices really high. We see supply chain is disrupted all of this will contribute. And then there are many equipments which are not getting supplied in time. So your supply and delivery for project orders is going to get hampered or going to get constrained a bit, so just the integration is going to become challenging. So given all of that, we understood that the working capital will go up. It will normalize somewhere. And the way we had guided, it stays exactly right at the early part of that curve right now. So I think we are pleased that we are pleased with the situation, and that's the way it is playing out exactly the way you expect. Krishnan, you want to add?
S. V. Krishnan
executive[indiscernible]
Operator
operatorI'm sorry to interrupt, sir. Your voice is breaking.
S. V. Krishnan
executiveOkay, is this clear now?
Operator
operatorYes, sir.
S. V. Krishnan
executiveOkay. So as you know, the net working capital by end of the quarter, it was about 28 days, split into debtor days of about 52 days, inventory days of about 32 days and creditor days of about 56 days. I want to ascribe one important reason as to why there is a spike in working capital as Rajiv alluded to you. See, in the enterprise space, what we see is, there are short shipments. And since there are short shipments and the balance shipments are taking time because of the general shortages that we see in the industry. We had to store these stocks and we couldn't bill. That has enabled us to increase our inventory days. So this is something which is very unique. It'll continue for some time till this shortage situation goes away. But there is no concern at all on this in our view. And also, as the enterprise performance, the IT value performance has been better, as you know very well, this also tends to increase their debtor days and at the same time, we will also get in higher creditor days which can cushion a bit in terms of increase in debtor days. So as Rajiv said, we are well within the trade, and we don't see any concern in business.
Nitin Padmanabhan
analystSure. That's helpful. And any change in provisions for the quarter?
S. V. Krishnan
executiveOkay. So the provisions for the reasons that I have stated had gone up in the case of inventory. Inventory provision for the quarter has been at about 0.55%, which is mainly because of some of these part shipments that had come in where we had to provide for it. We had an option of changing the inventory provision model because we don't think these will be taken a second but we thought it would be prudent not to make a change, and we had gone ahead. So that has increased the provision percentage for this quarter, which -- I mean, once the product gets sold, it will get reversed. In the case of receivables, the provision percentage for this quarter has been 18 bps, 0.18%. That's also slightly higher. I want to mention two important points here. One in the case of India. In Q4, there was a provision that we had created last quarter. And I mean we knew the money will come but it is going to take time. A substantial portion of the money has been received in the current quarter and the provision got reversed. There is a similar transaction in our overseas business, where while we are still confident in terms of collecting because of the aging that we should provide for it and that provision has added on to it so that the overall provision is about 18 bps, Nitin.
Operator
operator[Operator Instructions] The next question is from the line of Pranav Kshatriya from Edelweiss.
Pranav Kshatriya
analystCongratulations on a good set of numbers. My first question is regarding the growth. I mean, we were anticipating some sort of slowing down growth in India Mobility segment. But if I look at that is the one which has driven the growth in this quarter. So what has led to that? Because I was thinking that we had this change in GTM, which should slow the growth. And your commentary also suggests that enterprise has driven the growth, but the numbers suggest that India Mobility is sort of driving the growth. So that's my first question. Second question is on the sustainability of the margin, if I look at the margin and if I incorporate the 18 basis points.
Operator
operatorMr. Kshatriya, sorry to interrupt. Your voice is echoing.
Pranav Kshatriya
analystYes. So if I look at the margin profile, the margins are at significantly higher, considering there has been 18 basis point provision. So what will be the sustainable level of margin, given I think most of the costs are now normalized? Or are there one-off costs which you want to call off? Because our last interaction suggested that you might be looking at investing more in creating capability, and that's why we were sort of expecting the margins to go down. And lastly, I mean, working capital trajectory, if you can comment on that. That's it from my side.
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveOkay. Many questions. I think about the working capital, but we can give you more color to that. But let me give you a sense as to growth and is the growth driven by India Mobility or is it driven by many other things? Growth is driven by Mobility overall. Clearly, there is a mobility which has grown faster than any other part of the business. But our value part of the business has grown 30% okay, which is a very, very, significant and serious growth. Value business, it generally don't see such a huge amount of growth because that's a much more stable sort of a product line and category. But our value part of the business has grown significantly. Then our cloud has grown even faster than that. Our cloud has grown 48%. And it is equivalent to our mobility growth. I think the question that came up last time in the call, and many analysts, many of you had asked that question about the impact of Apple GTM and how is it going to impact the revenues of [indiscernible] and all that. And if you recall we had answered that question, it wasn't Apple alone, it was Apple and Dell and Lenovo. And everybody makes changes to their GTM. And it is only fair. I told you that it is only fair for them to make changes to the GTM to suit the model that they have. And we at Redington have to do a variety of different things to make sure that we continue on our course of growth. And there are many elements and your question is very deep. There are many elements that allow us to stay on the track of growth and also stay on the track of profitability. Sustainability of margins that is one-off of costs, we are making investments. We made investments into our many areas of technology, people, platform last couple of quarters we've been making, and we'll continue to accelerate those investments because those are fundamental to our business. And what we are doing in that space is, we are making investments in technology that allows us to become more productive and more efficient, very straight line sort of an equation. We are making investments in shifting our business model from a pure-play brick-and-mortar to a more online or a customer choice model, which is an omnichannel model. We have made our shift towards the cloud platform. You know we've got a very strong cloud platform where more than 11,000 partners are transacting pretty much every day now -- every month now. And that's a very, very strong mode of working. All of those are models which allow you to do more with a much more optimized operation. We've set up -- in the last quarter, we've set up our shared services, which has consolidated the operations of Redington, the entire country to enable us to become far more efficient. And just so you know, I'm really not sure how many of you would probably know. We generate more than 3 lakh invoices every quarter. We process more than 3 lakh orders every quarter. And all of them is getting done now out of my one single shared services center at the back end and how cool and efficient can that be. So look, there are many, many, many such initiatives that enable you to become far more optimized and efficient in your business than otherwise. So that's the way we see our trajectory. That's the reason of growth because the value has grown very significantly because cloud has grown significantly because all our tech investments and efficiency investments happen to be continuously sort of scaling up and going up. To give you a sense on whether they are sustainable or there one-off kind of a profit margin and all that, I think we are granting ourselves to be very, very efficient and very maniacal, focused on our costs. And we are also cranking ourselves become more efficient, but we also have a view to where the world is headed right now. We know for sure that the global supply chain, the global financial markets, everything is disrupted. So providing a sort of guidance to you for the long run is going to be a very difficult, tough ask to do. We did extremely well in Q1. We have a good hold on where our Q2 is headed. And so that's all that we can be as prudent business players in the market for a long time. And as any reasonable business, you would expect us to be very, very strongly and maniacally focused on delivering short run in a very healthy way. And having every single -- every single quiver -- or every single arrow in our armor to make sure that we have covered ourselves for the mid to long run. So I think those are the ways in which we are trying to think of our business. Everything has to be in a good, sustainable way. We will -- you will continue to see us make more investments and not less. And to your question about working capital having gone up, we answered that. Krishnan, do you want to add anything more to that, please?
S. V. Krishnan
executiveI think it was answered clearly. In working capital, I mean I just want to make all of you know, we are at it. There is no need for concern. And if there are any business-related situations, we will handle in the best possible manner. We will not leave any stone unturned as far as the efficiency is concerned. And the point on cost Pranav, what I want you to know in spite of the additional costs that we are incurring towards the capability building, still you can see the increase in cost is well within control. In a way of speaking, what we had done in Q1 is a bookish performance. Revenue has grown strongly, gross margin has grown even at a better pace. The OpEx growth has been lower than both revenue and gross margin, resulting in the operating profit being better. So I mean we will be at it, don't worry.
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveYes. And also to your point, I think the current environment will not anyways, allow you to make long term sort of really long-term prediction from that perspective. So our range of working capital stays in that of 25 to 35 sort of a day there.
Operator
operator[Operator Instructions] The next question is from the line of Krish Mehta from Enam Holdings. [Operator Instructions] I believe we have lost the line of Mr. Mehta. Let's move on to the new next question, which is from the line of [ Athreya ] from [indiscernible].
Unknown Analyst
analystSir, I just wanted to know -- I mean, as to whether the Mobility segment grew year-on-year in the rest of world market or how is the performance there been? That is my first question.
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveYes. Mobility grew in the rest of the world as well. Mobility has grown by 24% it has grown in the rest of the market.
Unknown Analyst
analystSure, sir. And I mean, in the past few quarters, we had incorporated new subsidiaries in Bahrain, Jordan, et cetera. So what is the medium-term perspective? Or how are you planning to grow in new geographies? And can you just talk about the new products, the solar product and our AWS partnership as well?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveOkay. And again, I think, thanks so much. And that's a great segue, great question, wanting towards how we're thinking about our business. And clearly, our business has two dimensions of -- two or three dimensions of growth. One is, in the distribution business, you add more products, you will surely grow or you add more geographies, you will grow or dual combination with 2 in any geography you will grow. So in countries like Jordan, Bahrain, there are requirements that we must set up our business expansion there. And we are setting up our business expansion. You're absolutely, bang right, Jordan is a subsidy that we're looking at. And there will be a few more countries there, we will try and grow to expand our reach and coverage. We understand the game well. We know how to set up our distribution business in any of these countries. And we are using tech enablement -- technology enablement to make sure that we can accelerate our penetration into these countries. The products are similar. The products are the products that you get a contract for from any of the brands. So we try and do value. We try and do volume. We do in IT and mobility products in any of these countries for whichever product we start with getting a contract from a brand, from a vendor and we start to penetrate in that market. So that's our philosophy. That's our growth paradigm right now. We are in the countries that we are in, but we are looking to make sure that we can expand our coverage in a lot of these other countries there.
Unknown Analyst
analystSure, sir. And is it possible for you to give some more color on the -- how would our cloud business is working and it is shaping up and our partnership with AWS as well?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveYes, I'm going to give you that. You had asked that question -- and I was going to cover that. And solar as well, okay. So let me cover solar and then I'll cover cloud. Is that okay?
Unknown Analyst
analystYes, sir. Sure.
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveOkay. Now solar is a very strong business now. You know that globally, there is a strong pitch towards sustainable energy, very strong pitch towards green energy. And India has made some significant commitments to World Forum on sustainability of trying to make sure that 50% of the energy generated is green energy, by 2030. So I think that's a very, very strong commitment we have made. That pitches solar to be a very, very strong deployment implementation and all the solar projects have to be done at a very, very fast pace. So because of that, our solar business grew more than 400% last year. And in this quarter, Q1, it has grown about -- it has grown about 190%, close to 190% it's grown, solar business in Q1. We do very -- lots of activities in solar, we do classic distribution of the solar panels, invertors, and the products that go into the making of a solar plant. But we also have a bit of advisory services over there. So we are extremely differentiated. We pretty much are the only unique in this space because, we are the only organized distribution partner, which also does consultancy and advisory services to a whole range of partners who set up small and big solar plants. So that's one thing which is being out. We -- hopefully, we can expand this business as we go forward because the geographies we play in are literally the sunshine capital of the world. So there is a huge amount of potential possibility, which exist there in the solar business. Your point about cloud. And our cloud has been a very good story for us in Q1. In Q1, our cloud business across all the geographies, countries we operate in, has grown by 48%. And that's a very strong story. Our managed services and cloud has grown by 62%. And those are both very good outcomes. We have struck a partnership with AWS for all the regions we operate in India and Middle East and Africa. And those are very strategic, we've got very strategic sort of a play or partnership with AWS and also with Google and Microsoft to resell their products, but also scale up in trying to add competencies and those competencies then allow us to do a lot more with our customers and partners. We move far more, engage and enrich with our customers and partners. So this is a strategic collaboration agreement called SCA with the Amazon Internet Services Private Limited, which allow take a range of the products and also enables deployment and...
Operator
operatorI'm sorry to interrupt. Your voice broke. Can you please, repeat the last sentences which you said.
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveI said we have a strategic collaboration agreement, SCA, with Amazon Internet Services Private Limited, which allows us to offer the range of products, management platforms and services to our customers and partners. It enables us to become far more capable because we add technical capabilities to ourselves to deliver these products and services to a partner. So we feel very good about the fact that the world is headed in the direction of cloud and so are we.
Operator
operator[Operator Instructions] The next question is from the line of Krish Mehta from Enam Holdings.
Krish Mehta
analystCongratulations on a good quarter. The first question I had was a follow-up on the cloud business, if you could provide the margins for the cloud and cloud managed services for the quarter?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveThe cloud product resell comes at a similar margin, Krish. It doesn't really give you a very, very huge, differentiated margins. It will be in the range of 5%, 7%, 8%, depending upon which product of cloud you're selling and which banner cloud you're selling into, which customer or which segment of the market. It goes in the range of 5% to 8%, 9%, not more than that at a cloud product level. Services are a different ballgame altogether, Krish. And services stretches from a very rudimentary fundamental entry-level infrastructure services of provisioning, which will give you a margin of 10% to 15%. But if you scale up the services to the level of migration and platform and software as a service, then you start to get into the game of 25%, 28%, 30%, 35%, 40%. So depending upon the complexity of services, and we are building our capabilities to do the entire range of services. Right now, we may be less on the more complex services and a lot more on the entry level services, but we breed capabilities now to deliver and deploy the more complex services of migration nature, which will give us much, much higher margins.
S. V. Krishnan
executiveAnd just to add on to what Rajiv said, from a working capital perspective, there is no -- I mean, either no [ do in terms ] of working capital. So both the businesses resell and the services portion in terms of ROCE, it will be quite attractive.
Krish Mehta
analystOkay. And my other question was on the net debt and cash balance. If you could provide that for Q1?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveCan you repeat, Krish? We missed your question, please.
Krish Mehta
analystCould you provide the net debt and cash balance for the quarter?
S. V. Krishnan
executiveSo the net debt figure end of Q1 is about INR 744 crores, which is roughly about 0.1x of negative net debt. And the cash balance -- okay, I don't have the ready-made number. It's about INR 1,100 crores, INR 1,200 crores.
Operator
operator[Operator Instructions] The next question is from the line of Aasim Bharde from DAM Capital Advisors Limited.
Aasim Bharde
analystSo just a couple of questions. Firstly, can you talk about what should be a sustainable EBITDA margin for the consolidated Redington Group going forward? Would it hover at level just shy of 3%, maybe a little higher the year after? And what would keep margins at these levels? Will it be more on the enterprise sales bid, which brings its own working capital and higher interest cost? Or would it be more services-oriented?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveWhat did you mean by the second part of the question? First part was, what will be the sustainable EBITDA margins? And the second part of the question?
Aasim Bharde
analystAnd what would drive it basically? Would it be more enterprise hardware bit that would keep it higher or services also because services today is still just 1% of revenue.
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveOkay. All right. Good one. Look, we'd mentioned in the earlier part of the call that guiding or projecting EBITDA or like any sort of profit profile for the long run right now is going still. Just the way the global market situation is evolving, just the way the current operating environment for us is. We're not going to be projecting it you. But right now, just so you know that the way we're trying to balance out our operational efficiencies costs and our -- and our product portfolio is helping us to stay in the range that we are in right now. And Q2 seems to be on a good track so far, okay? That's so much from a sustainability of -- long term, you've got to be thoughtful about how you guide long term. The second is a driver for the margin. And there are a few things that drive our margin, Aasim. One, clearly is, what you said is services versus non-services. But you're right, services is a very small portion of what we do today. It's about 1% of the overall revenue that we do. There's always going to be a small portion, right? But a large part of our margin is the mix of this. If our mix shifts from volume products to value, and you saw this in this quarter, our volume grew 14%, but value grew 30%. If value continues to grow faster, then value inherently provides you a better margin profile. That's one. Second is, if our cloud business is going to be as good and as steady as it is happening right now, it will help us to continue to improve margins as stated. The third is if our [ proliferated ] logistics business fails up, it will continue to help us with no margins. Our solar business immediately comes at a much higher gross margin than the other parts of the business. So I think margin is a play of geography and a combination of mix of products that you end up doing. And we are always speaking, always trying to do whatever we can to manage the mix and the geo play to get to the margin requirements that we have in the company. So I think that's how we are trying to balance out this sort.
Aasim Bharde
analystOkay. And just a follow-up. So how long do you anticipate the enterprise cycle to last from today?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveMy -- and this is like you're asking me to crystal gaze, but I will. And let me give you a sense of crystal gazing on this. My sense is there is such a lot of adoption of technology and such a lot of digital transformation that is taking place across pretty much every sector of the business right now. Governments are investing and they know that if they had not invested during the COVID times, countries would have shut down. Companies are investing because if they hadn't done that, they wouldn't have survived the 2 years of COVID downtime, okay. And so people have got to a point where business and technology has almost become inseparable. Earlier, people used to have a different -- technologies, and the two were kind of quite linked. But now we're getting to a...
Operator
operatorSir; I'm sorry to interrupt. Could you please repeat the line which you are saying?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveOkay. What I was saying was, earlier, there used to be a time when GDP and technology growth were kind of intertwined and linked together. But now we're at a point where digital growth has been delinked from GDP growth and companies are using technology to either stabilize their operations or grow faster, get into new product categories, do innovation, launch new territories and geographies. So it has become pretty much absolutely the most crucial thing for businesses to survive. If you take a look at adoption across the world at a cloud and we know that companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft in the cloud domain, just in the cloud domain, they are growing about 35%, 36% year-on-year, okay? At that level of higher revenues of $50 billion, $60 billion, they continue to grow at about 30%, 35%. So the cloud adoption is fueling the growth for lots and lots of technology providers. Cloud adoption across the world so far is sub-20%, global cloud adoption is about 18% right now, 15% to 18% of the workflows having put on cloud. So I feel that the technology buying cycle of the enterprise customer variety and the mid-market SMB variety continuing in the future for a much longer time. This cycle is here to stay for a bit here.
Aasim Bharde
analystOkay. And just second and last question. Any comments on supply chain...
Operator
operator[Operator Instructions] The next question is from the line of Chintan Sheth from Sameeksha Capital.
Chintan Sheth
analystA very good set of numbers. Congratulations for that. Sir, two set of questions. One is on the working capital. If I look at the past trend, our net working capital typically builds up in Q1 and then kind of tapers down by the end of the year. Is that the phenomena will likely to play out this year? Or do you see that this is stable, as you mentioned in your opening remark that we are still at the fringe of our guidance of [ '20 to '35 ]? That's one. And second, on the -- within the SISA, SISA Group, I see that our South and South Asian market is trending towards loss. Just want to clarify whether the net profit or profitability of that region has kind of impacted during this quarter? And how -- what is the outlook there given the geopolitical issues in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and regions we are in, if you can provide that?
S. V. Krishnan
executiveOkay. So on the working capital front, yes, I agree with you in Q1, normally, it will be higher, not because of any other factors. It's mainly on account of revenue being soft in Q1, but you would have seen this quarter, revenue has been quite, quite strong. But having said that, the main reason for the spike in the working capital, as I said, is on account of the parts shipments that we have received in the IT value space, which we think in about 1 or 2 quarters once the situation gets normalized, this will also get normalized. So that's -- so I mean it's not just a normal Q1 phenomena. That is on added to that is this point also. With respect to SISA, see, SSA has been degrowing. We have spoken about it in the past, mainly because of the movement of the vendor model, from offshore to onshore as far as the India part of the business, which was a significant part of the SSA business in the past. So that movement has enabled us to rethink even our own structure in terms of, is this to be monitored centrally out of India and we looked at as one unit as SISA. That's how we have gone ahead with this structure. So what you will see overall now since it's an integrated unit, we can look at the growth in this form. But more specifically to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, yes, Sri Lanka is impacted a lot. But our business in Sri Lanka is not quite significant. And we are now playing a very safe game where it is -- our risks are covered is where we are participating. Otherwise, it's not. However, I mean, Bangladesh and few other markets we think is looking very attractive and there are big opportunities, and we would want to do a deep dive in that space. But I would want Rajiv also to add, the things you find.
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveYes. No, I think you've answered a lot. See, our presence in South Asian markets is only in 2 or 3 countries. We just do Bangladesh, we do Sri Lanka and do a bit of Nepal as well, okay? And that's obviously Sri Lanka is a cautious approach right now. Go slow -- and -- but Bangladesh, Bangladesh is not challenged. I don't know where you hear from that Bangladesh is in a difficult situation. Bangladesh is -- they're obviously coming up with policy regulations and framework as they grow. But it's a very happening market. And we will -- we are expanding our operations and we are expanding our play in Bangladesh. We are trying to do many, many different things on products, solutions, services, logistics, and setting up a name in Bangladesh entity for ourselves so that we can really mine the market as the market starts to grow. It is in a very, very good situation. I have traveled to Bangladesh a few times and they're really, really looking very positive right now.
Chintan Sheth
analystSure. And just a bit on Turkey, given the currency situation.
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveAnd then just to round up on the other South markets. Right now, we play in these countries, but there's obviously going to be a potential to play for us in the other, little more mature economies of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar, those kind of countries. So I think it's a huge potential that exist and we're going to exploit that. Sorry, go ahead with the question on Turkey.
Chintan Sheth
analystYes. Just on Turkey, given the currency devaluation happened over the past 2 years, and we have still been able to manage both on the revenue growth as well as profitability. Obviously, revenue growth on rupee term will look much better, but the profitability is one aspect where, if you can provide more color to it, how we are managing the situation there? And what is the way forward?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveYes. Look, I was in Turkey last week, I spent about 10 days in Turkey. And Turkey is a very, very sort of -- it's a very curious case. It's a great country, great people, great commerce, good population and does very -- technologically very enabled countries. And so businesses and governments over there continue to use technology very, [indiscernible] and that contributes to our growth. That's how we've been going.
Operator
operatorThe next question is from the line of Rajeev Agrawal from DoorDarshi India Fund.
Rajeev Agrawal
analystMy first question is, I think there has been some concern about whether your margins, the gross margins or bigger margins that you have had in financial year '22 will be sustainable. Based on your commentary so far, it seems to me that you are saying not only are those margins sustainable, but we might even be able to expand on it. Am I understanding this correctly?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveI don't think we said we are expanding on it or we are maintaining at what. We said that we are taking it in the near term on a real near-term basis because providing guidance in the long run will be a little challenging given the global operating environment right now. So we're not going to guide from a long-term perspective. What we're suggesting to you and what we are saying is, we are maniacally focused on ensuring that every part of our business is optimized to the core, to the head to ensure that we can continue to have the visibility of gross margins that we have delivered in the past. So we can only grow -- and hence the reason I'm choosing this is because of the operating environment. And so we can bite in some of small timeframes. And so we did -- we exactly said the same thing in Q1 as well, and we delivered a very robust Q1. We are seeing exactly the same thing in Q2. And so far, Q2 is trending all right, right now. Like I said, the -- continuing demand -- continuing the growth growing demand for supply chain orchestration. We continue to anticipate a reasonable demand environment in Q2 as well. And we will take it quarter-by-quarter, Rajeev, really, that's the way our approach is right now. While from a fundamental building the company perspective, capability creation, we are long-term focused, obviously, and I gave you many examples of long-term focused on people, processes, technology, platform play all of that, that we are trying to do a business model orchestration that we're trying to do. On the operational capability -- on the operational intensity, we are very, very, clear in our focus to make sure that we deliver the right results here.
Rajeev Agrawal
analystAnd sir, the question was really coming because you are getting into new areas, where they seem to have even higher margins of the cloud, right? [indiscernible] so if you can just elaborate...
Operator
operatorSorry to interrupt Mr. Agrawal. Could please repeat your question. We couldn't hear you.
Rajeev Agrawal
analystSo the question was coming because you're getting into new margin or new areas, where they seem to be higher margins especially, your cloud revenue, you're talking about solar and how you are possibly consulting there with a much higher margin. Maybe if you can just elaborate on a few such areas which you are very bullish about and which may have better margin potential?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveLook, I think the way we split our business, Rajeev, is across three dimensions. One dimension is focused on the core. What we do well, we must continue to orchestrate and do well. And that's our bread and butter. That's our more than 95% of our revenue.
Operator
operatorSir, we are not able to hear you.
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveOkay. Can you hear me now? Is it okay?
Operator
operatorYes, Sir.
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveOkay. What I was saying was we cut our business across three distinct types. One is always focus on the core. Core is about 97%, 98% of our business. We got to make sure that the core continues to run as efficiently as possible. That's one. The second is we expand that, going to new geographies to the question earlier, which came in from Jordan and other places, we expand geographies, we expand product categories in those areas. And the third is our foray into new product categories. Of the nature of that you're talking about cloud, of the nature that you're talking about logistics and services and supply chain and of the nature that you're talking about from a cloud perspective. Those are small businesses, right? And as we scale, you will see that it will provide me a hedge around any downside to the business or if there's no downside to any other on the core business, it will provide me a lift in our margins. So I think that's the way we're trying to play ourselves. We are orchestrating our portfolio to become more balanced to be -- there are some parts of the business will deliver much higher margins. Some parts will be okay. Averages as it goes. But overall, we hope to become a much better, much more rounded sort of an organization as we go forward here. So that's how we are trying to think of passes across those three dimensions of product and portfolio play.
Operator
operator[Operator Instructions] The next question is from the line of Sanjay Dam from Old Bridge Capital.
Sanjay Dam
analyst[indiscernible].
Operator
operatorI'm sorry to interrupt Mr. Dam. We cannot hear you?
Sanjay Dam
analystIs it better now?
Operator
operatorYes. Yes.
Sanjay Dam
analystYes. Sorry about that. Just one question, Rajiv. We possibly entered FY '22 with around INR 1,600 crores of cloud revenues and you keep growing at 45% to 50%. So is that -- I don't know I may have caught the number a little off. But if that continues, should we be a INR 5,000 crore cloud business by FY '25? Is there any reason that shouldn't happen?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveIf you play it well, there is every reason that we can get through those kind of numbers in the timeframe you're talking about or a year up and down, okay?
Sanjay Dam
analystAnd Rajiv -- the other question, sorry for interrupting you. Is that when you talked about the margins in the cloud business and the services part as well. Service is very small, I understand. So basically, cloud as the base starts at 5% kind of margin -- EBITDA margin. And then according to the kind of complexity it goes up to 7%, 8%. And the SaaS is about 25% to 40% range. So basically, the EBITDA margin of this business of a INR 5,000 crore cloud business, whenever it is 1 year up or down, broadly should be in the high single digits, would that be a good understanding?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveWe'll have to do the mix, when you do INR 5,000 crore cloud business and you do, let's say, a 10% or INR 500 crores of that as your services business and the services comes at 25% and cloud business comes anywhere between 5% to 9%. We'll model that and we can let you know what the numbers look like, and I'm sure you can do it yourself as well. But look, directionally, you hit the nail on the head, Sanjay. And it seems that makes a lot of sense. In the cloud business is the one which is growing across the world, and we are pivoting our company on to a very strong cloud sort of a portfolio, I think that's where we will get to. I mean your timelines may be a bit up and down. But we are focusing ourselves to make sure that we have a very strong portfolio on cloud across a variety of alliance types and these global alliances are hyperscalers of the nature of Microsoft, Google and Amazon. And then there are many other companies, which have cloud products, which are platform products like ServiceNow, like Adobe, like Salesforce and then there are players of the nature of Oracle and IBM, which is Red Hat and many other companies of that nature, which are SAP, which are pivoting themselves to cloud. And we are very well aligned with each one of them. We understand the game has changed. The game, we can play it at a partner or we can play at a product level, but the game is directly different now. It has to be played at the level of alliances in a very deep way to maximize, go to the market with the alliances to the customers, and that's a winning proposition. So our pivot deeper than just trying to say, look, can we get to INR 5,000 crores. You will obviously get to that revenue, okay? But the game is much deeper and broader because you need the whole range of technology innovation and partnerships to come in and play to make sure that you can scale it up in the right direction, in the right way, not just a random focus on just the revenue number.
Sanjay Dam
analystGot it, Rajiv. And second question. If you could tell us about the kind of investments we did in FY '22 in the new business? And what do you intend to do in FY '23?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveSanjay, I couldn't hear your question. You might want to repeat that, please.
Sanjay Dam
analystSir, investments in the new business in all kinds of abilities and people and systems and processes to scale this business up and do it in the way you dominate your bread and butter business. So how much did you spend in FY '22? And what are the investments going to be like in FY '23?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveKrishnan, would you remember the investments that we made, is it the investments we made in FY '22 in some of the businesses that you're talking about?
S. V. Krishnan
executiveYes. He wants to know how much business?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveHow much? How much? Okay. Just want to check.
S. V. Krishnan
executiveSee as we have discussed in the past, Mr. Sanjay, the investments are more in OpEx form than in CapEx because we start to build capabilities and many of the capability building in these new business initiatives are on talent. And that's why I said when we talked about the OpEx that those additional OpExes are also part of the current topics for which we may not be getting the return immediately. Some of these returns, better returns will kick in only as we move forward. Okay. So if I need to consider even OpEx as part of the investment, it would be in the range of about INR 60 crores to INR 80 crores, if I need to put a number, Sanjay.
Operator
operatorThe next question is from the line of [ Rushabh Choksi ] from [KR Choksey ].
Unknown Analyst
analyst[indiscernible]
Operator
operatorMr. Choksi [indiscernible] can you please ask your question.
Unknown Analyst
analystYes. Sir I had two questions. So what is -- sorry, I joined late. I just wanted to ask -- I just wanted to ask that your cloud business has -- how much of your cloud business has grown year-on-year? And sir, I've seen your trade payables has grown increasingly since last 5 years, can you give me the answer for that, sir.
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveRushabh, your question wasn't audible at all. I couldn't hear a word.
Operator
operatorMr. Rushabh, there is disturbance from your background. We are not able to hear you. And your volume is also too low.
Unknown Analyst
analystAm I audible now?
Operator
operatorYes.
Unknown Analyst
analystI was saying, the research your trade payables has been increasing at an immense pace in the last 5 years. So can you please explain that? And my second question is how much of your cloud business is growing year-on-year?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveI only heard the first question, so Krishnan you can take it.
S. V. Krishnan
executiveYes. On the trade payable, there are two factors that are attached towards the trade payable. One is as our enterprise business, our IT volume business keeps going up, generally, since the working capital deployment there in the form of inventory and receivable days being more, our AP days also tend to be more. Second, we have also consciously spoken to many of the vendors in terms of increasing the credit days where there is a requirement, take the help of outside financial institutions where it can get extended. So these are few I mean, options that we have to make sure that our AP days are better. That's I think that should continue. Having said that, your second question, Rajiv, said wasn't clear to us. So if you can repeat, please.
Unknown Analyst
analystSir, my second question was how much is the cloud business grown year-on-year.
Rajiv Srivastava
executive48%.
Unknown Analyst
analyst48%. Sorry for my small question. Can I squeeze in here. Any measures you're taking to reduce your trade payables?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveAny measures?
Unknown Analyst
analystTo reduce your trade payables?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveTrade payables, no. No. No we're not taking any measures.
S. V. Krishnan
executiveOur objective is to keep that as high as possible. We would feel happy if the trade payable days covers our AR days. In the past, there were challenged, but we could achieve it in the last few quarters. Our objective is always to make sure our AR days is covered by creditor days.
Operator
operatorThe next question is from the line of Sangeeta Purushottam from Cogito Advisors.
Unknown Analyst
analystI'm Sangeeta's partner Andrey here. I had two questions. One is in terms of the working cycle -- working capital cycle, how do you compare with the pre-COVID era? And the second question is, could you give us a sense of the seasonality of your sales in terms of a breakup of sales into Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 on a typical year pattern so that I can understand the quarter Q-on-Q mild degrowth better?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveYes, yes. Okay. I can give you the question on seasonality. I didn't hear the first question that you had. Seasonality of business is H1 versus H2 is always in the range of 45, 47 to 53 in that. So 47, 53 will be the seasonality of business that we've got here.
Unknown Analyst
analystOkay. The first question was, how does your working capital cycle compared with the pre-COVID era?
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveIt is right now, it's much better than pre-COVID. Pre-COVID was much higher. Pre-COVID we were in the range of 40, 45 on the working capital days. Right now it's 28 days. So it's much -- it's about 40% better than pre-COVID.
Operator
operatorLadies and gentlemen, due to time constraints, that was the last question for today. I would now like to hand the conference over to the management for closing comments.
Rajiv Srivastava
executiveYes. Look, thanks so much, everyone. These questions are always very insightful. They keep us in a good space because we tend to make sure that we are covered in our business from all sides. And you guys are very, very helpful in the manner in which you project and send your questions to us. So that's very helpful and thank you so much. Like I said, we had a very strong quarter 1. Record revenue for -- and operating margin for any first quarter of the year. And that's a great story. That's a great place to be in. And it seems that our sustained investments in technology capabilities, partner relationships and our comprehensive breadth of offerings is paying out. We understand the ways that global environment is playing out right now. And we can only assure you that we are very, very cognizant of every single movement that is taking place in all the countries that we operate in. And that enables us to be cautious, that enables us to maximize the opportunities, that enables us to mitigate the risks wherever they arise and do our business in a prudent way. And Q1 is a reflection of that. So thank you so much for joining the call today, and I hope to talk to you as we go forward in the next quarter. Thank you, and have a great day.
Operator
operatorThank you. On behalf of Redington India Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.
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