Yes, hi. Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone.

I would like to welcome the management team of Metro Brands and thank them for this opportunity. We have with us today: Mr.

Rafique Malik, Chairman; Ms. Farah Malik Bhanji, Managing Director; Mr.

Nissan Joseph, Chief Executive Officer; Mr. Kaushal Parekh, Chief Financial Officer; Mr.

Mohit Dhanjal, Chief Operating Officer; and Ms. Alisha Rafique Malik, President - Sports Division, E-Commerce and CRM.

I shall now hand over the call to the management for the opening remarks. Over to you, sir.

Thank you, Devanshu. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our earnings call.

In Q4 FY 2026, we posted a 20% growth in our standalone business along with a 21% growth in EBITDA, leading to a PAT of 15%. We continue to see consistent growth from our multiple e-com channels in our digital commerce business as it grew 53% and holds a 12% share of our total revenues for that quarter.

A few noteworthy points on store openings: we crossed the 1,000 store mark last quarter by opening a net of 42 stores and ended the quarter with a total of 1,034 stores. In those openings, we also had our first two Fila stores that we opened since the acquisition.

As we look to the future, we are closely monitoring the Gulf crisis to see the impact that it could potentially have on our raw materials and other input costs, though we believe we can mitigate most of it for the near term. We remain aware that there could be disruptions caused by geopolitical issues, and we'll stay agile to make sure that we continue to maximize our sales and profitability in those situations.

In March of 2026, we also opened a new DC that increases our storage capacity by 200,000 square feet, ensuring that we have the capacity to cater for our growth. We continue to invest in growing our multiple banners, invest in our talent, our technologies, and last but not least, in our marketing initiatives to ensure that we continue to hold a strong position in the market.

In closing, despite a slow start to the fiscal year, I'm very pleased to see and proud of the team that, at the end, delivered metrics in our guidance range, which has been PAT in the mid-teen percentage range, EBITDA in the high 20s to low 30s, and, of course, a sales growth of 15%. With that, I will now turn it back to the operator for questions.

Hi. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for taking my question.

Congratulations on a good set of numbers. First question, sir, most of the input cost basket has gone up and, specific to crude, is seeing a way sharper inflation.

Now, if you can just quantify the kind of input cost inflation that you're facing at this point, and what is the strategy? I know you mentioned you can mitigate it, most of it, in the near term, but still, are you looking at price hikes going forward?

I still understand that you have more than six months of inventory, but still the procurement for the next season would have started, and you would be locking it at higher prices. Just wanted to understand this aspect.

Hi,

great. Thank you, Sameer.

There's two ways that we plan on mitigating this. We are looking at forward buying a lot of the raw materials that we can buy in bulk to make sure that we don't see significant price hikes there.

Overall, if it does impact us, in those items that it impacts us, I think we'd say overall in input costs a 10% maybe, it's not significant in spike, though there are certain categories that spike a little bit more than the others. Like you rightly said, we do have six months' worth of inventory, and we also have orders placed for past that period of point that would be protected in price.

When you look at the overall picture of things, it's going to be a lot more gradual. Though input costs may spike in between, we're not going to have that spike, and because we are so far planned out, we're able to then figure out how best to mitigate it.

Got it. Basically not looking at any immediate knee-jerk reaction in terms of pricing at all in the near term.

That would be a correct summary?

Correct. Nothing more than normal inflation, Sameer.

10%--

Sameer, just to add-- --[unclear] Sameer, just to add--

Sure, Kaushal.

In fact, one of the reasons behind this is some front-loading of inventory that we did in anticipation of this price rise, which may see gradually coming through from now on.

Got it, Kaushal. That's very helpful.

A sub-question to this is also, there is an impact on the input cost basket, but there is also an impact on the end consumer demand. Usually, inflation tends to have higher impact on discretionary products.

Just wanted to understand any experience that you can share, how has that been in the past? Now, FY 2023 is a very muddled year.

Even though it was an inflationary, but there were a lot of other things that were happening, so that may not be the right benchmark. In previous years where there was high inflation, how did demand pan out at that point in time?

Footwear is still a discretionary purchase which can be deferred, so that is the source of this question.

Yes. I think there's a couple of ways to look at that.

Footwear is not a constant purchase, right, that you feel an inflation would hit your wallet of significant nature. Neither is it a big-ticket item.

Those are the two things that think our tab going for it. The other thing is, unfortunately, inflation really affects the low to middle class much harder than it seems to affect a slightly higher class of person.

Therefore, we don't see as much fluctuations come when there's inflation of a higher nature. The demand tends to not be as spikey or lumpy when we see inflation as you might see with people that see a significant increase in their basic basket of good purchases.

Because of the premium nature or the premium-end target consumer, you are saying that the elasticity to inflation is that much lower?

Correct.

Got it. I'll come back in the queue, sir, for any follow-ups.

Thanks for taking these questions.

Thank you, Sameer.

Hi. Thank you so much, and a very good afternoon to the team on the call.

I had two questions based on more medium-term trends. One is when I look at the in-store sales, I see single-digit growth over the last three years.

If you could just comment on how do you see walk-ins and footfalls in stores and the growth forward? For fiscal 2026, and obviously including fiscal 2025, the sense I'm getting is that most of the top-line growth is driven by new store additions and lesser from SSGs.

Any comments specifically on same-store sales growth across, maybe Metro, Mochi, the core network? We could just talk about that.

Thank you so much. Yeah.

Thank you for your question, Rahul. We are seeing footfall growth in our Metro, Mochi stores.

Another way to look at that also is the basket of goods that they do buy. We've opened up stores that have different mix of sales per square foot, and you can see that we maintain our square footage compared to the last quarter at 4,500.

That shows that it is not just coming from new stores, because if it was only new stores, you would start seeing that square footage sales per square foot go down, because new stores typically aren't as productive as your existing stores, right? They get up to that mark, but not right away.

We always think that there's room for improvement in SSGs. We're quite pleased with the SSGs we're seeing, especially since we're able to decipher how we look compared to the market in previous quarters once we see the numbers, and so that has also been indicative to us that we're gaining market share.

You're right. A portion of our increases do come from new stores.

A portion of our increases do come from the annualization of stores that we opened in the previous years, but that is not what drives all of it. It is definitely SSG that drives it.

Got that. The question on the in-store footfalls, how should I look at that part of the segment?

No, we're seeing in-store footfalls growing. One way to measure that is also the number of bills that we have.

We've seen that, but more importantly, what we're seeing from our CRM database is in the back half of the year, also the same part where we saw our business start to improve, we started seeing new customers come into our stores, customers that we didn't have--maybe they were not new, but we never had information on them, one could lead to the conclusions that they were new customers. We started seeing that increase too, which is where you saw If you tracked us from Q1 through Q4, you've seen steady improvements in our business, and it's largely driven by ability to acquire new customers and also go back and win back and/or get customers to repurchase in our stores.

Got it. Got that.

Thank you so much. I'll get back in the queue.

I have more questions. All the best.

Thank you for taking my question. Congratulations on this strong set of numbers.

My first question is with regards to the nature of the growth. If you look at the growth, one, we are seeing the portion of men has increased significantly in the overall contribution, whereas the unisex has kind of declined.

Anything to read there given that Walkway and Clarks are also adding men's kind of a product?

No, Gaurav, I think best way is to look men's and unisex together because, at times, due to some reclassification that happens from few of the third-party brands, you see slight movement. Even during this quarter, the increase that you see in men's, there is equivalent decrease that has happened in unisex.

Nothing more to read into that.

Okay. Just one data point that we also able to get from the data was that eastern part of India kind of declined, whereas the south part of India has continued to grow faster for you.

Anything specific to eastern part which have led to this decline of 10% Y-o-Y basis? In terms of store basis, that is.

We're just trying to see the number you're seeing, right? It's pretty much in line with our number of stores.

Depends on what happens from a festival standpoint in the other markets as much. If you look at it over the years, the eastern part of our business has been between the 13% to 15% mark, right?

Last quarter, we were 14%. For the year, we were 14%.

It's nothing unusual that happened there that I could point to.

Gaurav, it's also rounding off that comes here, because we are not showing in decimal points. Even 14.51 ideally will get rounded up to 15, whereas 14.13, I'm just saying, 14.49 would still be rounded down to 14.

We have not seen any decline as such in the eastern part of India. Just last part from my end.

Given the medium-term guidance towards that 15% to 18% growth, and now you have multifold brands in your kitty, how are you looking to segregate this growth between your four brands versus the new-age brands? What kind of growths are you looking from these two cohorts?

That would be a helpful question for us.

Yes, I think from a quantum of growth in each one, there's a significant opportunity for each of those banners to grow, right? There's varying degrees of what growth looks like.

Foot Locker can grow to a certain number, definitely not as big as the number of Metro, Mochi stores out there, right? Same with Clarks.

Each of them for the next few years, from a quantum standpoint, has the same quantum potential for growth. As we're well-capitalized.

If we find the right opportunities for whatever brand that might be, we're happy to open those stores. The opportunity exists, Gaurav.

The willingness on our part exists. The tools exist, and of course the capital exists, so that's not a restraint in any way.

It's just got to be the right locations in the right markets for the right banner.

Sure, sir. I hear.

My question was different. I do understand this opportunity will be there just given that the base for the core brand is now higher and the newer brands are starting at a lower base, can there be the contour of growth percentage could be different in each of these?

If yes, what kind of growths can we expect from newer sort of the cohorts versus the older cohorts?

Correct. Gaurav, I think I understood your question when I meant that quantum, maybe I didn't clarify, quantum in terms of numbers, not in terms of percentage, right?

In terms of numbers, for the next foreseeable couple of years, all of them have a significant opportunity to grow almost to the same level. It might vary a little bit left and right.

From a percentage standpoint, as you rightly pointed out, be significantly different. We have no Clarks stores today, their growth will be infinite, to speak, on a math basis.

Whereas Metro, Mochi has a lot of stores, their growth may seem small on a percentage basis. When you look at a numerical quantum, I think the opportunity for each of those banners to grow at equal paces almost is quite good.

Sure. Thank you for answering all the questions.

Best luck.

Hi. Thanks for the opportunity, and congrats on a good year.

My first question was again on demand. Currently, what kind of momentum are you seeing?

We're seeing three quarters of stable SSS sort of revenue per square feet. Are you confident that with the current pace of expansion that number will remain stable or grow from where we are?

A related question was you mentioned about festive, wedding demand to be good and GST tailwinds. Was there anything a higher festive or wedding days in this current quarter versus base quarter, which was kind of driving this improvement on a sequential basis?

Okay. Just to decouple your questions, I'll take the last part first.

There was nothing significant driving it, but like I said, I think some of the marketing initiatives that we're putting in place is driving new footfalls to our stores, and that's where you're seeing that growth come from. When we look to the future, Umang, we are pretty confident that on a long-term basis, we can continue to grow our business in that 15% plus percent range year-on-year, as we've done and shown over periods of time.

Will there be hiccups in between? Absolutely.

Will there be things that come in? Absolutely.

Will there be normal things that come in that create differences such as lower wedding dates one season or one quarter versus another quarter? Those things will always happen.

For me to commit and say every single quarter will be at 15% is a little bit erratic on my part. However, what I'm confident about on my part is that we can keep this sustained growth going for quite a bit of time.

Got it.

Thank you. The second question was on the network expansion.

Specifically, if you can call out on current pipeline for Fila, Foot Locker, Clarks, and Metro Active, how many stores could be possibly added in '27?

All of them combined? Yeah.

Separately or yes, sure. Yeah.

Let me break it down this way. I think, I'm just going to say an aggregated number in those brands that you mentioned, opportunity to open 50 stores exists.

Will we get the right locations? Will we get the right rentals?

Will we get the right timing of all of those? Will we make sure that BIS is mitigated, especially for the Foot Locker and the Metro Active brands, which are heavily dependent on imported products?

Those are questions that remain unanswered. Until we have clarity of all of those things, we try not to just open stores rapidly.

The opportunity exists easily this year. Now the question is, how much of those opportunities will be realized due to other economic conditions that we may or may not control?

Sure. BIS issue is there even in Clarks, is it?

BIS issues to varying degrees happen with most of our brands. With Clarks, it's not significant because they have more production in India.

To varying degrees, it has it. Don't forget let's assume it's 15% of an entire brand's portfolio, right?

That 15% is what super-accretive to your profit line. That's what's doing a lot of flow-through down to your profit line of that banner, right?

If you miss that last 15% of your sales, the impact to your profit could almost be all of that amount. That's why we're very, very careful when we make these decisions.

Sure. Makes sense.

Just one last one for Kaushal. Possible to highlight the pre-Ind AS EBITDA and PAT for the full year?

Pre-Ind AS EBITDA, Umang, would be around 21-odd percent, and I think we've already given pre-Ind AS PAT. For the full year, it is 15.5%.

Sure. Thank you so much.

Thank you, and all the best.

Thank you.

Hello. Am I audible?

Congratulations on the good set of numbers. Also, if we take a look, then e-commerce and omni-channel sales have increased significantly for the Q4.

How should we look for it for the upcoming year?

I think you should look at it as a percentage of business, right? Because the business is growing, and so is e-com.

It's not necessarily what is e-com going to grow at. We look at it as what percentage of the business should it represent, and it's going to represent somewhere between 12% to 15% of our business in the near term.

Then that might grow, that might not grow, but where we sit in the near term, that would be how we'd peg it, you can do the backward calculation to figure out if the rest of the company is growing at X, what would e-com grow. As you know with e-com, we do have some lumpy quarters depending on what the festive season is, depending on when the brands do a lot of sales online and all of those things.

There is some lumpiness in the e-commerce growth, but overall, we think it'll be somewhere between the 12% to 15% range.

Sure. That was quite helpful.

Also try to understand that if we take a look, then the Foot Locker expansion remains cautious due to the BIS-related issues. When do we expect the supply chain challenges to normalize?

Also the Fila repositioning is underway with the local manufacturing. When do we expect the brand to meaningfully contribute to the overall growth and profitability?

The Foot Locker growth, it's not like we've stopped opening stores. I think the aspiration was to open a lot more stores by now if we had the comfort of BIS.

We still don't have it, and unfortunately, this is not something that I can predict. It's out of my hands to predict.

All I can tell you is, as of today, we still don't have 100% comfort that BIS challenges, for whatever reason, have been mitigated. Different brands are at different spaces with it, and that ebbs and flows, by the way.

Sometimes brands don't get licenses renewed. Sometimes they get it renewed.

It's a little erratic from where we sit to predict how that is going to look. That's foundationally on that.

Your second question, Shraddha, was on Fila. As we've opened our first two stores in Fila, and we've spent a lot of time and money cleaning up the old inventory, and as we reposition it, because we're trying to build for the future and not try to get a quick sale, we want to build it the right way, and that takes a little bit of time.

I've got to believe that in the next 18 months, it becomes meaningful to our numbers.

Oh, sure, sir. That was quite helpful.

I'll fall back in the queue. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi. Thanks for the opportunity, and congrats on good set of numbers.

My first question pertains to your read on the consumer sentiment. Our performance has been very good, but would you attribute largely to our own efforts on expansion or branding or servicing, or is it that you are actually picking up a real uptick in sentiments at consumer level as well?

I think it's a combination, and it depends which banner you're talking about. Some banners had outstanding product launches that helped.

Some banners are now taking share away from unorganized markets. That has helped.

Where we feel a little bit more insulated is twofold. One is our customer, for the most of our business, tends to be a premium customer, right?

As we know, inflation doesn't hit them hard right away. It has a delayed effect on them, and because we're not a frequent purchase or a high-ticket purchase, they're not going to do the calculation, "Oh, my god, I can't afford this.

I'm not going to buy it, and I'm going to go down in grade." That's not who they are, right?

That's how the premium customer acts. When it comes to the value customer for our Walkway business, we are so underpenetrated with Walkway relative to the market, which is dominated in see the overall footwear market has 70% in unorganized footwear, but in the value space, it's much higher that is in the unorganized market.

Walkway has huge opportunities to continue its growth given its market share today in that space and the shift from unorganized to organized and the aspiration of customers to have better shopping environments and not necessarily pay more. We see us not being insulated, but I think we see us having a few moats around us that would hide through any significant swings in inflation.

Nissan, just focusing on your customer set, based on whatever media headlines and other numbers that we are picking up, the white-collar job seems to be under stress, or that part of the market, which is essentially your customer. I was just trying to understand that is it that our customer base is part of subset of this which is insulated from the macro cues that we are picking up, or they were, as you said, that we had also product launches and we had also made a lot of intervention for growth revival.

I'm just trying to understand the momentum that you have seen this quarter, is it sustainable for next year, at least in the near future?

Tejas, I think there's a lot of things that go into having good retail quarters. At the foundation of it, if the consumer sentiment isn't right, you can't get it.

It doesn't matter what you do. On the other hand, there's also, we're comparing ourselves against the previous year, right?

What were the inefficiencies we did last year? What were the misses we had last year?

What are we better at this year versus last year? A lot of that comes into play, and in all honesty, there's so much more we can do to keep improving.

My confidence saying that we can mitigate it, or at least we will be the ones that lead the way out of it, is not coming from the fact of one single thing alone that my consumer won't be affected by it. There are many things we can do to also inflate ourselves from it.

If some of these numbers you're seeing does come from consumer sentiment, it also comes from some of the product launches we've done, some of our marketing initiatives that we've invested in, some of the tech we've invested in in our CRM. There's a lot of initiatives going on that we feel is driving it.

The last question, sometime back, we were kind of highlighting that the rentals or the competition for rental space was not sustainable for us to make a very profitable construct of the business there. Looking at the store expansion this year, should one assume that we are out of that very hyper-competitive market cycle, and from here on, based on this, how should we think about store expansion run rate going forward, looking at the space availability and competition both?

I don't think we're out of it. It's not like it's gone back to the good old times per se, but I think what we're not seeing is it's acceleration that we saw, right?

We think that stabilized a little bit. Then, I think we've also got a great BD team that's working really hard to find us the right locations in the right spots that make sense for us.

There's a lot of things there, too.

Any guidance on store expansion?

As many good ones as we can find, Tejas.

Okay. That's all.

All the best for coming quarters.

Thank you.

Yes, hi, Nissan. Sir, we have been investing in building up a strong leadership team, improving operations and technology for last couple of years.

Checking if you could talk about some of the large changes that have happened over last year or so. This will help us better appreciate the improvement in growth profile and also sort of give us confidence for a sustained growth going ahead.

I think let's start off with the technology piece of it, right? We've now gone through an evaluation of our store POS systems, and we're moving to a much more robust system that suits us.

We appreciated the last one we had, and we liked the last one we had, but when we look to where we want to go, there's other POS systems out there. We have started that tech upgrade to the new POS system that will start in June, and by the end of the year, we hope to have that rolled out.

We've also started developing AI agents in-house to manage agentic workflows inside the organization using AI at its finest level of efficiency. We want to see that come to fruition.

We're also continuously investing in all kinds of technologies, including giving our people access to AI sites for different descriptions. Not everybody wants the same AI site.

They all have different functionalities. From a tech standpoint, we've definitely done our due diligence and are working towards it, not the least of which where we will be doing an SAP upgrade as well later on this year.

All of that's in play, right? From a people standpoint, we continue to invest in people.

We've had three significant hires in the last 12 months. Some of them are old familiar faces, and some of them are new.

We've had a new Chief Technology Officer. We've added a new Chief Marketing Officer, and most recently, we've also added a Chief Product Officer to the team.

All of these people come with deep domain experience, and they've also come with scale experience. They also come with complexity experience, which is all of the things we need for to run our business.

We've been strengthening the management team, the senior leadership tool, and we're very confident about the capabilities of the team. It's now a question of how we can leverage that to take us to the next step.

Got it.

Sir, this leadership investment is largely done with, or we expect few more gaps to fill up in the due course?

I think as we grow, right, there's always going to be gaps. There's always going to be gaps caused by our growth.

There's going to be gaps caused by attrition, right? There's always going to be gaps that come up.

I think for the most part, for where we are today, I think we've got a terrific team in place.

Understood. All these leadership hires are new roles that have been created, right, like Chief Product Officer, Chief Technology Officer, or these were earlier also there, and this new leadership that has joined has replaced the earlier one?

No,

some of them are new. The Chief Product Officer role in its current avatar is a new role.

The Chief Marketing Officer role is new. We haven't had that position for a couple of years.

The Chief Technologies replacement Product is a slightly differentiated, but we also, by the way, I think it was in the previous fiscal year, we hired a Chief Digital Insights Officer that joined the team, which is why we've been able to take advantage of some of the AI initiatives that are coming through. We're investing not only in the product side of it or the marketing side of it, but also the technology side of it.

Fair enough. Nissan, second, I wanted to understand Walkway and the format.

The expansion has definitely escalated in FY 2026. Any initial read-through on how the format is ramping up?

Have we now crossed the pilot phase, and now deep expansion should be expected? Today, in one of the comments, you mentioned that the format had deep penetration potential, if you could throw some light here, it would be helpful.

Yeah. I think from a market space standpoint, it has potential for two reasons.

There are more Tier 3 and Tier 4 towns in this country than there are Tier 1 towns, right? That's where Walkway would be playing.

That's number one. In those tiering of city, unorganized sector leads the way.

I would guess, and it's not a study, but if the average is 70%, in those sectors, it's almost 85% of the business is done in an unorganized sector, right? The ability to serve that consumer is high.

The market size is big. The number of stores are big.

That's why we feel that the opportunity for growth exists. What we have to still keep cracking and getting it right is: how does Walkway play in a Tier 2 town street?

How does it play in a Tier 4 street store? These all come with different mechanics.

It's not a cookie-cutter approach. Until we figure out the entire formula, I would never feel that the pilot is done, which, naturally, I never feel my work is done on any store concept.

I think there's a lot more pieces to the puzzle to make Walkway successful across from Tier 2 to Tier 4, through small shopping centers, through high streets, through high-density markets. Overall, though, we are pleased to see with the profitability and the model of Walkway starting to make a lot more sense, especially to our ROCE.

Fair enough, sir. Thanks for taking my questions.