Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Info Edge (India) Limited Q4 FY '26 earning 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. Amrish Raghuvanshi, Chief Financial Officer.

Before we begin, I would like to draw your attention to the detailed disclaimer included in this presentation for good order's sake. Kindly note that the conference is being recorded.

All the participant lines will remain on mute and there will be an opportunity for Q&A after the presentation concludes. Now, I would like to hand over the call to Mr.

Hitesh Oberoi 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 calls for for the fourth quarter of FY '26. We will begin with an overview of our standalone financial performance, followed by business highlights for each segment along with our a commentary on the strategy for each business.

We will then take questions. For the standalone business in Q4 of FY '26, billing was ₹1,057 crore, a YoY growth of 7%, and revenue was ₹805 crore, a YoY growth of 17%.

Operating profits at a standalone level grew by 39% year-on-year to ₹323 crore, and the operating margins stood at 40%. The standalone business generated cash from operations before taxes of ₹621 crore in Q4 of Q4 of FY '26, a YoY growth of 16%.

The cash generation from the recruitment business was ₹619 crore. The non-recruitment businesses at an aggregate level generated cash of ₹37 crore in Q4 of FY '26.

For the standalone business in full-year FY '26, billing was ₹3,178 crore, a YoY growth of 10%, and revenue was ₹3,052 crore, a YoY growth of 15%. Operating profits grew by 17% year-on-year to ₹1,138 crore, and the operating margin was 37%.

The standalone business generated cash from operations before taxes of ₹1,469 crore in FY '26, a YoY growth of 12%. The cash balance of Info Edge, including wholly-owned subsidiaries, at the end of March 2026 stood at ₹4,963 crore.

Continuing the track record of progressively improving shareholder distributions, the board has also approved a final dividend of ₹3.6 per share for the year. This adds to the total dividend payout of ₹8.4 per share for FY '26, a 40% increase dividend payout versus last year.

Moving on to the segmental performance and starting with the recruitment business: In Q4 of FY '26, the standalone recruitment billings grew by 10% to ₹811 crore and revenue grew by 14% to ₹581 crore. Recruitment billings, including Zwayam and DoSelect, grew by 9% to ₹838 crore and revenue grew by 12% to ₹608 crore.

The operating profit for the standalone recruitment segment improved by 22% year-on-year to ₹340 crore, and the operating profit margin was 58%. Cash generated from recruitment operations was ₹619 crore, a YoY growth of 16%.

In full-year FY '26, the standalone recruitment billings grew by 10% to ₹2,374 crore and revenue grew by 14% to ₹2,256 crore. Recruitment billings, including Zwayam and DoSelect, grew by 9% to 2,461 crore and revenue grew by 13% to ₹2,343 crore.

The recruitment the operating profit for the standalone recruitment segment improved by 14% year-on-year to ₹1,277 crore, and the operating profit margin was 57%. Cash generated from the recruitment operations was ₹1,513 crore, a YoY growth of 13%.

The key operating highlights for the year: FY '26 was a year of moderate growth for the recruitment business. After second a strong second half of FY '25, with Q4 FY '25 billing growing at 18% year-on-year YoY, 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 Jobseeker index, which grew at 7%, 8% YoY 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%; recruitment consultants grew at 8%; and other sectors combined grew at 14%. Quarterly quarterly numbers can sometimes be influenced by renewal timings 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, 19% of billings, grew 10% YoY 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 Jobseeker Services business reported ₹53 crore in billings, a YoY growth of 33% with 60% operating profit margin in Q4 of FY '26. For the full-year FY '26, it reported ₹176 crore in billings, a YoY growth of 19% with a with an operating profit of ₹98 crore and a 57% operating profit margin.

Naukri Gulf billings in Q4 of FY '26 were ₹41 crore, 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 ₹126 crore in billing, a YoY growth of 16%, with a ₹41 crore operating profit and a 35% operating profit margin. Job Hai continued to operate on a freemium model with a focus on select markets.

Platform metrics remained healthy and revenues continued to grow. The business remains in in an investment phase, and we're making good progress on monetization.

On the Jobseeker 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 Job Hai 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 Hai, the recruitment margin was around 61% in the quarter.

For the full-year FY '26, the operating margins slightly improved to 57% at an standalone level and to 59% excluding Job Hai. Moving over to the real estate segment: In Q4 of FY '26, billings grew by 2% to ₹163 crore, whereas revenue grew by 36% to ₹144 crore.

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 eight quarters has been reversed, and revenue for the quarter as well as for the year stands increased by ₹20.5 crore as a result. This is not material under applicable accounting standards and hence has not been separately disclosed in the financials.

This is a one-time reversal and is not expected to recur in the future at this point in time. Operating profits in Q4 were ₹3 crore, whereas the cash generated from operations in 99acres was ₹22 crore in Q4 of FY '26.

In the full-year FY '26, billings in 99acres grew by 10% to ₹497 crore and revenue grew by 19% to ₹488 crore. Operating losses were ₹59 crore, and cash losses from operations were ₹5 crore in FY '26.

During Q4, we undertook changes in the 99acres sales organization and tightened certain key processes and and and the adherence to these processes to set up the business for sustained long-term growth. This had a one-time 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 of iOS app traffic time share. The overall market share of 99acres in in April in March was 51% and in April 52% traffic share, sorry, traffic time share.

Supply momentum remained strong across categories. Live resale-cum-rental listings from brokers grew 35% year-on-year, and live new project listings grew 28% year-on-year during the quarter.

We continued 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 ₹39 crore and revenue grew by 19% to ₹36 crore.

The business incurred an operating loss of ₹3 crore and generated cash from operations of ₹4 crore in in Q4 of FY '26. Our matchmaking portfolio, including Jeevansathi and Aisle combined, reported ₹49 crore billings, a YoY growth of 23%, and combined operating losses were ₹7 crore in Q4.

In full-year FY '26, Jeevansathi billings grew by 28% to ₹142 crore and revenue grew by 26% to ₹138 crore. The business incurred an operating loss of ₹4 crore and generated cash from operations of ₹15 crore in FY '26.

The Jeevansathi plus Aisle business combined reported ₹182 crore in billings, a YoY growth of 29%, and combined operating losses reduced by 50% to ₹15 crore in FY '26. Jeevansathi 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.

Aisle grew at 31 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 Aisle umbrella to grow even faster.

Arike, the Malayalam-focused app, is now growing at an even higher pace. Moving on to the education business: In Q4 of FY '26, billing was ₹45 crore, a YoY decline of 13%, and revenue grew by 11% to ₹44 crore.

The business delivered an operating profit of ₹6 crore and generated cash from operations of ₹11 crore in Q4 of FY '26. In the full-year FY '26, billing was ₹164 crore, a YoY growth of 1%, and revenue grew by 13% to ₹170 crore.

The business delivered an operating profit of ₹13 crore and generated cash from operations of ₹22 crore in FY '26. AI-driven changes have in search behavior have been affecting Shiksha'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 bots 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 US and Canada, driven by evolving student preferences and broader macro factors in these geographies. We're actively broadening our destination coverage with increased focus on the UK, 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. In the recruitment business, the core Naukri strategy is centered around three variables: hiring volume, our share of hiring, and revenue per hire.

We are focused on improving all three. In the premium segment, we are deepening focus through targeted offerings including Naukri Top Tier, IIMjobs, and Hirist, 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 assistive services are improving revenue per hire. In the value segment, Job Hai is expected to play an increasingly important role over time.

The success there depends on building real-time labor matching and simple workforce 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-Recs, our agentic AI offering for recruiters; TalentPulse, our data offerings for you know for for for our customers; branding solutions; and premium products are expected to contribute meaningfully in the in the near term. Job Job Hai adds a further growth layer over the medium to long term.

Beyond the core B2B business, our Jobseeker Services segment has been 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. Excuse me.

Naukri Gulf has delivered 20%-plus billing growth over recent years and progressed from break-even to a 35% operating margin business. The structural opportunity in the Middle East remains intact, and we see a strong runway for 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 two years.

Our supply share has crossed 50% and response growth has nearly doubled. In new projects, a market estimated at approximately 5,000 to ₹5,500 crore, we are seeing early momentum, with responses now growing 30% year-on-year after being flat last year.

The recent rollout of 99shorts in NCR aims 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% YoY billings growth over the past couple of years and is nearing break-even after from an after operating losses of ₹120 crore a few years ago.

With a close to 45%-plus profile share in Hindi-speaking markets and AI-driven recommendations, matching, and pricing, our focus is on building a more dominant position and driving higher monetization. The Aisle business recorded ₹39 crore in billings in FY '26 with over 30% YoY growth and reduced operating losses.

Arike within the Malayali market is now growing at 40% year-on-year and is a meaningful contributor to Aisle revenues. The matchmaking portfolio is positioned to sustain healthy growth while contributing to overall cash flow.

The 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 bots to complement domestic counseling efforts, and diversifying destination coverage in Study Abroad towards markets like the UK, UAE, and continental Europe.

We expect these initiatives to progressively offset search-led headwinds as monetization matures. Across all our businesses, whether across our businesses, whether matching job seekers with employers, home buyers 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, two-sided network effects, and deep domain context to to deliver better matching, automate workflows, and make the experience meaningfully productive for more productive for both sides. Done well, this translates into higher engagement, stronger outcomes, and a greater share of customer wallet over time.

Accordingly, we have been increas- 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.

The this two-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're continuously improving our ML models to deliver better outcomes for job seekers and recruiters alike. On the employer side, we're getting better at identifying hiring intent, such as distinguishing urgent, hard-to-fill roles from routine ones, the platform can match accordingly.

On the job seeker side, we're progressing from search-led recommendation search-led to recommendation-led discovery, where relevant opportunities are 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 one year are already gaining healthy traction: AI-powered mock interviews are used by 1.5 million users monthly, AI-generated 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 over 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 now so that we can unlock new revenue streams.

We are building products that go beyond feature additions. AI-Recs, our agentic recruitment platform, automates end-to-end hiring works 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 AI-Recs.

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.

AI-Recs is both a product innovation and a nascent revenue stream at this point in time. Of course, 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 AI 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.

AI-Recs has been like rolled out to 1,000 clients, and and we have now 30,000 job mandates on AI-Recs, 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 reduce the end-to-end cycle hiring cycle time for enterprise clients, and we continue to track this as a as a key metric. PremiumX, a dedicated database for premium candidates, and data products such as Executive Intelligence and TalentPulse, represent additional monetization opportunities as we expand their reach amongst enterprise clients.

In 99acres, our AI recommendation engine is driving 10% to 15% improvement in unique interests, with monetization expected to follow as a platform as platform engagement strengthens. At Jeevansathi, AI powers recommendations, matchings, and pricing end-to-end.

Monetization 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 over time.

Thank you, and now we are happy to take questions.

Thank you, Hitesh. Anand, we already have few questions.

Maybe we can start.

Anand, you're on mute.

Yeah. Thank you, Vineet.

Our first question is from Kaushik Gurumurthy from Bank of America. Kaushik, go ahead and ask your question.

Hey. Can you hear me?

This is Sachin Salgaonkar from Bank of America. I have three questions.

First question, again, 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're thinking on hiring given what's happening in AI?

Would be great to get color across GCC, IT sector, and non-IT sector. Second question, let me actually go through all the three questions and then I'll pause to take answers from you.

Second is obviously on 99acres. Clearly, we're seeing good execution, good margins.

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? Third, would love to understand how are you guys thinking from a Info Edge Ventures point of view if there are any incremental opportunities we are seeing in India to invest from an AI perspective?

Thank you.

Yeah. See, the overall job market, I think the sentiment continues to be subdued.

It's not a hot market. It's a lukewarm market.

Of course, there is hiring happening in pockets. For example, you mentioned GCCs.

The smaller GCCs continue to hire, but the larger ones, some of them their head count 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've, of course, expanded our coverage. We are now in more cities than earlier.

We have many more clients, but ARPU are still low. The overall sort of hiring environment is not a hot market.

It's not as if companies are sort of under pressure to hire quickly. They're taking their time.

They're hiring for certain positions. Positions like in machine learning and AI, there we're seeing massive growth.

There are a lot of companies want to hire this kind of talent. Amongst the GCCs, at least, there is pressure on the larger ones for people to become more productive.

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.

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. That'll depend on how the economy plays out over the next few quarters.

Also, I guess if things get better on that front, that should also help in the medium term. As far as 99acres is concerned, 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 estimate we have a 52% traffic Our latest number for traffic share for April is 52% time share. Ultimately our revenue is a function of the response we deliver to our clients.

In the resale and rental segments, responses 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 have started growing.

Response grew by 22% in the new home segment last year. In Q4, it grew by 33%.

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?

That's where we are right now. If we add a few more percentage points to share this year, I think we'll become a very, very strong leader in this market.

Sanjeev, you want to take the question on Info Edge Ventures? Yeah.

You're on mute.

Yeah. Sorry.

On AI and Info Edge Ventures, see, we just did a sort of enumeration just last week. Out of our 130-plus companies that we've done since 2007, which are not strategic 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 an element of AI, and very many of them are AI-first. We're not going out and looking for AI companies.

This is what we are finding bubbling up from underneath. Clearly, the AI space is very, very active.

On deep tech, the government is putting a lot of effort and investment. There is a ₹100,000 crore RDI fund, there is a ₹20,000 crore Fund of Funds for Startups, there's a ₹10,000 crore AI fund that the government has put.

There's a lot of government effort, a lot of private capital coming in, a lot of young entrepreneurs are trying. There's a lot of action in AI.

Our difficult task is to figure out who will succeed, who will fail, behind whom is there a moat, what can be replicated. You're not finding too many foundational models here.

It's not as if you're investing behind LLMs. It's the 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 two years later.

That's a long and short of AI.

Got it. Very clear.

Just one small follow-up to Hitesh. Hitesh, this follow-up is more on competition on 99acres.

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? At least

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 should go to the team for having done a really good job.

I think as far as competitors go, see, there are on on the in the in the broker business, we compete with MagicBricks and and Housing. For in the new home business, we compete with Meta and Google.

In the owner business, we actually end up competing with MagicBricks, Housing, and NoBroker to some extent. My sense is all these of course, Meta and Google continue to are are very, very strong players.

They our our that's and for a lot 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 for us.

It's like a 5 4,000, ₹5,000 crore TAM, and we do only about maybe 240, ₹250 crore in in this segment. Our response has started has started to grow.

We're beginning to get a few things right. Like I said, 20% to 22% response growth last year, but 33% growth in in Q4.

Hopefully, we'll be able to monetize better as we go forward. In the secondary market, resale and rental, we've succeeded we've 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've, our our traffic and in every city now. In every city, earlier, we used to be leaders in in two or three of the big cities, but now in Delhi, Bombay Bombay, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, almost every in almost every big city now, we are traffic leaders and and supply leaders and and custom and leaders in terms of number of customers and increasingly on on revenue as well.

Competition has has they've there have been a few issues with with competition. There have been leadership changes at at Housing at at both Housing and MagicBricks.

Housing, they've they've sort of they give out their numbers publicly. I think their burn is now close to ₹250 crore a year and they're they've sort of lost a lot of ground, in my view, in India.

Maybe it's no longer as exciting for them as it was a few years ago. In the owner segment also, we have made substantial progress over the last few quarters.

So, 99acres on 99acres, it's free for owners to list, and and we monetize only a small percentage of owners who list their properties on 99acres. There's substantial headroom for growth there as well, and our our supply share on the owner segment has also increased substantially over the last few quarters.

Super clear. Thank you.

Yeah.

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. What I've 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.

I think exceptional team and talent, and I think fantastic leadership by Hitesh. Hitesh has probably been spending the bulk of his time last couple of years on 99acres leading from the front in the trenches.

Thank you.

That has made the difference.

Thank you.

Thanks, Kaushik. Next question is from Vivek from Ambit Capital.

Vivek, go ahead and ask your question.

Yeah. I hope I'm audible.

You are.

Yeah. 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.

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, increase presence in tier-2 and 3 cities, and I think you're also offering free trials to SMEs. Just wanted your thoughts on the non-IT segment and what you can really do to accelerate growth.

The last one is on Job Hai. What are the key metrics of success that you're tracking there?

Where do you read the progress in regard to those metrics? When do you see this becoming meaningful for your recruitment segment?

Thank you. Yes, see,

the premium segment, our sense is right now the premium market, and when I say premium, people who earn more than, let's say, 25, ₹30 lakh 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, in machine learning, in data engineering, and so on.

These are not leadership-level jobs, right? These are not like jobs that pay crores and a crore, 2 crore, 3 crore.

There are some of those as well, but the bulk of the hiring is in the ₹20 lakh to the ₹40 lakh, ₹50 lakh segment. There Naukri is very strong.

Naukri has significant market share in this segment. Both IIMjobs and Hirist are also reasonably strong in this segment.

Of course, we are also doing a lot of work to improve our share in this segment. Yes, LinkedIn is a competitor.

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 Jobseeker side. We've launched PremiumX on the recruiter side.

We've got Hirist, which is our premium. IIMjobs is a premium MBA offering, and they're very strong.

We've grown Hirist well over the last couple of years, and Hirist has now significant share in the premium tech hiring market. We are, I think, we've been working hard to sort of grow our offerings in this segment.

We are confident that we will continue to grow our share even in this segment going forward. 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 in segments, 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 freemium model to attract SMEs on the platforms.

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 of hiring is not picking up as yet.

Maybe it will in the next couple of quarters, who knows. Right now, I think there is stress there.

In the value segment or in the Job Hai sort of market, we are making very good progress. We are trying to get our model right, and we've focused on Delhi NCR for some time.

Today, we are, I think competitors in this market are smaller in size, but we are leaders in traffic in Delhi NCR, and we've started monetizing now in Delhi NCR. Now we're taking this template to other cities.

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?

On all these metrics, we are making good progress. Of course, now we've started monetizing.

It's small business right now, but it's a startup. We would like to grow it 100% year-on-year for the next few years.

It'll take some time to become a meaningful contributor to our revenue because the base is very small. I think strategically, very important for us, and it'll 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 Kanzhun, they work with more than 6 million customers, and most of them are SMEs. About more than 40%, 50% of the revenue comes from SMEs.

They're very profitable, and they've grown and they do over $1 billion, I think, in revenue. It'll take a few years.

India is not that large. The Indian market is not that large.

I think that's the right model to follow for this segment. There are several things which make this segment and this market different from the Naukri sort of market.

That's what Job Hai is trying to solve.

Okay. Thank you for the explanation.

Just one clarification related to the opening comments. You said something about a one-off ₹20 crore accrual was it in 99acres and does this impact your billing or revenue?

Could you repeat that? I just couldn't understand what.

Yes.

Yes, that was in 99acres. Basically, we wrote back some earlier provision, and that did not impact billings, but impacted revenue and also profit for this quarter.

Vineet, do you want to elaborate on that, Vineet?

Sure. Vivek, basically in 99acres, we have some small part of the business which is cost-per-lead model.

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 leads are not satisfactory. Then over last eight quarters, we studied those trends, and then we came to a conclusion that the refund that we have to issue is significantly lower than what we were building provision for.

As a result, we have made two changes: One, we reversed the extra provision which was not used as of December in the last quarter, that led to some one-time gain. Second, going forward, instead of creating this 20% provision, we'll be now provisioning it at 5%.

These are two changes. That led to around ₹20 crore of higher revenue in this quarter, which obviously has flowed down to profitability as well.

That was more like one-off in this quarter in 99acres.

Okay. Understood.

Then this quarter's billing performance is not impacted by that. It's only revenue and segmental PBT.

Yeah.

Billings have already been accounted for. It's already part of billings.

Think of it that way that you collect ₹10 from a customer for this kind of business. For recognizing revenue, you were taking 20%, which is ₹2 as provision, and ₹8 was going to revenue.

Right. That ₹2 over the last few quarters combined value of that equivalent of ₹2, we have reversed it back in this quarter.

Okay. That's great.

This performance of 1.9% billing growth, you mentioned that there is some change in the way you are carrying out the business, which is why this was lower, right? Yeah.

Yes, we undertook some changes in our sales organization and we tightened some processes around basically billing is invoicing, right? Now, we've tightened controls around invoicing into the future and stuff like that, right?

Customers were willing to pay us in advance, and we've sort of clamped down on some of those things. I think this is a good thing to do, and it'll help us in the future.

We'll have a one-time transitional impact on Q4 billings.

Okay. This is not likely to repeat in the next coming quarters, is it?

The one-time impact that you mentioned about? Because logically, last year's base will have, let's say, those advance collections, but now perhaps you're not going to collect money in advance even if customer wants to pay, is that?

Yeah. We made it tight.

We've basically tightened the controls around all this a bit.

Okay. Great.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Vivek. Next question from Kunal from BanyanTree.

Kunal, go ahead and ask your question.

Hi. Thank you so much for the opportunity.

My first question was on Job Hai, can you talk about the competition there? We've looked at Apna and a couple of other players.

What is their business model? Is it similar to us?

I understand they've been monetizing as well. If you can throw some light on how we are thinking to monetize.

That was on Job Hai. Second was in 99acres, when you say this one-time adjustment that happened in this quarter about the write-back, then from a sustainable point of view, what is the impact on the profitability because of that?

Is it that the profit number that we're seeing may not be sustainable in Q1? That is the second.

Third, we've been talking about the Jobseeker as a product being 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 job seekers are finding the product more beneficial or it is broad-based for all the sectors? These are the three questions.

Thanks.

Yeah. Our business model in Job Hai is not very different from Apna and WorkIndia.

Except that perhaps we are more freemium than they are. We allow you to list for free and then we charge only in some markets and in some categories.

Like I said, our focus right now, 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 NCR. Now that we've achieved that objective, we're trying to monetize more aggressively in NCR, and now we're taking this template to other markets.

The model is not very different from WorkIndia for sure, overall model. 99acres, see, of course, because this provision has been reversed, it's resulted in ₹20 crore of extra revenue in Q4, and that has flowed to the bottom line as well, right?

It's a one-time. It's not expected to occur again, I think.

As far as Jobseeker offerings go, the 360 offerings on Naukri are for all segments and for all categories and for all kinds of job seekers. We've seen growth across the board.

It's broad-based. We've seen higher growth across all segments, across all categories.

Okay. Sure.

Thank you.

Thanks, Kunal. Next question from Swapnil from JM Financial.

Swapnil, go ahead and ask your question.

Hey, hi. Thanks for the opportunity.

My first question is with respect to your deferred sales growth numbers. It seems that there has been a significant deceleration in those trends 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 growth perspective? Last year, it was 18% in Naukri, for example, and now down to 12%.

Sorry, Vineet, you want to take that, huh?

Yeah. Swapnil, see, deferred sales revenue is a function of billings growth.

Last year, when you looked at the higher deferred sales number because last year in S2, the growth rate of Naukri business billings was actually higher. Quarter three Naukri grew at 15%, quarter four it grew at 18%.

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 of FY '27. Basically the way we account billings into revenue is it is amortized over 365 days.

That flow-through will happen. Other thing to note is that, like Hitesh mentioned, our candidate services business, B2C business, that's going faster.

There the tenure of the product is shorter. Like in Naukri, typically, you sell for 12 months, revenue gets recognized over 12 months.

In B2C business, and that business is going faster, there generally the plans are 3 months, 6 months, 1 month. The recognition is quicker.

There the flow-through of billings to revenue is immediate. That also plays a part.

It's a mix of both. That's how one should look at it.

Got it, Vineet. The second question is with respect to your B2C revenue growth only.

This particular item 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 a proposition for the candidates?

We've done a whole bunch of things. We've launched a lot of new offerings, some of them are AI-led, like I spoke about AI resume makers, AI mock interviews, AI agents for job seekers.

Two, also we made the model more self-serve. 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 us sort of grow our revenue faster.

Okay. Any forward-looking guidance on this particular piece?

How do you expect this business to grow? Look,

to be honest, I have also been surprised myself. This business used to grow at 18%, 20% per year, but after making these changes, it's now started growing at 30%, but it's only been one quarter.

Now, of course, the team is very bullish, but let's see if this sustains.

Got it. Just the last thing on the employee cost side.

For the last couple of quarters, I think there has been some dip in your 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?

Everybody wants to use more AI inside Info Edge also. Every time they ask for a AI budget, we also tell them, sort of, just like our customers, we've also been telling them, "Listen, hopefully, you'll become more efficient and more productive since you're using AI now."

There are hundreds of AI projects going on in the company right now as we speak. 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're doing things in a much more efficient manner than earlier.

We don't expect a major reduction in head count going forward. People are becoming more productive than earlier because of these tools.

We have not laid off anyone or anything of that sort, we are just encouraging everyone to sort of do a little more than what they were doing earlier.

If I can just comment there, I think there generally, an efficiency drive within the company to just look at virtually every new hire or a rehire very, very closely. There's a strong emphasis to just ensure that every hire is adding value.

Your other point about the Jobseeker business growing strongly, to some extent, this might be a function of just countercyclical to what's happening in the economy. Generally, with a slowing job hiring market, you're bound to see a little bit more inbound interest in the services which we offer for job seeker, the paid services.

I think that's a function of what's happening broadly in the hiring trends in the economy.

Just a quick clarification. What would be the contribution from this Jobseeker Services to your overall billings?

To

the Jobseeker business, I think revenue last year was about ₹176 crore.

6%, 7% of the billings.

6% to 7%?

Yeah.

Okay. Very helpful.

No, not 67%, 6% or 7%.

6% to 7%. Full-year full-year growth was only 19%.

It's only in Q4 that it grew by 33%.

Understood. Very helpful, Hitesh.

Thanks a lot, and all the best.

Thanks, Swapnil.

Anand, there is a question in chat box. Should we first take that?

We can take that. Go ahead.

Yeah. Sanjeev, this is for you.

There's a question from Avnisha, "What is the aim behind starting two new funds, Karkardooma Trust and B8?" You would like to take that one.

See, one is a fund which we are investing in growth stage in venture. We felt that there was an opportunity there.

We had the capital, we had the team to utilize the capital and the opportunity. One is to continue to invest in deep tech.

We had got earlier invested in deep tech through our subsidiary of Info Edge called Redstart. Then through fund called Capital 2B, right?

When that fund ran out of first check money, we decided to allocate a fresh pool of capital. That's why we're doing these two funds.

Yeah. Thanks.

Next question is from Prateek from HSBC. Prateek, go ahead and ask your question.

Hi. Thank you for the opportunity.

My question was to Hitesh on the hiring sentiment. Thank you for the color earlier.

Just wanted to follow up on that. How are you seeing the sentiment over the, let's say, six months?

Is it improving? Is it worse?

In the IT business, what we are looking at, if we look at the LTM attrition trends, right, probably in the last two quarters, it has fallen a bit, right? This is trailing 12-month attrition that we get from IT companies.

Probably from the fall, it's actually a higher fall, right? Even we are hearing at GCC companies, you also mentioned that there is a phenomenon called job hugging, right, because of how everything is happening around AI.

First, wanted to understand how are you looking at sentiment? Is it improving, stable, or has deteriorated from last six months?

I have a follow-up question after that, I'll ask.

Yeah. I would say it's been stable.

If you look at Jobseeker also, I think it's been in that 4%, 5%, 6% range. I would say it's been stable.

In some markets, in some sectors, maybe there's more hiring happening than earlier. On the whole, there's not much improvement.

Hitesh, I think earlier you used to mention about the margins, right, the way the business would grow for Naukri and the way you think about the margins, right? Obviously, the growth has slowed a bit, right?

How should we think about margins, right? Have you guys probably changed the thoughts there and probably margins will sustain as they were in 3Q and 4Q?

It should be that kind of margins should we look at or probably something changes?

See, there are two big areas where we are still investing in our recruitment business. One is Job Hai, and the other is AI.

We don't want to starve these two areas of investment. We'll continue to invest in both Job Hai and AI, important for us for the long term.

Now, my sense is that if we are able to grow our top line in double digits, the margin should remain the same. If you're able to grow at 10% or more, we should be able to maintain margin in Naukri.

If we grow faster than that, then maybe margins could get better going forward. On the other hand, if the economy slows down further and Naukri grows at 7%, 8%, then we may sort of lose a little bit of margin in the short term.

Yeah. Hitesh, also on your 99acres business, right, I understand 4Q was one-off aberration, right?

However, before that, you guys were growing at somewhere around mid-15% billing growth, and also now you have a higher market share. Commentary is a lot more bullish.

Should we start building in higher than 15% growth? Do you think that would be a right estimate for next year?

Should we start seeing that from the first quarter itself?

It's easier to make projections about what could happen over the next three, four, five years than about what will happen next quarter, right? Our goal in 99acres, actually, our goal should be, if you ask me, given where we are today, because we've 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. Revenue, like I said, will follow with the lag and when we've been gaining share for a few quarters.

I think our billing last year was about 500, ₹497, ₹498 crore. We should aim to at least double our business, if you ask me, over the next three years.

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 99acres.

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 in Q1.

In the short term, the market may slow down a little bit, something else may happen, God knows. Over a three, four-year period, I think we have now laid the foundations of building a solid second vertical inside Info Edge.

The team is also confident that they can deliver. In these kind of businesses, once you get this kind of lead over your competitors, it's not easy for them to catch up.

Medium term, this should be our goal for sure, at least in my view.

Last one, I know you guys are a little conservative on M&A, but in this area of 99acres, would you guys also be open to kind of consider if there is any M&A opportunities, right, just to kind of put the industry structure where Naukri's business environment is, right? Would you be okay doing that?

Yeah. At the right price for the right asset, why not?

Okay. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Prateek. Vivek from Ambit Capital has a follow-up question.

Vivek, go ahead and ask your question.

Thanks for the opportunity. Two questions: Number one is on AI-Recs.

Hitesh, last time you had spoken about some of the mandates that you got on AI-Recs and how you are now taking it to more and more customers. Just wanted to understand better in terms of client adoption and willingness to pay.

Have you initiated those conversations yet? Anything that you would like to share on this one?

That's number one. The second one is appreciate the rich color you gave on 99acres.

Just wanted to understand whether the traffic share gains also help you in the new home segment or is it primarily leads hand for brokers which gets stronger and stronger? 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?

Thank you.

Yeah. No, AI-Recs, we've been working on our agentic offering for a while, and we were sort of figuring out the go-to-market.

Initially, we did a pilot with a few customers and we tried to sell these offerings to a few recruiters. That was creating a lot of friction and it was taking a lot of time.

B2B adoption is harder. B2C is easier.

We've changed our approach, and what we've done is we made AI-Recs available for free to a lot of recruiters on our platform, and we are encouraging them to try it out, to sample, to see the difference. Our whole pitch is, "Listen, AI-Recs is going to turn recruiters into super recruiters."

That's the positioning of the agentic AI offering. It can help make recruiters become more productive and do their job faster and better.

That's the approach we're taking right now. It's a new offering.

Like any new offering, there are some early adopters. We are seeing that on the platform now.

Close to a few hundred customers have already recruiters, lots of hundreds of recruiters have already been experimenting with it. Some are using it, of course, a lot more than others.

Close to 30,000 mandates have now gone through AI-Recs. The product also is under constant development.

We're trying to improve as we get feedback from clients. Now this is something which we are very excited about because, again, early days, it's a new offering.

We don't know whether it'll succeed. If it succeeds, then, again, it increases TAM for us, right?

Because like we've said this in the past, in our heads, we target a take rate of 1% from our clients, but if you are able to make recruiters more productive, then this take rate can actually go up over time, right? Even if hiring volumes don't grow, our revenue can still grow.

It's early days, but we're very excited about this offering, and fingers crossed on this one. Similarly, the TalentPulse offering is a little older because we launched it a while back.

As we get more and more data and as we get more and more better in modeling, our offering is improving. Again, in TalentPulse, what we're doing now is we are monetizing it and we have a lot of revenue for TalentPulse.

We did about 30, ₹35 crore last year from our TalentPulse offering. We are making it available to more customers so that they can try it out.

We've launched new variants, and, again, this is a business we think we can grow much faster than the overall Naukri business. Again, it increases the TAM for us.

These two offerings we're very excited about. Additionally, we've also launched PremiumX, premium search inside Naukri.

Early days, that's free right now, we are not charging for it. 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-tier hiring market right now.

Again, it's difficult to say what's going to happen in the short term, but over a three-year period, it'll be great if we can make a few hundred crores of incremental revenue from these offerings. That could 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 buyers on the platform are open to both, right? When they come to the platform, they're not sure whether they want to buy a new home or a ready-to-move-in sort of apartment, and therefore, a percentage of them end up sort of becoming leads for our new home clients as well.

Then, of course, also the new home advertisers, because 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. It helps.

Of course, you need to keep working on your new home offerings. To answer your question around what extra are we doing on that front, see, one of the things we're excited about is our 99shorts offering.

We've rolled it out in NCR. We worked very hard last year to launch this offering in NCR.

Think of it as an Instagram of real estate projects. You can see apartments, you can get details of projects, walkthroughs, it's all video, right?

It's almost 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 view resident reviews and stuff like that.

Early days, 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 99acres for our users. If that happens, and if we become a destination site for new homes and if we become the place where people start their new home search, like we are for ready-to-move-in apartments, then this business could grow much faster than it has grown over the last few years.

Separately, we have a large database of both owners and buyers on our platform, and 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. That's early days on that one, but I think even that will sort of work out in the medium term for us.

We are working on a bunch of offerings in new homes. Our response, like I said, in Q4 for new homes was up 33% YoY.

Great. Thank you, Hitesh, for those detailed answers.

All the very best.

Thank you, Vivek. Vineet, that was the last question for the evening we have.

Great. Thank you, everyone.

On behalf of Info Edge, we now conclude this conference call. You may disconnect the lines.

Thank you for joining.