Ladies and gentlemen, good morning, and welcome to the Nazara Technologies Q2 FY26 Earnings Conference Call, hosted by Spark Institutional Equities Private Limited. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes.

Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star, then zero on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded.

I now hand the conference over to Mr. Anand Srinivasan from Spark Institutional Equities Private Limited.

Thank you, and over to you, sir.

Thanks, Swapnali. On behalf of Avendus Spark, I welcome all of you to the Q2 FY26 earnings call of Nazara Technologies Limited.

We have with us the management team represented by Mr. Nitish Mittersain, CEO and JMD at Nazara Technologies; Mr.

Rohit Sharma, Executive Director, Nazara Technologies; Mr. Rakesh Shah, CFO; Ms.

Anupriya Sinha Das, Head of Corporate Development at Nazara Technologies; Mr. P.S.

Menon, Head, Offline Gaming at Nazara Technologies; Mr. Terry Lee, CEO of Fusebox Games; Mr.

[Jess Ames?] , co-founder and CEO at WildWorks; Mr.

Akshat Rathee, Founder, NODWIN Gaming; Mr. Ajay Pratap Singh, CEO, Absolute Sports Private Limited; Mr.

Senthil Govindan, CEO, Datawrkz; Mr. Stuart Dinsey, CEO, Curve Games.

I would now like to hand over the call to Mr. Nitish Mittersain for opening comments.

Over to you,

sir. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us this morning. To start off with, on our quarterly performance, Nazara delivered INR for an H1, Nazara delivered INR 1,025.2 crores in revenue in H1 FY26, up 80.2% year-on-year, and INR 109.4 crores EBITDA, up 118.5% year-on-year.

Our core gaming EBITDA came in at 23.2%. In Q2 FY26, revenue was INR 526.5 crores, up 65.1%, and EBITDA was INR 62 crores, up 146.4% year-on-year.

Our PAT was negative INR 33.9 crores in Q2 FY26, predominantly due to the real money gaming ban and our impairment of Moonshine Technologies. Our PAT for H1 FY26 was 17.4 crores.

Our operating cash flow for the first half of this year was INR 71.5 crores on a pretax basis, up 170.8% year-on-year, demonstrating a high cash conversion to our EBITDA and reported PAT. Growth was driven by scaling up our LiveOps, improved retention, and multiplatform monetization across mobile, PC, console, and offline.

At this point of time, over 90% of our gaming revenue comes from international markets, with a strong constant focus on the US and UK markets. Mobile gaming remained our primary engine of growth, led by gaming IPs such as Love Island, Big Brother, Kiddopia, Animal Jam, WCC, etc.

Our PC console publishing business performed quite well through successful IPs such as Human Fall Flat and Wobbly Life. Offline gaming, Smaaash and Funky Monkeys, has been growing well and is expanding pretty rapidly now for us.

Our centers of excellence in user acquisition, analytics, AI, and growth are demonstrating good success for us, with improved cost of customer acquisition, expanding our lifetime value of each customer, and more importantly, creating synergies and operating leverage across the different studios that we operate. These shared capabilities are compounding portfolio performance at scale, and we will see increasingly improved metrics in the quarters to come due to these initiatives.

During the quarter, as you all would know, new regulations in India's online skill-based real money gaming space prompted Nazara to record an impairment on its investment in Moonshine Technologies, which operated PokerBaazi, based on a fair valuation as per accounting standards. We've always taken a conservative approach to our accounting presentation, and that's why we've taken a significant impairment in this quarter itself.

Also, Nazara's stake in NODWIN Gaming came below 50%, which resulted in de-subsidiarization of the business. Consequently, while earlier we were carrying this at investment value in our books, we have now taken it at fair value, leading to a meaningful one-time gain.

This quarter's performance, despite the headwinds faced, demonstrates Nazara's resilience and validates our strategy of a diversified portfolio, providing stability to the overall platform and allowing us to take surprises in our stride while continuing to scale. With that, I will now hand over to Anupriya to discuss segmental performance.

Over to you, Anupriya.

Thank you, Nitish. Good morning, everyone.

I'll start with the performance of our core gaming segment, which consists of mobile gaming, PC console publishing, as well as the offline gaming segment. In H1 FY26, on a year-on-year basis, our core gaming segment grew by 159% in revenue terms and 253% in EBITDA terms.

The EBITDA margin for this business was 23.2%. In Q2, on a year-on-year basis, the segment grew by 159% in revenues and 213% in EBITDA, with an EBITDA margin of 22.1%.

Starting with mobile gaming segment, the momentum remained strong, with broad-based growth across Love Island, Animal Jam, and WCC. We also added Cats & Cos as the new IPs in this segment.

In Q2 FY26, mobile revenue grew 81% and EBITDA grew 95% year-on-year, reflecting improved UA efficiency, LiveOps cadence, and content refreshes. H1 trends were similarly robust, with revenue up 83% and EBITDA up 109% year-on-year.

Operationally, we executed our systematic growth framework, sustaining Love Island's longevity with Season 13 featuring on App Store, scaling Kiddopia investments at disciplined economics, and delivering revenue uplifts in Animal Jam through new content. We also advanced IP expansion initiatives, including Animal Jam's upcoming Roblox launch and Bigg Boss launch for the Indian market.

Moving to PC and console publishing, we continue to demonstrate high-margin IP monetization and expanding platform reach. Curve Games benefited from evergreen catalog strength and new platform initiatives, with Human Fall Flat delivering 1.25 million units in September 2025, up 25% year-on-year, while Wobbly Life surpassed 2 million lifetime units and is being now developed for Switch 2.

Turning to offline gaming, consisting of Smaaash and Funky Monkeys, the portfolio delivered INR 12 crores of EBITDA in H1 FY26 at a 27.5% margin. Within the quarter, Smaaash and Funky Monkeys together drove revenue and EBITDA with a clear discipline-led playbook.

We launched three new Funky Monkeys centers in Q2 FY26 and continue to progress the Smaaash 2.0 revamp, with relaunch targeted for FY27. Offline remains both cash accretive today and a valuable audience funnel into our digital IPs.

Moving on to the other segments, AdTech delivered strong growth and robust profitability, with Q2 FY26 performance such as revenue increased by 501% and EBITDA grew by 289% year-on-year for it. For H1, the AdTech business contributed to INR 10 crores of EBITDA.

The combination supports client synergies, broader cross-market solutions, and a shift towards higher-margin product lines. NODWIN core business showed profitable growth in Q2 FY26, even as revenue and EBITDA for its core business grew 31% and 32%, respectively, in revenue and EBITDA terms.

The business sharpened focus on youth, content, and influencer IPs, and is scaling esports across India, Saudi Arabia, and other emerging markets. NODWIN appointed a global gaming veteran as a non-executive director.

The business also refined playbook and stronger synergies are now improving outcomes. Backed by equity infusions, divestments, and expanding profits, now NODWIN is preparing an additional raise to accelerate its global strategy.

In Absolute Sports, Sportskeeda delivered INR 7.2 crores of EBITDA in H1 FY26, even as it navigated lower organic traffic following Google's update. Management has proactively executed cost measures, driving a 13% year-on-year cost reduction in Q2 and planning a 40% year-on-year reduction in Q3.

Other properties performed well, with Pro Football Network revenue increasing 83% year-on-year in H1 with modest cost reduction. Similarly, Primetimer grew 178% year-on-year post-acquisition, and last year's acquisitions, such as Soap Central and DeltiasGaming, grew 195% year-on-year in Q2.

With this, I conclude my remarks, and we'll now open the call for Q&A.

Thank you very much. We will now begin the question-and-answer session.

Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touchtone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two.

Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles.

The first question is from the line of Jinesh Joshi from PL Capital. Please go ahead.

Thanks for the opportunity. Sir, we have taken a provision for impairment in Freaks for about 206 crores.

What led to this impairment? Also, if I remember right, we had invested about 271 crores over here.

Please correct me if my number is incorrect. Apparently, on that base, the impairment appears to be quite substantial in nature.

If you can provide some color on that. While in the PPT we have stated that Freaks 4U is facing some headwinds in Europe given high layoffs and the stagnating market in Europe, but I think we invested in this company maybe about a year back or perhaps one and a half year back, and suddenly we are having an impairment.

Just some color on that.

Hi, this is Akshat. I'm the Founder of NODWIN.

Can you hear me? Just doing a sound check.

Yeah.

Excellent. Some minor factual corrections which is there.

We had invested into Freaks as an associate, and then we ramped up our investments into this. This is about a 2-year-old asset approximately that we have, that's getting there.

When the investment was initially made into this, Europe was doing very well. Esports was doing really well, and the gaming market was far more robust than it is right now.

However, with whatever's been happening on geopolitical levels, Europe as such has gone through a very, very bad time. Not just a normal bad time, it has been a very, very bad time.

Layoffs currently in that sector are in the hundreds of thousands of people across the board, and Europe per se has shut down most companies in that space. The additional one, obviously, marketing dries up if you're firing people.

That has been hard here to play, plus AI is also going in playing in that space a lot. Budgets, people, etc.

are all being cut. Now the second part is Europe is also going through an aging crisis and which has also led to a ability to move people out of the business is extremely expensive.

The last one, which is very important, is esports per se in the Western markets has died. It's only becoming an emerging market and a Saudi Arabia phenomena.

In these markets, it's doing phenomenally well. As esports dies also in those markets, we're hit with triple headwinds.

The final question on this was how much had been invested. Our total investment in this asset was around €42 million, closer to 420, 450 crores.

As of right now in associate-based accounting has an impairment that you're going and seeing, which is Nazara's share. The rest of the total impairment for us is there.

We're doing proactive one where we believe the cash that the company requires to go ahead and keep surviving is not going to be sustainable for us to go ahead and keep on funding this asset in the future.

Jinesh, this is Nitish. I just wanted to add a couple of points here.

I think it's important to understand that a lot of the investment was through equity swap into a subsidiary of NODWIN. The cash amount was much lower than the total value that is being impaired.

I think secondly, at least our view is that if we make a mistake, we should recognize it quickly and move ahead, rather than keeping on putting more cash into it. I think NODWIN is also aligned with the same.

If you look at NODWIN numbers, actually the overall business is doing quite well this year. The losses are predominantly coming only from Freaks 4U.

I think we've both agreed to take this proactive action in terms of the health of the business, as well as in terms of conservative accounting. I hope that answers your question.

The line for him has been disconnected.

Let's move on.

We will take the next participant. The next question is from the line of Manan Poladia from MKP Securities.

Please go ahead.

Hi, Nitish. Good morning.

My first question is again on Freaks 4U, if you could disclose the cash value and the share swap value, even if it was in a subsidiary of NODWIN, number one. I think secondly, on the PokerBaazi impairment that we've taken, I know we've been fairly conservative and taken most of it upfront.

I'm just wondering how much of that cash was already used. There must still be some cash on the company's balance sheet.

I understand there are contingent liabilities as well from the GST department. If you could explain what the strategy there is going forward since we are still major equity shareholders?

Sure. Let me answer the PokerBaazi question first, and then Akshat can give the clarification on Freaks 4U investment breakup.

On PokerBaazi, I think we've basically taken an approach to write off everything except for or provision for impairment except for the cash in the company broadly. I think the delta that you see is cash in the company, and they have over 100 crores of cash at this point of time.

The company is obviously evaluating multiple options. They have an extremely strong poker platform which has been demonstrated at scale in India, and therefore it is quite sought after by global players.

They are exploring a variety of global businesses, and also potentially how they can leverage their India user base going forward for different offerings. I think it's all work in progress, and hopefully by next quarter, we will have more concrete updates to give a view on that.

From a Nazara perspective, like I said earlier, we usually like to keep our books very clean and take a conservative approach, which is why we went ahead and took this impairment upfront in this quarter itself. On Freaks 4U, Akshat, can you give the breakup?

Do you have it handy? It was a four-tranche investment into this.

We had initially invested $9 million into Freaks in January of 2024 for a 13.5% equity. After that, we had gone and increased our shares to 51% 57% by stock swapping $25 million with the NODWIN Singapore asset to the Freaks 4U shareholders.

We additionally have invested around another $6.5, $7 million into them as primary capital over time, for a total of about 15 million in cash and 25 million in stock. The balance is stock that is still due, but we will not be going and exercising that asset.

Total value in everything put together is around $40 million.

Right. Understood.

Akshat, just a follow-up on that if I can. My understanding at least up till last year was that we are exploring this global esports opportunity where I think you guys were talking about Turkey and outsourcing a lot of the services part of that to India.

Is that still a part of the thesis with what you just told us, or is there a change?

Look, Manan, it's probably a good question, which allows me to go ahead and give a small commentary around this, and if it might help everyone else who is potentially going to ask that question. NODWIN remains extremely gung-ho on the global esports strategy, but in specific sectors of the world: emerging markets, which is basically the Global South.

Latin America, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa. On the east side, we have Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and then the global Russian South, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan.

These are the places where the young people are in the world, right? As a youth media company in the world, we need to be very focused towards where we want to be growing for, because this is where young people are.

Everywhere in the north, people are just getting older. Now, our Freaks asset was the ability to go ahead and get a beachhead in a developed market, which would go ahead and potentially bring us a lot of revenue that it would then go ahead and funnel into the rest of the locations that we are.

That theory of going and investing into developed markets to go ahead and get a funneling for the developing markets did not work out, specifically from the European point of view. Our theory on this still stands, and Freaks was actually an asset we acquired, if it's part of the presentation that's uploaded, this is one of the seven previous assets that we had acquired.

Everything after that which we've been doing has been working out much better. Even our M&A strategy has worked out much better, and thank God we at least had, you've not put more cash behind it.

I think Nitish's counsel is great, where we've been able to go ahead and just impair a lot of the equity value that we swapped with, but an equity is not cheap for us because we keep growing. That's our idea.

We remain robust, and we remain strong to go ahead and invest in emerging markets, and we continue to do so.

That sounds great, Akshat. Thank you.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Rahul Jain from Dolat Capital.

Please go ahead. Mr.

Rahul, please proceed with your question.

Hope my line is okay.

Yes, please proceed.

Yeah. Hi.

Firstly, if you could elaborate on the new brand that we are creating, brand new brand title, where we are saying that this is around imagination, creation, and expansion. Specifically on the creation side of it, in terms of what kind of investment we would put in and what kind of monetization we are looking into it, and any other plan on the expansion side of it.

I think some of the color around this new found brand, and yeah.

Rahul, I'll take that. This is Nitish.

First, let me give you the whole thinking behind the new brand identity, our new logo, and our new brand positioning as Enter Magic. I think what we realize is that our players or generally everyone's life is stressful, and the one thing that can really bring some magic or some relief in their lives is interactive entertainment experiences through gaming, through immersive worlds, which is why you have so many gamers, right, today?

Everyone in India's 500 million-plus people playing on their mobile phones exactly for that. As technology is progressing at a very rapid rate, we believe that these interactive, immersive experiences will really scale up and really become much deeper.

I think that's the direction that Nazara is really looking to go, leveraging artificial intelligence, leveraging virtual reality, etc. A lot of our focus, as has been on IP.

The beauty of owning IP is that you can easily transcend IP into these new platforms and technologies. Let's take, for example, Animal Jam, which is the IP that we own.

We are, for example, currently working on a very exciting project that takes Animal Jam onto the Roblox platform. Tomorrow, we would probably work on a immersive world around Animal Jam in a metaverse.

I think providing these interactive, magical experiences to our consumer base, to our players is a direction we are going in, and we believe that will be very powerful. That's the perspective.

In terms of creation, we will obviously invest more in these technologies, in these developments that we are doing, but we will also remain very pragmatic. We don't want to be too early in anything and burn a lot of capital.

You can expect us to continue to remain pragmatic as we have been, but also with a leaning towards investing in these emerging technologies.

Right, right. Thanks for the color.

Just one more question from my side. Just to understand the Freaks 4U part of it from a P&L standpoint of view, given your current positioning about that business, is it that some more losses would continue in this business as it taking down at an NODWIN level, or will it be moderating now since we have written it off in our case?

Yeah. Akshat, can you take that?

Of course. Look, our idea on this is we've written off the entire value of the whole business asset.

There's a small provision that is kept for us in case any follow-on losses might come. We are fundamentally not going to continue funding this business.

The management of the business has been told very, very clearly if they can go ahead and survive internally with internal approvals, that's great. Otherwise, we will not be supporting them, which would mean that either they will go ahead and file for insolvency or they would go ahead and have to trim costs.

As a large shareholder of theirs, at close to 57%, 50% to 62%, we are no longer willing to go ahead and support them on an ongoing concern basis.

Akshat. Sorry.

Please go ahead.

That's why we're proactively impairing our entire position on it.

Yes. I was just trying to understand from a accounting point of view, is the current quarter losses the run-rate losses that will sustain for that business in the second half of the year, or I understand the cash part of it, but from accounting and integration point of view, will still be carrying the losses in future?

Rakesh bhai, would you like to go ahead and help us on?... I know,

I will take that answer. I think, Rahul, the company, given its cash position, will not be incurring much losses going forward.

The company has already been reducing costs at a significant rate over the last few quarters. I don't estimate similar losses to continue, or they will be significantly reduced even if they are.

Understood. Understood.

That's pretty helpful. Similar way on PokerBaazi, we are not going to put any cash, and they already have some bit of cash.

I heard you saying more clarity would emerge, but meanwhile, what could be the burn rate on an exit basis on a monthly or quarterly basis?

Look, they've had a I think approximately 17 crores burn in this Q2. I do know they've been also working on optimizing, but over there it's a delicate balance because, like I was saying, their technology platform is in great demand, and they continue to invest in the technology team.

Some of the revenue that's going to start kicking in may lag by another quarter or so. There may be continued losses into Q3, and we would probably have to take our share of that loss as an associate company.

I think over the next quarter, costs will be optimized further, revenues will start kicking in, I think it's maybe one or two quarters more.

You're saying revenue can potentially come even in Q3?

It should, because, like I said, they will be licensing some of their existing platforms to external parties and working with them.

Right. If it is possible to share the fixed cost of the business?

I don't have it handy, but we'll try and put it out separately.

Sure, sure. Thank you.

That's it from my side, and best of luck for the time ahead.

Yeah.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sukrit D.

Patil from ISide Fintrade Private Limited. Please go ahead.

Good morning to the team. I have two questions.

Looking beyond the quarter numbers, what is the bigger picture for the company with gaming rules changing and esports becoming the mainstream? How are you putting the company to build a lasting edge beyond just order wins or new platform launches?

Is there something deeper that you're planning, like global partnerships, IP creation, or engagement forms that will make the competitors hard to copy? Thanks.

Sure. I think our playbook on creating centers of excellence on user acquisition, on artificial intelligence, on data analytics, on growth, and we've hired some very strong professionals from across the world to lead these centers of excellence that we have created.

I believe that this will become a significant differentiator and competitive edge for us, because what these will do is they will uplift the capabilities in each of these segments for all the studios that we are operating. Therefore, as a collective, I think we should be able to achieve a lot more and create distance between us and the competition.

We're already starting to see early signs. For example, our center of excellence on user acquisition, we're using some of the latest technologies to deliver better results.

We're starting to see green shoots in IPs like Kiddopia, which we will show you in Q3 numbers. I think we are quite excited about that aspect of bringing together these synergies.

On the top of this, our whole focus is on buying gaming IPs or creating gaming IPs, because we believe that, especially in the world of AI, if you own well-established IP, that becomes a big differentiator for you, and you can actually leverage AI to develop faster, service your consumer base faster. I think synergies through our centers of excellence plus a focus on buying and building profitable gaming IP from a global perspective is really the core business focus at this point of time.

Thank you. My second question is on margins and cost planning.

When the costs rise, whether it's marketing, compliance, or IT, how do you make sure the margins stay stable without slowing down the growth? Is there any system that you have put into place or you will be putting into place like smarter sourcing or digital efficiencies that will help you keep the profit stable even when things are getting out of control?

I would love to hear your view on this. Thank you.

Yeah. I think our mindset has always been to deliver profitable growth, and therefore we don't believe in a growth at all cost strategy.

I think that's quite baked into our DNA. At this point of time, we are definitely seeing an increase in group costs or corporate-level costs because of the centers of excellence that we are investing into quite aggressively and building out the team.

At the same time, I think some of these initiatives have a fairly quick payback period, which means there won't be a long gestation. Lastly, of course, we are leveraging all new technologies to make sure that our costs remain competitive.

Sorry to repeat again a buzzword, but I think AI will definitely help us on that front. We are going to, for example, launch WCC4, which is our next version of our cricket games, which is completely coded in AI using Claude.

I think some of these emerging technologies will also help us optimize our costs, but more importantly, be able to generate a lot more productivity from the existing teams that we have.

Thank you for the guidance, and I wish the entire team best of luck for Q3.

Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, in order to ensure that the management will be able to address all the questions from the participants in the conference call, we request you to kindly limit your questions to two per participant.

Should you have a follow-up question, please rejoin the queue again. The next question is from the line of Jinesh Joshi from PL Capital.

Please go ahead.

Yeah. Am I audible now?

Yes, sir.

Yeah. Sir, I just wanted to know at what valuation did NODWIN raise the money, and who were the investors, because apparently we have recognized the gain on revaluation.

For Freaks, which is a subsidiary of NODWIN, there is an impairment. If you can just explain that part.

Yeah. NODWIN has done two fundraises.

One was last year with Nazara, KRAFTON, and Sony. Then a top-up earlier this year, a couple of months back, at broadly the similar valuations.

Akshat, you can share more details. That is it.

The Freaks, we have already impaired. The extent of that loss would get deducted from the overall carrying value in our books as well at a consol level.

Akshat, do you want to throw some more light on that?

There is two values that we go ahead and use. Again, a slightly longer answer, but I hope it will set context.

The cash that NODWIN has raised is from our existing and predominantly all our existing investors, including me, the founder, who has gone and invested more cash into the company, as NODWIN's goals and aims for the future. We have everyone who's still believing in it.

The other part is every company that NODWIN acquires now has with the discipline of its paper being very valuable to external investors, both financial and founders who stock swap with us their entire companies to the tune of 80, 90, or even 100%. That's the belief of NODWIN providing liquidity to them and growth to them and group synergies to them.

As far as our raise is concerned, was at a 3 a 1.5-year-old raise with Sony was at a pre-money valuation of $349 million, and then everything else has been on top of that. With the total amount of money that we've raised in the last 1.5 years at that pre-money valuation is set about $30 million.

Sorry, I'm harping on this issue again. This is the last question from my side.

Just wanted to check, from whatever you have mentioned, apparently it appears that the post-money valuation has not changed that much. There has been a revaluation gain in the books of Nazara to the extent of 1,098 crores.

I just wanted to understand that bit, and that is why I was asking about that.

Sure, sure. I will answer that.

Basically, from a Nazara perspective, since we had originally acquired a 51% stake in NODWIN and made subsequent investments, the carrying value in our books at a consolidated level was at the investment value, and it had never been marked up on the different fundraises done by NODWIN since the time of our original investment. Now post-de-subsidiarization, as per Ind AS accounting standards, as an associate, we had to value it at a fair value, which we have taken as the last round of funding value, which was done two, three months back.

Perfect. Thank you so much, sir.

Thank you, and all the best.

Yeah.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sachin Dixit from JM Financial.

Please go ahead. Hi.

Good morning. Thanks for the opportunity.

I had a couple of questions. The first one was on basically two of our key properties, Kiddopia and Sportskeeda, right?

Both have seen struggling or seen headwinds in the recent times, right? How do you think their recovery will happen, if you see that there will be a recovery at some point?

When will that point come, if you can talk about that, especially from basically Kiddopia side, where the average paying users number has been declining? Yeah.

Sure. Let me take the Kiddopia answer first.

Actually, as Kiddopia has struggled for quite some time post-IDFA, maybe it's been a couple of years now. We do see light at the end of the tunnel.

We really beefed up the team at Kiddopia, brought in a new business head, Manish, and I think the team, along with our centers of excellence, in the last few months has done some very good work. We are finally starting to see positive growth in subscriber numbers.

We believe at this point of time, Q4 should be able to deliver positive growth in subscriber numbers, including, I would say, increasing ARPU, reducing churn, etc. I think work all around is starting to show results, and hopefully Q4 we will have positive news for you.

In terms of Sportskeeda, obviously it has taken a large Google algorithm hit. We were hoping that it would have recovered by now, because usually, in our past experiences with ourselves as well as other partners, it takes a few months to come back.

That hasn't happened yet. We do have Ajay, the CEO of SK.

He can share more light on this.

Thanks, Nitish. As Nitish mentioned, we were hit by a Google core update, which negatively impacted our organic traffic in March this year.

We've seen this happen across publishers, with one of our companies also, which is Pro Football Network, which took around three quarters to come back. We should see a Google core update come again in the month of let's say November or December.

That's how the trend continues. We are hopeful that we will bounce back soon, and once we do that, our numbers will go up again.

Yeah. Basically, we should expect something happen in Q4 if that's right way to think?

We are hopeful. Different publishers take different times to bounce back.

It also depends on what Google is releasing in their Google core updates. PFN took around three quarters.

It has been two quarters for us now. Another couple of updates, we should be good.

Just to add to that, I think while the large impact is on the parent site, which is Sportskeeda, the other sites like Pro Football Network, etc., especially continue to do quite well. Ajay, you want to share something?

Yeah.

Just to add, if you look at overall ASPL numbers, right, Sportskeeda is one of our flagship property, which contributes around 85% of overall revenues and 90% of EBITDA, and hence the impact is more. If you talk about the other sites, be it EssentiallySports or Primetimer or Soap Central, DeltiasGaming, Pro Football Network for that matter, right, in this H1, they grew 83% YoY in terms of revenues.

All of them have done really, really well. It's just Sportskeeda which has been negatively impacted.

Once the Google core update is fixed for us, we should also see them all back.

Sure. Thanks so much for that.

My second question is again a bit more high-level, right? Across businesses, you see quite a lot of volatility in how the growth rate tend to happen for you, right?

If you can talk about, obviously, there are certain businesses which have done quite well this quarter in terms of how they've grown. If you can talk about the sustainability of some of these growth rates, shed some light on how we should think of forecasting perspective, what is the right way to think of growth rate across these segments, that will be helpful.

Thank you.

Sure. I think if you focus on our core gaming business, what we find is that with improved efficiencies across user acquisition and also I think a lot more detailed data analytics and CRM work that we're doing, we should be able to deliver more predictive growth.

We are targeting to grow our core gaming businesses at 20%, 25% year-on-year. We are also aiming for a EBITDA margin in the 20%, 25% range for the core gaming business.

I think that is what should be achievable, and that's what we are going to kind of focus on driving going forward.

Sure. Just one housekeeping question if I may.

On Smaaash side, right, while last reported, you reported revenue only for the acquired period, revenue and EBITDA. It looks like while EBITDA has tripled this quarter, but sorry, revenue has tripled this quarter, but EBITDA remains flat.

Is there something incorrect that I'm looking at?

I will just have to double-click on that. For us, before I jump into that, let me just give a perspective of what is happening in the offline gaming side.

We have two offline properties right now: Funky Monkeys and Smaaash. Funky Monkeys right now is on a quite active growth path, because the format is working quite well, and we are expanding now to multiple stores in a city.

We are launching one to two stores every month, which is going to compound. I think we're quite excited about that, and there's huge scalability.

We believe current 14 centers or 15 centers can get to 100 centers in the next couple of years. That's what we are going after.

In terms of Smaaash, what we are really doing is after procuring it from NCLT, we are doing two things. One, of course, we are cleaning up and getting proper grip on the existing business.

Acquiring any business from NCLT requires some optimization, and we've also made new hires over there. The second thing is Smaaash 2.0, which is completely reimagining Smaaash with what Nazara can really bring to the table.

That is what we are going to drive aggressively once we do our first or second POC launch. Coming back to your housekeeping question, Q1, we had 8 crores of revenue and we reported 3 crores of EBITDA.

Q2, we had 24 crores of revenue and we've reported 3.5 crores of EBITDA. That's because Smaaash was consolidated from June.

In terms of your question on why the EBITDA is lower, to be honest, I will have to double-click on that, we'll put this information out later.

Sure, sure. Thank you.

Thanks a lot, and all the best.

Thank you. A reminder to all the participants, you may restrict your questions to two per participant.

The next question is from the line of Abhisek Banerjee from ICICI Securities. Please go ahead.

Hey. Hi.

Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity. Just a couple of questions from my side.

Firstly, I saw the game that you put out on Bigg Boss, seemed like a good proposition. Any thought process on what can be a potential revenue from this game going forward, and how is the early signs of traction?

Yeah. It's very early days.

We've just launched it and we've kind of soft-launched it. We are fine-tuning the initial KPIs before we start user acquisition, etc.

The bigger picture here is, and I will ask Terry, who is the CEO of Fusebox, to jump in, I think the bigger picture here is that through the Fusebox acquisition that we did, we found that the engine that they have made works really well with IP on this narrative-based story games. Love Island has already proved that at scale.

What we've really done over the last year working with the team is to acquire other IPs that we think can do very well and launch games around that. We acquired a Big Brother global license.

The game has already been launched, and the second edition or second episode of that has just been launched a couple of weeks back. Then we got Bigg Boss in India, because we also want to make sure that we are translating all our studios also from a India context.

I think Bigg Boss has been a good launch for that. We acquired Traitors, which is again a global license.

The studio has really moved from a one-game studio to a four-game studio in one year, and I think that should drive substantial growth overall into FY27. Bigg Boss, a little early to comment at this point of time, but given India's large user base, I think with the right IPs and the right quality of games and content, we should do very well.

Terry, you want to add to that?

Thanks, Nitish. As Nitish mentioned, it's still very early.

We only launched Bigg Boss last week, first day last week. We're still in the kind of the early launch, and only starting to engage with user acquisition now.

However, yeah, we're very excited about such a huge IP. In general, from our experience, these games take several seasons to compound players, and it makes UA cheaper, and so we can keep growing at scale.

We're very excited about the addressable market for Bigg Boss, and it's just another IP on the route, and we will continue to kind of grow in this way.

Understood. Terry, just one follow-up on that.

I played the game a little bit. It seemed like it was tuned for the India context.

Trying to understand whether was it developed in India or was it developed outside?

It was developed both in the UK and both in India. We partnered with a trusted partner of Nazara, and so yeah, we were working with the UK team and with an Indian partner to make sure that it was culturally relevant and actually we have some Indian employees as well.

It was a mixture of both.

Great. Super.

Nitish, just wrapped up with one last question, which is on Moonshine. We have seen that in the RMG space, some of the erstwhile players have now pivoted into other business offerings.

Anything like that on the horizon for Moonshine or?...

No. Of course, definitely.

The team there is very hungry to do a lot, and they have, like I was saying earlier, a fantastic platform. I think it's at a global stage, their platforms can compete very well.

I think there are two broad areas of thinking. One is they have a large, very high-paying consumer base in India, which is quite loyal to their brand, and how can they leverage that of making other offerings that would be relevant to that user base.

That's one area. The second is, of course, taking their platform global, both from a direct-to-consumer perspective, second is working with existing RMG platforms, real money gaming platforms globally, and kind of being a B2B offering for them.

I think multiple areas being worked upon by the team. We'll come back with a lot more specifics on that in Q3.

Understood. Thanks.

Thanks, very helpful.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Kunal Bajaj from Choice Institutional Equities.

Please go ahead.

Yeah. Thank you.

Good morning, and congratulations on good set of results. Firstly, my question was on NODWIN.

We have seen that NODWIN has been continuously raising funds. What is the focus area for growth over here?

Secondly, on the strategies and status on the Nazara Publishing business. If you can briefly give a highlight on that.

Thank you.

Yeah. Akshat, you want to take the first one?

Of course. Look, NODWIN has been raising money for some time now, and we continue to raise, and we have believers in us.

Over the last couple of years, this is our last quarter that we'll be part of the Nazara family till our August numbers, and we've loved this journey. One of the big things is that NODWIN is growing up, right?

We're a company that is now considered one of the best in the world in youth media in emerging markets. We are literally number one or number two in the world of what we are building.

Our idea is to go keep on building that. My stated vision is NODWIN wants to be a billion-dollar revenue company in the next 5 to 7 years.

NODWIN wants to go ahead and be there. We want to be wherever the youth are.

We want to have content. We have four legs, which is live, content, esports, and influencer.

These are the ones that kind of all tie together. Whether it's Comic-Con, that is a property that we have in India and we are now taking to multiple parts of the world, or we are having global IPs that come to India, or we have our esports tournaments happening in Budapest in December with the World Championship of Counter-Strike, or we have the BGMS activity happening in India, or Playground, which is the most watched youth show in the country of India that's being exported to different parts of the world with Banijay or Endemol, those are all strong verticals for us, and we will continue to go ahead and invest in all of these as we go forward.

All the markets that we stated are our ramp. Everyone across the world now recognizes that, and that's why they invest into us.

We have founders who come to our thing, and there's more ships that join our flotilla to keep on becoming better because we have great founders who come, and sometimes those founders will fail. We'll never have a 100% success rate.

We are blessed if we have a 50% success rate. Those founders who will try will go ahead and build value for us.

Sometimes when those ventures fail, the idea will fail, but the founders never fail. Those founders will always try to go ahead and start new businesses and new ventures for us.

We've already started seeing that with some of our founders making new ventures that are now creating extreme value for us. NODWIN will remain an IP company.

The short-term cash flows will be done through agency and white-label work, and the long-term value will be through IP monetization and global growth in emerging markets.

Thanks, Akshat. I will answer the second question around Nazara Publishing briefly.

Our plan really is to build a large direct-to-consumer network of users based on first-party data, based on cross-promotion, based on our ability to monetize better and a loyalty platform. What we had just completed is a large Google project with Google on CDP.

That's going to allow us to have one Nazara ID across all the games that we publish, and this will enable all the features that I just spoke about and more. I think this will become quite a strong platform for us going forward.

Initially, we are launching it with our existing games, whether it's World Cricket Championship, Bigg Boss, etc. Over the next couple of quarters, we'll build out the network using that.

Thereafter, our idea really is to work with some of the global players, help publish their games in India and monetize better, as well as work with local Indian developers. Basically, think of it becoming a very sizable consumer network.

Today, India has 500 million gamers. Can we get 50 million, 100 million gamers on our network and service them better?

I think that's really the larger vision that we are working on as far as Nazara Publishing is concerned.

Sure. That helps.

Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, as there are no further questions, I would now like to hand the conference over to the management for closing comments.

Sure. I have Stuart Dinsey, who's the CEO of Curve Games, on the call, and he's woken up at 3:00 in the morning to join the call.

Maybe he can just quickly use this opportunity to introduce himself and speak for a couple of minutes on what Curve is up to. Stuart?

Thank you, Nitish. Good morning, everybody.

It's nearly light here, but not yet. We're very pleased to have joined the group.

Curve has got a long history of profitability. We're well-established in the console and PC market.

I think we're just coming up to 6 months since the acquisition. We've gone through a period of transition without it materially affecting the business.

We're continuing to work with Nitish and Rohit to leverage the Nazara ecosystem to further benefit Curve. We're signing games and looking to grow the business going forward.

Thank you, Stuart. I will hand over the call to Rohit Sharma, who's our Executive Director, for closing remarks.

Rohit, over to you.

Thank you, Nitish, and thanks, everybody, for joining the call and all the questions. As Nitish and most of our team members have mentioned that Nazara has been in the last couple of quarters been very strong focus on building IPs, building synergies between all our studios.

Our centers of excellence has really worked well for us, and will scale up and continue to scale up. I think we are very excited about what we built and the way we are scaling up.

Thanks a lot, everybody. Once again, thanks for the nice, relevant questions, and thanks from our side.

Okay. Thank you, everyone, for the call.

Have a good day.

Thank you very much, sir. On behalf of Spark Institutional Equities Private Limited, that concludes this conference.

Thank you for joining us today, and you may now disconnect your lines.