Thank you, Darwin. Good evening, everyone.

It is indeed a great pleasure to host Meesho's first-ever earnings call after its listing. Joining us today to discuss earnings for the third quarter and nine months ended 31 December 2025 are Vidit Aatrey, Chairman, Managing Director, and Chief Executive Officer; Sanjeev Kumar, Whole-time Director and Chief Technology Officer; Dhiresh Bansal, Chief Financial Officer; and Karthik Chandrasekar, Head, Corporate Development and Investor Relations.

Investors and analysts are encouraged to review the shareholder letter available on Meesho's Investor Relations website. Management will use this call to focus on questions beyond the uploaded content already covered in the shareholder letter.

Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that certain statements made on this call may be forward-looking in nature and should be viewed in conjunction with the risk factors disclosed in the company's filings. With that, I'd now hand the call over to Vidit for his opening comments.

21 - 03:08 Vidit Aatrey (Chairman, Managing Director, and CEO):

Hey, everyone. I'll get started with the important takeaways.

I think, first of all, you will see that we had a very good quarter in terms of growth. Our annual transacting user base crossed 250 million for the first time.

It was 251 million, and on YoY growth, about 34%, which is quite strong. We continue to be India's largest platform by annual transacting users, as well as orders, and still the most downloaded shopping app in India.

I think our growth numbers continue to be strong, and this is mostly because of our investments around technology, marketing, wherever we're seeing the right ROI. If you look at our annual transacting seller base, that has also grown really well, 81% year-on-year growth to 846,000 sellers because we continue to improve our product and invest in better technology, especially for sellers.

Now, if you look at NMV growth, I think the nuance here this quarter, as compared to the last year, a lot of festive demand had moved to Q2. I think a important way to look at it is combining nine months.

If you look at nine months, first nine months of the year, our NMV grew by 37%, and for this quarter, it grew by 26% year-on-year to ₹10,995 crores. Again, we continue to kind of grow at a very good pace basis some of the investments I talked about.

If I look at contribution margin, our contribution margin was at 2.3%. Again, here we have talked about earlier, some of these investments have come because of Valmo scale-up in a very short period after one of our partners ceased to be in business and there was some bit of third-party logistics consolidation.

We had to scale up some capacity in Valmo at a very fast pace, which came at some cost. This should basically go away in the next two quarters.

We have also mentioned the timeline that some of our margin numbers will converge back to where we were in first quarter of FY '26 in the next two quarters. Our LTM free cash flow for the last 12 months was at ₹56 crores, and free cash flow to equity was at ₹437 crores, taking our overall cash balance to ₹7,277 crores.

These are the important takeaways. We can get started with the questions.

08 - 03:36 Operator:

Hi, Vidit and team. Congrats on continued good set of numbers.

I have three questions. First question is on logistics and what you mentioned in shareholder letter about optimization of logistics costs.

Question out here is, how should that change your outsourcing mix? I think the last reported number was around 60 to 60 to 65%.

Because of that change in mix, should we see an increase in cost or decrease in cost? Should I go one by one by the question, or, yeah?

Sorry, go ahead.

30 - 05:27 Vidit Aatrey (Chairman, Managing Director, and CEO): We can do one by one. I think on the outsourcing point, I think we have talked about this earlier, we will continue to basically decide the right mix between Valmo and third-party logistics partners basis the lowest cost structure.

As we said, right now, for example, because we built some of the capacity in Valmo at a very fast pace, some of that was not optimized for costs. I think we will fix it and then start to scale up Valmo again, that will bring a lot more goodness on pricing.

That will continue. In the meantime, we're also building up capacity with our third-party logistics partners at the right price.

In the long run, I think we will continue to kind of build a very competitive logistics ecosystem so that prices reduce everywhere. It's not that only in Valmo we continue to improve pricing.

We continue to improve pricing even with third-party logistics partners as their business keeps growing on our platform, and they also have more operating leverage. 27 - 05:48 Sachin Salgaonkar:

Got it. Very clear.

Just a small clarification, Vidit, out here. You guys created a new subsidiary on logistics.

The thought process behind that, is it for opening up for third-party guys or this is more like a captive logistics entity only? 48 - 06:14 Dhiresh Bansal (CFO):

Hi, Sachin. This is Dhiresh here.

I think we are setting up that subsidiary primarily to explore how should we kind of structure the Valmo financials so that they're more clearly visible for people to understand. There is no plan of opening this up to other third parties.

14 - 06:44 Sachin Salgaonkar:

Got it. My second question is on your margin uptick, where you guys said that for the next couple of quarters, the margin will improve.

Just wanted to double-click on the drivers for that margin improvement. Is it mainly because of the logistics investments pulling down, or the investments what you guys are making in terms of onboarding new set of users, even that will slow down?

44 - 07:31 Vidit Aatrey (Chairman, Managing Director, and CEO):

I think it'll be both. It will be both, and not just these two.

I think we'll get a lot of operating leverage on all our investments. Last two years, you saw that we invested aggressively to increase our growth rates.

Those investments came in more marketing, came in people, technology investments going up. Again, you will start to see operating leverage on that.

That should contribute to margin improvement. As well as we, for example, continue to kind of scale our logistics business going forward and make it more optimized, I think that will also lead to improvement in margins, it'll basically be across the board.

31 - 07:44 Sachin Salgaonkar:

Is it fair to say that your absolute adjusted EBITDA losses have peaked in this quarter, and going ahead, these numbers should decline? 44 - 08:08 Vidit Aatrey (Chairman, Managing Director, and CEO):

Yes. I think going forward, all these numbers on bottom line peaked in this quarter.

As I said, in the next two quarters, you should start to see them come back to where they were at the beginning of this year. 08 - 08:35 Sachin Salgaonkar:

Got it. My last question is on ad revenues.

Would be great to get some color in terms of how it has improved in the quarter. From a 2- to 3-year point of view, how should this scale up?

A related question is, how is your ad engine different from that of other e-commerce peers in India?

35 - 10:24 Vidit Aatrey (Chairman, Managing Director, and CEO): Right now, we're not sharing specific ad numbers, but in terms of inputs, we continue to see a lot of progress happening on that product. Every quarter, larger base of sellers, larger base of products are coming on ads, and they're also seeing much better ROI on their money.

I think at the right time, we will come out with more details there. I think when we talk about steady-state, we have in general shared that 5.5 to 6% is something that a lot of value commerce platforms globally kind of at least get to, and we also believe we should get there.

I think that's what we're going after. Now, if you look at the differentiation of our product as compared to other platforms, most other platforms, because they have branded sellers, tend to focus a lot more on keywords and stuff like that, whereas most of our sellers, these are some of the smallest to medium-sized sellers, may not have known brands, they're very, very sensitive to return on ad spends, right?

Because they want to make money on every single order and in the right way. Hence, our product has been built out that smallest to the largest sellers with very small budgets, not knowing what keyword to target, should be able to use a simple product and get to the kind of return on ad spends that they want.

Because, again, you want to abstract out all the complexity away from the seller, we have built quite sophisticated systems that now use AI to do the right targeting and get the right ROI for these sellers. I think that's the big difference.

24 - 10:35 Sachin Salgaonkar:

Perfect. Thanks so much, and all the best for future.

35 - 10:48 Operator:

Hi, thanks for taking my question. My first question is on logistics cost optimization initiative.

Is it only gonna come from the Valmo-related stuff, or will there be any efficiency that will be shared by the 3PL guys on pricing front or other front, which would comprise this margin improvement journey for you? 21 - 12:20 Vidit Aatrey (Chairman, Managing Director, and CEO):

I think it will come from both. If you look at overall, and I would take maybe a mid-year mid-term view, next one or two years, it'll come from everywhere because everyone, as their business scales, they have operating leverage, they'll pass it on to us.

Some bit of that will happen. The largest share we believe will come from Valmo because because, again, it's a newer network, lots of optimization opportunities.

We have talked about there are a lot of opportunities there of automation, of doing much better route optimization. There the opportunity of improving margins is much, much more.

Everyone, as they continue to scale their business, they will basically realize certain costs and what like we will also, like when they pass it back to us in some form, we'll also reward them with more volumes. Everyone will continue to get better in the ecosystem.

20 - 12:43 Gaurav Rateria:

Got it. My second question is on ad monetization.

What is the return on ad spend currently we are operating at from seller's point of view? At what level of return on ad spend you would get to your 5.5, 6% steady range that you talked about?

43 - 13:38 Dhiresh Bansal (CFO):

Hi, this is Dhiresh here. I think we don't specifically talk about the ROI, but to give you a directional sense, over the last one year or so, the return on ad spend that we are providing to our sellers has increased by almost 50% or more, and we continue to be on an upward trajectory there, which is leading to better adoption of the ad product as Vidit described earlier.

I think for the 5.5 to 6%, obviously, as we keep on becoming a more and more competitive ad marketplace as well, some of this return on ad spend would get competed away, and that's been the course of the journey for some of the e-commerce peers outside of India as well. I think that's the way it will directionally progress from here.

38 - 14:15 Gaurav Rateria:

Got it. Last question is on your cost of customer acquisition.

My understanding is that every new 50 million or 100 million that you add on the platform is gonna come probably at a higher cost of customer acquisition. What has been your experience since you kind of accelerated your growth in the annual transacting users?

Have you seen your CAC moving up compared to the last year? Then if that happens, then how do you manage your payback period?

Thank you.

15 - 15:42 Vidit Aatrey (Chairman, Managing Director, and CEO): Actually, by the way, we see the opposite. Over the last many years, most of our growth, again, you have to go deeper into the country to get the next 50, 100 million people, and you realize that they're not a lot of people who are reaching out to those customers apart from us.

Not many products out there, not many platforms target mass India consumer. It's not that there are a lot of competition there and hence, the cost of ads are high.

It's more around do you have the product that basically can convert these people and get the right LTV out of them? That's what we focus on.

How do you make a product which is very intuitive for them, language that they connect with? They see the product that they connect with.

It's a lot of our improvement and growth comes by making a product relevant to someone even in the rural areas, and them connecting with that product much easily. Actually, it has gone down over the last few years.

The most important thing we obviously work on before we go out and scale that user base and make sure that our product is good enough that we can get good enough LTV and hence, good ROI for the investment that we do in acquisition. 42 - 15:49 Gaurav Rateria:

Thank you. All the best.

49 - 16:00 Operator:

Thanks. Vidit, as you keep growing, you will rely on both ATU growth as well as frequency growth, right?

Which between the two will be a bigger driver over the next two, three years considering you already have 250 million users on the platform? 26 - 17:34 Dhiresh Bansal (CFO):

Hi, Garima. This is Dhiresh here.

I think if you look at the trend in the last sort of quarter, our sort of ATU base grew by about 34% year-on-year, which is obviously quite high, and that has been the result of all of these efforts that Vidit just kind of highlighted on going deeper into the country and figuring out those use cases for our users which resonate with them. In this initial period, let's say, if I look at a 3-4 year kind of horizon, the growth would be faster on the annual transacting users versus frequency.

Also, because typically the first year of transaction frequency is lower versus as people mature and become habit-formed users of our platform. Then it'll shift towards kind of higher-frequency growth over a longer horizon.

I think for the next 1 to 2 years, the growth would come more from kind of addition to annual transacting user base than frequency. 34 - 17:51 Garima Mishra:

Got it. To understand this frequency pattern a little better, could you give us some sense of how many times a year are your, let's say, top 5% or top 10% consumers transacting?

51 - 18:32 Dhiresh Bansal (CFO):

Sure. I think roughly, if you look at it, the top quartile of our users transact at a frequency of more than 20 times a year.

That's kind of the frequency that we see. The typical correlation of who these customers are are people who have spent long enough time on the platform.

As the cohorts keep maturing, people keep on adding to their frequency of transactions. 32 - 19:07 Garima Mishra:

Understood. Last question from me really is on the product profile on the platform, right?

You have slowly diversified away from apparel, footwear as a category, added more categories. In that context, what other categories do you think can potentially be big growth drivers for the company?

A related question: what are you doing in Meesho Mall? How large is it, and what value proposition do you think it fulfills?

07 - 21:03 Vidit Aatrey (Chairman, Managing Director, and CEO):

Yes. I think, again, you rightly picked.

What we are doing is to keep expanding categories, we continue to kind of make our platform conducive to different kinds of products. For example, a big focus area for the last few years was to grow categories like beauty, personal care, kids, baby care that have a lot more branded products and what people buy, and we started Meesho Mall.

We have seen some of those categories grow really fast on the back of Meesho Mall. We have also started to see certain categories in the grocery section also grow within Meesho Mall that are part of that.

Again, as we have made our platform more conducive to low AOV products over the last few years, now we have seen categories like home and kitchen grow really, really fast because a lot of products in that category fall in lower prices. I think it's a continuous thing.

I don't think we take a big focus area. At the end of the day, for us, it's building the platform and building the right supply chain for all products to flow through.

I would say our focus is to eventually have every category out there. The category that I just talked about, which were focus area for the last 2 years, our job is not done there.

There are a lot of expansion opportunity available there in all these categories. We continue to add more sellers, more brands that are fulfilling more use cases, offering across price points, across different use cases.

I think that continues to be a focus area. As our customer evolves, also, I think our focus area on categories will change as more people come from maybe rural areas.

A lot of product categories that are more relevant to them will come onto the platform. I think it's a continuous thing.

There's no one or two category we focus on. Our goal is eventually to have each and every category that our customer wants to be available on Meesho.

03 - 21:19 Operator:

Yeah. Hi.

Good evening, everyone. Thank you for the opportunity.

I just had a couple of questions. Obviously, the number of sellers on the platform has moved up quite sharply, right?

In your opening remarks, it's approximately mentioned about it, almost 80%. Then how do we think of this sort of higher seller numbers, densification, if that is the way we should think about it, and then sort of tie it up with the logistics costs?

54 - 23:09 Dhiresh Bansal (CFO):

Sure. I think over the last few quarters, we have been seeing this acceleration in terms of the seller numbers going faster.

A lot of it comes on the back of the introduction that we made for non-GST sellers to be also able to sell on the platform. There have also been changes on the onboarding flow, which have kind of helped grow this seller number much faster.

I think what used to happen initially or a few years till a few years ago in India that only GST-registered sellers were allowed to sell online. As that law changed, we were the first and only ones to kind of launch a product which supports even getting non-GST sellers to to be able to sell online.

That has led to significant growth in the number of sellers. These sellers are also then graduating into becoming GST sellers.

Overall, it has been good for the flywheel and the ecosystem on the seller side. 09 - 23:36 Gaurav Malhotra:

Got it. In terms of the NMV to GMV ratio, that has moved up, right, from around 57 to 60%.

What has helped here? It's like better RTOs, cancellations, returns?

Or any salience of one versus the other?

36 - 24:24 Dhiresh Bansal (CFO): It has been across. I think primarily the improvements have come from RTOs as well as cancellations.

I think we'll continue to see those in the future as well. As the prepaid share of the platform improves, that also leads to a certain percentage improvement in our RTO numbers because the prepaid RTOs tend to be lower than cash-on-delivery RTOs, and that has been the case in the last quarter as well, where our prepaid ratio continued to improve.

We're seeing consequent impact in terms of NMV to GMV ratio. 24 - 24:43 Gaurav Malhotra: Okay.

Just last question in terms of Meesho Mall, does it come under new initiatives, or this would be coming under your marketplace itself? 43 - 24:58 Dhiresh Bansal (CFO):

Meesho Mall is part of the core marketplace. All of the numbers are captured within the marketplace financials.

58 - 25:17 Gaurav Malhotra:

If I may ask, I'm sure it's still early, but any sense on numbers or size or proportion, etc.? 17 -

25:52 Dhiresh Bansal (CFO): I think, like you said, it's early, but we've been seeing good, healthy growth on the Meesho Mall front as well. I think last quarter, it grew by roughly about 70% year-on-year, faster than the platform in terms of NMV growth.

We continue to see good traction from various brands like P&G, Nivea, etc., which have continued to scale up on our Meesho Mall platform. 52 - 25:58 Gaurav Malhotra:

Got it. Thank you so much.

58 - 26:09 Operator:

Hi, Vidit and team. Congratulations on a successful listing.

I had three questions. The first one was on Valmo, basically, right?

You highlighted that there was some rapid expansion of Valmo, which is why we saw some cost spikes. How do we think of what exactly happened, and if you can put some color around how will we take the cost down, right, because broader understanding it's largely a variable sort of supply for you?

47 - 28:50 Vidit Aatrey (Chairman, Managing Director, and CEO):

Yeah. Basically, in this case, what happened was I think around May, June, one of our partners stopped being in business, and which is why a lot of our capacity in logistics was not available.

That also tend to be a time when you just have festive 3-4 months 3-4 months away. At that point in time, basically, we had two options: not to build capacity and basically not service many users, or basically build capacity, but at much inferior cost in a very short period of time, because a lot of logistics capacity has certain lead times of getting the right node, the partner may do certain investments to get started, and so on.

We basically said that, hey, we have invested in our business for the last 10 years, you want to make sure that we retain the trust of our users, we built some of this capacity in a very short period of time to service the demand. Because we had to basically do certain short-term contracts, they were more expensive.

Now, that basically flowed into the two festive quarters, which is Q2 and Q3. As I mentioned, a lot of that short-term capacity is behind us.

We've been unwinding that for the last few months, and by the end of this quarter, most of that should go away, and we should get to similar bottom-line economics as we were at the beginning of this year. I think that's basically what happened.

We have never had a situation where one of our partners basically goes away. Now, I think going forward, we are much better prepared for something like this to ever happen in terms of if we have to basically do this again, we can do it without ever paying extra for that capacity.

In this case, though we know that it basically came at a certain cost, but we believe that was the right thing to do for the platform in the long run. 50 - 29:08 Sachin Dixit:

Understood. Is it fair to assume that your insourcing would have actually declined because of this quite sharply in this quarter?

08 - 29:34 Dhiresh Bansal (CFO):

Yes, that's right. I think it's declined marginally, but that's the right sort of mix at which the nodes that we operate are operating at the optimal cost and sort of increasing efficiencies in those existing nodes.

34 - 30:03 Sachin Dixit:

Fair enough. Thanks for that.

My second question is in terms of expenses, right? In the filing, we see a large other expenses line item.

Is it possible for you to break down that between at least the larger ones, things like logistics and fulfillment expense and advertisement, maybe? 03 - 31:07 Vidit Aatrey (Chairman, Managing Director, and CEO):

Just a second. We'll just check what it is.

Yeah. I think if you go to the shareholder letter and page 15, that has some of the details of these other expenses which are kind of broken down into individual components, including ad and sales promotion, employee benefit, server and software tools.

The other expenses not directly attributable to placed orders, which is the indirect expenses which come below the contribution margin line, are also mentioned there. Rest everything, which is direct cost, goes above the contribution margin line in terms of the cost structure, and that is primarily composed of logistics-related costs.

Although it'll have some other direct variable cost like communication costs, etc., built in, which are directly attributable to the order, but overall, 90%-plus would be logistics-related costs. 07 - 31:13 Sachin Dixit:

Possible to have that logistics number? 13 - 31:40 Dhiresh Bansal (CFO):

Yeah. Overall, in terms of percentage, if you look at the contribution margin bridge that we have described on page 9, out of the 29.7% cost directly attributable, about 27.5% is related to fulfillment expenses.

40 - 32:15 Sachin Dixit: Got it. Thanks so much for that.

My last question is on basically user acquisition, right? We are on a very good trajectory this year, already having acquired 50-odd million.

How do we think of this number going ahead, right? Do we expect a similar, let's say, a 50 million-plus sort of a number in '27 and '28 as well?

Or I do understand you will want to continue expanding rapidly, but do we expect relative dampening of this number?

15 - 33:23 Dhiresh Bansal (CFO): I think it's hard to predict very accurately. If I kind of think about the trends that we're seeing, our return on investment in terms of ad dollars that we kind of spend leading to new user acquisition continues to be fairly healthy, plus more importantly organic traction of people who kind of discover us, friends and family who kind of share and get others to kind of install the app also continues to be on an upward trend.

I think where we're sitting right now, we see pretty healthy trends in terms of new user acquisition. I think it'll be premature to forecast specifically the number over the next year or so.

Like I had mentioned earlier, initial part of let's say a 4-5 year journey, growth would come more from ATU addition, and then towards the latter part, we expect to come from more frequency addition of existing user base. 23 - 33:32 Sachin Dixit:

Fair enough. Thank you so much, and all the best.

32 - 33:43 Operator:

Yeah. Hi.

Thank you for the opportunity, and congratulations on the numbers for all of you and for the IPO. My first question is, if I look at platforms outside India like Temu, etc., they have significant user bases across income curves, right?

For you guys, do you think there is a path towards that where, say, the top 5, 10% households in the country also use you more extensively than they do now? That's my first question.

25 - 35:36 Vidit Aatrey (Chairman, Managing Director, and CEO): I think even now we have a good share of our business come from tier 1 cities. If you look at the top six cities would be close to two 25 million.

About 25 million-plus people buy from us every year from the big cities, and these people are split across income segments. They may be buying different categories, and you see the same thing globally.

They may not buy apparel on our platform because they tend to buy apparel from certain brands which are high-end, but a lot of them we see even high-income households in India buy a lot of home and kitchen products because of our large selection and certain unique selection. We are seeing that, and we believe it'll continue to get better.

I think we will keep expanding across all segments. Our focus is not just in one city or the other, but basically to expand across all cities, all segments, and eventually have everyone on our platform.

36 - 37:10 Vijit Jain: Thanks, Vidit. My second question is, with Valmo, with the things you described just now to the question from Sachin, you've also said in the past and in this letter that you will remain asset-light there.

I'm just wondering as you build out Valmo further, in terms of the workflow of logistics, I know you do network design, network orchestration, node design, and all of those kinds of things, which are more technology investments, just trying to understand as you build it out further, are there other aspects of that design that you could undertake, and would there be any kind of capital involved within that? Relatedly, over time, in the mid-mile or even in the mid-mile especially, things like automation or tractor trailers, there could be some benefit if someone can procure it at scale on behalf of your partners in the logistics network.

Would you be involved? Would you get involved in something like that if and when it makes sense for Valmo?

That's my second question. 10 - 38:46 Vidit Aatrey (Chairman, Managing Director, and CEO):

Yeah. I think our philosophy is very simple.

We tend to invest in mostly technology. Now, that technology could be software, as you said.

Some of that technology could be around automation in certain nodes, and technology tends to have very good ROI, so that we will do. Now going out and doing CapEx across the board, building out logistics capacity like warehousing, etc., that tends to have lower ROI.

We may not do it ourselves, as we have done so far. There, staying asset-light makes sense.

Even today in Valmo, the entire software stack end-to-end is our own. The entire technology is our own because that's where we believe the majority of experience, value, better pricing lies.

By the way, we have a team which is focused on automation. Can we bring more robotics eventually?

Can we bring, I don't know, maybe 5, 10 years down the line autonomy is possible, many other things will be possible. We will bring all kinds of technology, not just software.

There if we have to invest, we will do investments. Again, some of this is hypothetical at this stage.

As we have something, we will come forward and tell you that, hey, we are doing this. Broadly, as I said, directionally, we'll invest in technology.

Other assets may not be something that we want to invest in. We believe there are enough players out there who are ready to partner with us and offer a very good service.

46 - 39:27 Vijit Jain:

Got it. Thanks.

My next question is on the seller-side growth, right? You had a great seller growth here, 81% YoY.

My first question is when you see expansion in seller community of this space, are there any new seller-side incentives also that you're doing in terms of maybe lower fulfillment charges for a short period of time or whatever the case might be as you try to kind of ramp up the seller community?

27 - 40:40 Vidit Aatrey (Chairman, Managing Director, and CEO): Today we don't do this. There's no incentive in the beginning for anyone to come on board.

In general, I think if you look at our overall penetration on the seller side in India is actually lower than the user side. On the user side, we have 250 million people out of I don't know, potentially a billion people or maybe more.

On the seller side, there are in India about 60, 70 million sellers altogether, and we have less than a million annual transacting. There, because the penetration potential is quite large, and as Dhiresh said, now even non-GST sellers are allowed to sell online, which is a large mix of overall seller base in India, we believe just by the need of people's reaching every consumer, this base we expect will continue to grow at a faster pace for the foreseeable future, because people want to get access to this distribution channel.

We continue to invest more in product rather than incentives, just make sure that people who come from any part of the country, know any kind of language should find our product very easy to use and come online and start selling very quickly. That's what we are focusing on, less on incentives.

40 - 41:25 Vijit Jain: Right. Thanks.

Just my last question, if I can squeeze one in. Just thinking about the assortment available on the platform, and if I break that into branded and unbranded, do you think that branded and unbranded can both coexist and both do fairly well, and in that context, could you partner more effectively with branded manufacturers as well going forward?

I'm just trying to understand if that category of assortment you think can do equally as well on the platform or if there is anything that kind of makes these two things not coexist that well.

25 - 42:47 Vidit Aatrey (Chairman, Managing Director, and CEO): By the way, Meesho Mall that we were just talking about is a very good example of that. It coexists on our platform.

All the big brands now are available across most categories, and they are continuing to grow at a very good pace. I think it's less about branded, unbranded.

It's more about serving use cases. Consumers who come onto our platform for different use cases prefer brands or unbranded.

As I said, for personal care, people even very deep into the country prefer brands all the time because they don't want to put something on their face that they don't know. In many other categories like apparel, women apparel, even big cities, you see a lot of people because they care about more variety, they tend to buy from all kinds of sellers.

I think coexistence is not a question. Meesho Mall continues to grow at a very, very good pace.

More brands come on board. They tell us that they're able to reach an audience for the first time that they could not before.

We will keep investing on both. We look at this as a problem of serving every single use case that our customers have across all price points and categories.

47 - 42:57 Vijit Jain: Right. Thank you so much.

Those were my questions, and best of luck to you guys. 57 - 43:08 Operator:

08 - 43:35 Aditya Suresh: Thank you, and congratulations on the listing. Three questions, all around logistics.

The first one is just on an absolute rupee per order basis, can you talk through the movements in your logistics cost this quarter versus last, and are there any kind of accounting impacts there for us to work through or kind of adjust for? 35 - 44:53 Dhiresh Bansal (CFO):

Sure. I think directionally, Aditya, there was, and I think we've mentioned it in the DRHP and RHP subsequently as well, there was a treatment change for some of our last-mile costs related to Valmo, which were between the periods April '25 till September '25 were not part of either the revenue or the cost, and then subsequently, we had kind of brought them into the revenue as well as the cost basis the GST law change that had kind of happened.

On a QoQ basis, for the October, November, December quarter, you would see that increment sort of come in both revenue as well as cost. On a YoY basis, this was the same treatment that we had last year as well, no change in terms of YoY trends, but on QoQ trends, you will see this difference kind of be there.

53 - 45:26 Aditya Suresh:

Thank you. The second piece is around your delivery times, right?

Going back to the DRHP, and I understand that I think the average delivery times was anywhere between, say, 5 to 7 days. Is there any kind of desire or thrust towards moving this down more towards, say, 1 to 2 days, or are you happy with the current kind of pace of delivery?

I guess what I'm trying to get at is, are we servicing just a completely unique, different use case compared to what some of the other logistics players or e-commerce players are catering to? 26 - 46:38 Vidit Aatrey (Chairman, Managing Director, and CEO):

Yes, I think I'll take that question. I think what's happening is, as our platform is getting diversified both on user and seller side, now we have sellers across the country and users across the country.

On average, basically that means is our network continues to get more and more complex. A lot of consumers in one city could be buying from a very remote part of the country, and the seller will ship from there and reach here, and vice versa.

I think, in general, if nothing else changes, our fleet speed should slow down because we are serving more hinterland, and more products are being picked from smaller places. What we have done is we have ensured that the speed stays in the same area.

I think 1 to 2 days, unless people do, for example, warehousing close to the customer, which many platforms do, you cannot do. I don't think it's possible in a marketplace format.

That's not a goal that we take. Our goal is obviously to be better than the last year, and we do that as our network gets stronger, better, more density as our business keeps growing.

Our aspiration is not to be the fastest, because we want to give access to the best products, best quality products, best price products to people, and to have that last selection, people end up buying from sellers anywhere in the country. 38 - 47:29 Aditya Suresh:

Thanks. It's a bit of a philosophical question, but how are you thinking about logistics, right, in terms of let's say kind of we reinvest in Valmo and kind of it settles, we play this out, let's say, over the next, say, 12 months.

Any savings in logistics costs, efficiency gains, how are you thinking about pricing logistics, right? Should we think about this as a 2-3 spread 2 to 3% spread on your actual cost, or are you thinking about kind of keeping the gains and we see margin expansion?

Just if you can talk through kind of philosophically how you all think about logistics versus what you report as contribution margin. 29 - 48:29 Dhiresh Bansal (CFO):

Yeah. I think philosophically, this is Dhiresh here, we tend to keep the logistics margin in a certain range.

Now, obviously, last couple of quarters were different, but if you look at the historical trajectory as well as what we intend to do going forward, we keep the logistics margin in a certain trajectory, which is about 2 to 2.5% of NMV from a contribution perspective, and anything we gain in terms of efficiencies, we have historically and expect to pass on in the future as well. Most of the contribution margin growth that we expect in the future would come from monetization through other forms like ads and other services, value-added services that we provide to our sellers.

29 - 48:35 Aditya Suresh:

Great. Thank you.

35 - 48:47 Operator:

47 - 49:28 Abhishek Banerjee: Hey, hi. First off, on the growth bit, right, you have explained that there was a festive season shift in this year.

From what I understand, the overall e-commerce market would have actually grown at a faster pace in Q3 than Q2. Is there any reason why, is it slightly different for you guys in terms of lead times, etc., why the growth has panned out the way it has done?

28 - 50:41 Dhiresh Bansal (CFO): I think there's no different trend. Obviously, given we have sort of slightly longer delivery timelines and our festive season sale starts sort of earlier or, let's say, in line with other kind of horizontally commerce platforms, that's why you see some of this shift.

Like last year, for instance, our festive season sale started on 27th September, which was pretty much the end of that quarter, versus it started in 19th September. Both in the baseline as well as kind of in current year numbers, this shift is kind of reflected.

That's why you had Q2 NMV growth of about 51%, which wasn't kind of the normalized sort of case, and in this quarter, you'd see about 26% growth. On an aggregated basis, let's say this is about 37% growth, and that's the trend that we kind of continue to see.

41 - 51:17 Abhishek Banerjee:

Understood. That's very clear.

In terms of the ad monetization bit, right, I completely agree with what you spoke about in terms of getting smaller sellers to really pay for things is very difficult. Do you think there is some room for some manual intervention, some on-the-ground sales people who can go and push for ad monetization?

Will that come into your manpower costs going ahead?

17 - 52:43 Vidit Aatrey (Chairman, Managing Director, and CEO): Vidit here. The way we think of our ad product, because we have such a large seller base, I think we have taken a very clear approach of building out a product that is very easy to use, self-serve, so that we do not have to go out and sell any product to them.

Far, actually, it's been a while since we built our ad product, all of our distribution of ad product is via our platform, which is basically via our app and web product, and there's no sales people, and we see very good adoption. As long as you are giving great outcomes in terms of return on ad spends to our sellers, they easily figure this product out and keep ramping up their ad spends.

We see no need of having any sales team. We don't have a sales team.

We don't plan to add sales team. Even in any of our experiments and scale-up so far, we haven't felt the need.

We believe if you want to build a product that millions of businesses in India will use for ads, you have to build a great product. I think sales is unscalable.

You can't get to a billion million people in sales and ads. You have to do it via product only, and that's the approach that we take.

43 - 53:18 Abhishek Banerjee:

Understood. Just one last question if I can, which is see, you have spoken about how reduction in the cost of delivery is one of the key goals for you going ahead.

With the new laws around gig workers, etc., do you think that the last-mile part of that cost is becoming more sticky? Does that impact your thoughts on how the cost of delivery can basically go down over the next 3 to 4 years?

18 - 54:39 Dhiresh Bansal (CFO):

Sure. I think we're still studying the impact of the gig worker code that has kind of come in.

I think there's still some degree of confusion that exists on different state versus central kind of laws. Having said that, I think a large expectation that we have in terms of reduction in the cost going forward does not come from any specific reductions on the last-mile delivery partner kind of payouts.

I think, in general, as the density of orders in a given time period increase, and the earnings potential of those partners increase, there will be opportunities to kind of reduce that cost. I think the overall expectation that we have going forward is coming more from overall network optimization, having a better designed kind of network, more automation coming in, some more innovative models around how we can do last-mile deliveries, etc., as well.

We don't expect any sort of change in the expectations that we have on reduction of overall logistics cost even with the new code coming into play. 39 - 54:44 Abhishek Banerjee:

Understood. Thanks.

Those are all my questions. 44 - 55:10 Operator: