Managing Director & CEO Group Chief Financial Officer
Mr. Vivek Goel
Chief Business Officer
Country Head, Middle East Business Investor Relations Mr. Anish Arora Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Brainbees Solutions Limited Q4 and Financial Year 2025 earnings call. This is Anish Arora, and I have with me, Mr. Supam Maheshwari, Managing Director and CEO of the Company, Mr. Gautam Sharma , Group Chief Financial Officer , Mr. Vivek Goel, Chief Business Officer of the Company , and Mr. Abhinav Sharma, Country Head of Middle East Business Operations. Kindly note that this call is meant for analysts and investors of the Company. We wish to highlight that the call is being recorded and by participating in this event, you consent to such recording, distribution and publication. All participants have been muted as per the default mode and participants will be unmuted once we open the Q&A forum for the members to ask questions after the presentation from the management concludes. We will be covering the presentation in the beginning of the call and we will there after o pen for the Q&A forum. We would like to point out that some of the statements made in today's call may be forward -looking in nature and the disclaimer to this effect has been included in the investor presentation shared with you. With this, I request Mr. Supam Maheshwari to take it over. Mr. Supam Maheshwari Good evenin g, everyone. Thanks for joining our quarterly earnings presentation for Q4 as well as Fiscal Year ending March 31, 2025. Today, we have reserved one and a half hours, as we would like to take you through a little more detailed dive on our business, some more nuances that you have not seen in the past. We want to reiterate for some of the members who may have joined new. A baby’s first cry is a special moment for parents, and at FirstCry, we aim to make this and all such moments of the parenting journey filled with joy and happiness. This is our mission that we continue to maintain and do every activity towards accomplishing this mission. Today, we will be covering the following agenda items. We will be covering our entire Fiscal Year 2024-25 f inancial performance, along with Q4, JFM. We'll also be covering our segments, four business segments: India Multi -Channel Business, which is our core business, International business, then Globalbees, and then Other segments. All four of these we'll be covering and then we'll also talk about our financial summary or consol performance of the Company. Moving further, let's just deep dive into our entire Fiscal Year 2024-25 performance. For Fiscal Year 2025, we are happy to report a very strong growth momentum and improvement in profitability for the full year FY25 over FY24. As you can see, this is the consolidated performance. Revenue of the company, at a consol level, increased by 18% over FY24, becoming around INR 7,600 crores. Gross margin has continued to increase, with 159 b ps year-on-year expansion to 23% absolute increase versus FY24. And adjusted EBITDA, adjusted for ESOP cost, h as also increased 90 b ps year-on- year expansion, with 43% absolute increase over FY24. And this, in percentage terms means to around 5.13 % i n F Y25, over 4.2% in FY24. Also happy to report that overall cash profit after tax i ncreased to INR 209 crores, which is 96% increase over la st year. And super happy to report that India Multi - Channel business turned PAT, as well as Free cash flow positive in F Y25. We remain very, very optimistic and the entire team will be working super hard to deliver both on growth and profitability expansio n across all our business segments. This is a new slide where we are disclosing gross margins for our different four segments, which earlie r we used to report at a consol level. So, if you will see, all our four business segments have been continuing to increase for the entire Fiscal Year, Revenue, as well as Gross Margin expansion and as well as Adjusted EBITDA. If you look at India multi-channel, revenue increased around 15% over last year, Gross margin improved 20% over last year with 149 bps improvement year- on-year, and Adjusted EBITDA about 24% increase over last year. International business, also had 14% increase in revenue from operations, gross margin improvement of 13%. We'll be talking about in detail about all four business segments, so you'll get a more detailed color of the year, as well as of the quarter. And close t o 140 crores of adjusted EBITDA l osses, which is similar to around FY24. Globalb ees had a 30% improvement in revenue terms over last year, and gross margin improved 36% on absolute basis and witnessed 186 bps increase. And Adjusted EBITDA improved 856%, over last year, to INR 22 crores, with 121 bps improvement year-on- year. Others, which is p rimarily our preschool business , had another good year of performance with INR 42 crores of revenue with, expansion of gross margin and almost INR 10 crores of adjusted EBITDA , which leads to close to 24% of Adjusted EBITDA over last year of 17.5%. So all four business segments have done fairly well for the year. For the Q4 performance , i f you look at our annual unique transacting customers, which essentially includes our India Multi-Channel and International Business, improved 17%, for the trailing 12 months ending March’ 25 over March’24, improved by 17%. GMV, which accounts for India multi- channel and International, increased by 14% over last Q4 of FY24. Revenue from operation s increased by 16%, which includes other business segments as well. Consolidated Adjusted EBITDA, improved for Q4 and witnessed 20% increase over Q4FY24, which represent almost close to 5.2%. And India Multi -channel adjusted EBITDA improved by 17% over Q4, which essentially was 9.3% over 8.9%. Cash profit witnessed a whopping increase of 484%, Q4 over Q4, t o almost INR 69 crores, for the Q4. With that, I would like, Vivek Goel to take you through our India multi-channel business, and I would like to state that in a lot of earlier calls, you had requests of certain more disclosures of some of our business, and performances of certain metrics. This time around, we are sharing a little more nuance around some of those disclosures which will help you to understand and appreciate our busines s in a little more detailed way. So I will, request Vivek to take you through . Some of the slides may be repetitive for some of you, because, our moats will remain the same, but since we have more disclosures, you will have a far more appreciation of the quality of the business that we are building. So Vivek, over to you. Mr. Vivek Goel Thank you, Supam. So, as Supam me ntioned, in the next few slides, I'll take you through some of the important moats of the business, along with some additional information which will help you appreciate what we are building as a business. So, as you already know, that we are the largest multi-channel retailer for mothers, babi es, and kids products in India. Of a total GMV of India multi -channel business, 78% comes from online and 22% of this GMV comes from our offline stores. Happy to report that this year we crossed 10 million annual unique transacting customers. Also want to mention that, of our total modern stores, offline stores, almost 45% of our source are, BabyHug, or FirstCry company-owned stores. So, as a business, we bring in a very unique pr oposition as compared to any other retail format, which is, where we have both online and offline strengths. And, if you really see that our business, and Supam has mentioned in past few calls as well, that our business lends very beautifully for an omni - channel or multi -channel kind of a retail format . Because there are all kinds of customers who want to buy things with experience, as well as they want to buy it with convenience, so we serve both and over a period of time, if you really see our data, the re are a lot of consumers who start purchasing with us in an offline store and eventually become a very loyal online customer. At the same time, a lot of our consumers actually discover us online and they continue to purchase in the nearby offline store as well. So, a testimony of that, is that, of the total GM V we genera ted in the top 20 cities for us, almost 38% of G MV comes from these cross -channel customers, the customers who buy both in online as well as offline stores. Anish, if you can move to the next slide. So, if I would say that, mother of a young baby is the busiest person in the world. And as a team in First Cry, we really appreciate that fact, and we strive to make things easier for them, when they come and browse our apps. So one of the most important things we have done is, we have personalized our app, basis the age and gender of a child. So, for example, if you 're a mom of a 6 -month-old girl, you would see a completely different homepage as compared to a mom of a 10-year-old boy. So, for example, a mom of a 6-month-old girl would see products like musical toys or strollers being promoted on our homepage, whereas, a mother of a 10-year- old might see remote-controlled cars and school supplies kind of products, which are more relevant for them. On top of this, we also personalize our app on multiple other accesses, which would include consumer behavior, a s well as regional nuances. For example, if I would give you a very recent example, monsoons are slowly progressing across the country. So, some of the states in South India might see our product selection as well as promotion select ion more conducive to monsoons, whereas certain other regions, which are still reeling under the heat, would see a lot more summer- related product selection and promotion. So this curation and personalization really helps mothers, in terms of making the right choices for the babies, and easier for them. And we apply some of these learnings of personalization, also in our offline stores. As a brand, we address the babies and kids' needs across age groups through a wide variety of assortment, which is almost, 1.8 million strong in terms of SKUs, which are offered across over 8,000 brands. So, a typical journ ey of our consumer, or the moms starts from the pregnancy, and continues till the time their oldest child is 12 years old, on FirstCry. When we started our business, at that time, our focus was more in, the age group of minus 9 months to three years, or ti ll the time the child was 3 years. A few years back, we expanded our selection to cater to the n eeds of up to 6 -year-old child. And subsequently, we expanded to it to the age group of 12 years. So, also want to mention that as a brand, and as a retailer, we are very fashion-focused. And that could be seen in terms of the ratio of fashion business in FirstCry. So of our total GMV of multi-channel India business, 52% of our GMV comes from Babies and Kids Fashion, which includes apparel and footwear categories. All the other categories which contribute to about 48% of our business , are powered by almost 300,000 strong inventory, SKU selection. This slide we have added to give you a little more color in terms of stickiness and long -term cohorts of FirstCry customers. So, if I would try to attempt to explain it to you. So, in Fiscal Year 2013, in the acquisition year, if a consumer gave us a GMV of 1 x, over a period of 12 years , we end up generating almost 7.9x GM V from the same consumer. And that was for Fiscal Year 2013. If you see this report vertically as well. So for example, till year 4 column, wh ich is 5 years post acquisition, in Fiscal Year 2017, the number increased from 3.4x to 3.7x. And, for the consumers who were acquired in Fiscal Year 2021, this number, for the first 5 years of revenue increased to 4 x. So, over a period of time, we can clearly see that the business has demonstrated increasing stickiness. And, as I mentioned, that the 6 to 12 months age group, that we have lau nched some time back i s still to be completely baked into these long-term cohorts. So we expect these numbers to further continue to improve over a period of time. This is another very important moat, as a brand that we have built, which is the collection of highly curated home brand portfolios. We have built some of the most iconic brands in India when it comes to baby and kids products. Which some of them include BabyHug, Pinekids, CuteWalk, and BabyOye. So, over a period of time, what we have seen is ou r home brands h ave grown at a much faster rate, as compared to Firstcry GMV. So for example, in FY20, the GMV contribution of home brands to FirstCry GMV was 37%. In Fiscal Year 2025, the contribution crossed 55% . Couple of very important benefits and strengths that First Cry Home Brand bring in, is first that , in our ma rket which is highly fragmented, home brands bring in curated and high quality, much better qu ality as compared to the market, which helps in better consumer retention, as well as, the home brands at the second level also help us expand our gross margins. Amongst our home brands, you already know , that Baby Hug is the largest mothers, babies, and kids product brand. We are the largest in terms of selection in Asia Pacific o r assortment in Asia Pacific, if you exclude China. And we are also the largest multi -category mothers, babies, and kids product brand, in terms of GMV. Over a period of our journey, we have built a lot of important marketing strategies for us, which have helped us in being very prudent with our marketing costs, or optimize our acquisitions, as well as increase the retention of our consumers. I'll discuss couple of them in the next few slides . One of them , is the most unique things that we ha ve built from our strategies is that we have built is that we are one of the unique apps to have commerce and community in the same mobile application. So, we operate the India's largest and most engaged parenting community in our app, w hich is also called FirstCry parenting. FirstCry parenting has educational information, provides educational information to the moms, which is both professional-generated content and also, user-generated content. We also provide very important tools which are required by the mothers during the parenting journey, like Immunization Schedule tracker, Growth tracker, Q&A, as well as content which is video as well as text. And a lot of this content is actually, personal ized basis the child's age, so that the mother, again, as I mentioned earlier, doesn't have to waste their time in looking for the stuff they don't need. So, parenting actually helps us in consumer acquisitions on one end, a s well as retention during the m ost important and formative years, of a consumer coming on our platform. The second and very important strategy that we have is the hospital gift box program. So this is a long -standing partnership with hospitals. Some of those partnerships go as back as 1 3 to 14 years. We ha ve partnered with almost 13,000+ clinics and hospitals across the country, w here we distribute almost 2.5 million boxes a year, at the time of baby birth. So, this is very important becaus the time of baby birth is one of the most emotional moment for all parents. And it is the perfect point of market entry for a brand like FirstCry. And just to give you a color about the scale that we operate this program at, so we cover almost about 10% of baby births in the country, through this program. So, now I'll hand ove r to Gautam , to take us through the financial numbers for multi-channel business. Mr. Gautam Sharma Thanks, Vivek. So, this slide talks about the growth in annual unique transacting customers, GMV, and orders. We continue to see a very healthy growth in our AUTC in March over last year, March, this is the 12-month trailing number. Orders and GMV have almost similar growth, for FY25 over FY24, which is 16%. And in Q4, the growth in orders, as well as GMV, is around 14%. This was slightly impacted in Q4. It got slightly impacted because of three reasons: One is we have witnessed some slowdown, especially in the offline business. The second reason is we have seen truncated winter. We talked about it last time that, there was a la te start of winter, and in fact, it ended early. So that is one of the reasons, because of that, the GMV has got moderated. And third one is that we have closed a few com pany-owned stores in Fiscal 20 25. These are the three reasons, because of which GM V growth and order growth got moderated in Q4. Revenue growth for full year is 15%, and for the Q4 over Q4, it is 12%. Again the moderation is because of the reasons I just explained. However, we continue to improve the EBITDA for the India Multi-Channel business, both on quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year basis. So, FY25 EBITDA, this is adjusted for ESOP cost, it has gone to 9.5% from 8.8% in F Y24. And it represents around 24% growth year -on-year. Similarly, if we talk about the Q4 FY25 EBITDA numbers, it is 9.3% compared to 8.9% in Q4 FY24. This represents a 17% year -on-year growth. Now I will let Abhinav S harma, who heads o ur Middle East operations, to take you through the International business slides. Mr. Abhinav Sharma Thank you, Gautam, and Hello, everybody, and thanks for joining us on this call , this evening. I'll quickly walk you over the international business, where we started, when we started, and why we started, what's the journey look like so far. As you can see here, a very compelling reason why we initiated or started our business in both geographies in the Middle East, KSA and UAE. As you can see, KSA birth rates are even higher than India and, the spends per child to top that up, is about 8 times higher as compared to India, and about 17 times higher in UAE as compared to India. So, very compelling reasons f or us to be present here in both the markets. And, it represents a large market opportunity for us, as well as very favorable demographics. Anish, go to the next slide, please. So, our journey thus far, we started, first in UAE in October 2019, and subsequently in KSA in August’ 22. And the basic tenet of our business in both ma rkets internationally, has been replicating a very well -defined and evolving sort of a playbook that India business has created over the last 15 years. And, we are online only r ight now in UAE and KSA, both the markets we are operating as a pure - play e -commerce player in our vertical. And, the average order values in the international segment is more than 4 times that of India average order value, as of now. This is a very imp ortant slide. This shows you how the gross margin values, or gross margin percentages have evolved, in both the markets, India as well as international, in certain timestamps. In India, as you can see, we sta rted in FY11, and after 7 years, we clocked a GM of 24%. In the international business, we've completed about 4 years now, and we're very similar in terms of the GM percentage. So, the playbook impact that I was talking about in the previous slide, obviously it has a lot of levers. To speak of a few of the levers in terms of margin expansion that has played out in India, that you can see in year 14, a spectacular 36.6% GM percentage are: Increase in share of home brands in the GMV is one lever, share of fashion, which is kids and babies fashion in GMV, better home brand and third-party margins due to economies of scale, and of course, operational efficiencies. Now, these are some of the levers that the India playbooks handed over to us, which are also in play in the international market. Gautam, over to you. Mr. Gautam Sharma Sure, thanks, Abhinav. So again, similar to the slides we presented for the India Multi- channel business. This represents the growth in AUTC, orders and GMV. AUTC has increased by 14%, Q4 over Q4, however, the growth in orders, slightly got moderated in Q4, and even full year. So we talked about a few horizontals during our last earning call. We talked about a few horizontals entering the Middle East region and that competitive intensity continues in Q4 as well, and that has impacted, slightly the growth in orders, as well as the growth in overall GMV. Next slide, please. Moving on to the revenue from operations, it has grown by 14% in FY25 vs FY24. However, the growth in Q4FY25 is little lower. It got moderated because of the reason I just explained, the competition reason. However, the clear focus is on improving the profitability and sustainable growth. You can see from the full year EBITDA numbers, it has come down from minus 19% in FY24, to minus 16% in F Y25. While the losses in absolute terms , remain more or less the same, but we strongly believe that, the peak losses now are behind us. And we will continue to reduce the EBITDA burn, both in terms of absolute value and absolute percentage, quarter-on- quarter moving forward. Over to you Supam, for Globalbees. Mr. Supam Maheshwari So, on Globalbee s front, I think, this is a little familiar slide. We continue t o operate in our four segments: Home, improvement and utilities, Home appliances, Active lifestyle & accessories, and Home and Personal care. As you know, we haven't acquired any business since September’22. So all our growth has been totally organic. Now if you will look at our performance for the full-year 2025 over FY24, it is 30%, going up to INR 1,577 crores. And for the Q4, we grew by 33%, Q4 over Q4. And in terms of adjusted EBITDA, as you can see, we continue to improve adjusted EBITDA. Because this business is three and a half year old, and in fact, first year went around in priming the engine w ith a lot of category and acquisitions that we did, so real ly the business is fairly young , for it to be able to result into a more mature EBITDA. But as you can see, we continue to improve our EBITDA year-on-year, quarter on quarter basis. For the full fiscal year, we have demonstrated 1.4% EBITDA over the same period last year, it was 0.2%, and likewise for the quarter, w here negative 0.3% has become 0.7% positive. So, these are still early days, company continues to do , and the business segment continues to do very well, both in terms of the growth and expansion of EBITDA is yet to materialize in a meaningful way. If you look, this is a little more detailed color on the Globalbees. If you look at some of these seg ments for FY24 and FY25, al l of that we have tried to classify into five segments, although we just talked about four segments. So we have our core four segments, which is Home improvement & utilities in darker pink, slightly lesser pink is H ome Appliances and very light pink on Home and Personal care, and Active Life and Accessories. These are core brands , and that have continued to expand. Other brands, which we have deliberately slowed down, and we believe, because of certain evolution curve, that have, if you look at even the right-hand side, the adjusted EBITDA from the core brands has been around 7.5%. And from the other brands, it's minus 31%, and the share of these other brands is reducing from 14% in FY24 to 8% in FY25 , as a deliberate strategy. So, over time, as the other brand's piece of the business reduces, and we will attempt at making it EBITDA neutral over a period of time, while improving our focus on the core brands, which has a disproportionate growt h, high growth, than the overall business growth of 30% year -on-year. So it'll mean a very meaningful outcome, over the next few years, as we move along, the other brands reduces in size, and the Adjusted EBITDA for those reduc es in percentage terms as well. Effectively, Globalbees as a business , will deliver a lot more EBITDA in terms of the bottom line, both at a consolidated brand adjusted EBITDA, and we believe we will obviously improvise on our corporate expenses and deliver a superior performance on the overall Globalbees adjusted EBITDA from 1.4% going forward t o a much healthier number over a few quarters and years to come. So, I hope this gives yo u a little more deeper color on , some of these were asked and questions that you had in the prior calls, so therefore we thought to share this additional piece of information. I would now request Gautam to talk about the other segments and consol performance. Mr. Gautam Sharma So other category largely includes our preschool business. We have a strong growth in preschool partnership across 160 cities now. And you can see the preschool numbers, the number of operational preschools, from 105 in FY23, we have increased this to 208 in FY24, and now we have 363 operational schools. You can see a healthy jump in the number of students enrolled as well . For FY25 it is 18,470 students who have enrolled in our schools. Revenue continues to improve from INR 33 crore , we have posted a revenue of INR 42 crore for FY25. And the same thing is with EBITDA, we continue to improve our E BITDA, f rom negative 13% in FY23, we have now reached to EBITDA of 24%. This i s about the consol performance for all business segments put together. We are just refreshing, in this slide, in the form of graphical presentation that Supam has done initiatlly. All four business segments India multi -channel Business, which is the core, International, Globalbees, and others, all continue to grow their revenue a nd continue to improve their profitability year on year. From 8.8% to 9.5% in case of India multi-channel business. For a minus 19% to minus 16% in International business. For Globalbees business, 0.2% to 1.4%. And in our preschool business, from 18% to 24% EBITDA in FY25. As a result, combining these four segments, we get a 18% growth in our consol net revenue for FY25 over FY24, a nd a 16% growth in our net revenue in Q4 FY25 over Q4 FY24. The green boxes, in this graph , are the consol gross margin s. So you can see those are also continuously improving from 36.7% in Q4 FY24, we have improved this to 37.5%, and from 35.8% in FY24, we have improved this to 37.4% in FY25. Likewise, we continue to improve the adjuste d EBITDA as w ell. Consol EBITDA from 5 .0% to 5.2%, Q4 over Q4, a nd from 4.2% to 5.1%, in FY25 over FY24. This ends our presentation. Mr. Supam Maheshwari Happy to now take questions. Mr. Anish Arora Thank you, team. We can wait for a minute for the queue to get formed, and then we can start with the Q&A. I request participants to raise the hands for asking questions. We will unmute you one by one, and you will have the access to the mic. Please introduce yourself and the name of the organization you represent. The participants are also requested to limi t their questions to a maximum 2. For any follow-up questions, you may join the queue again. First question is from Videesha. Videesha, please unmute yourself. Ms. Videesha Sheth Hello. I hope I'm audible. Mr. Supam Maheshwari Yes, Videesha, it is audible Ms. Videesha Sheth Hi. This is Videesha Sheth from Ambit Capital. Thank you for the opportunity and really appreciate the granular data points. My first question was if you can explain the gap between AUTC and the order growth that we've seen in both International and India businesses. You've talked about the reasons for subdued order growth, b ut going forward, what can be done to narrow the gap, and when do you expect the order growth to be in line with the AUTC trajectory? That was my first question Mr. Supam Maheshwari Okay. So if you talk about AUTC growth with respect to the order growth, right? I mean, that's what your question is? Ms. Videesha Sheth Yes. Mr. Supam Maheshwari If you look at India, the delta is not that big if you look at the full year picture. Videesha, you will have to put it on mute, I think there was some disturbance. Yeah. So, if you look at the full year picture, you will not see any delta. What you're seeing as the delta is largely coming from certain slowdown that we experience d in our offline store network. Lesser footfalls, leading to lesser orders, is what we experienced, especially in January and February, which obviously got corrected in March with the season change. If you look at our online, while the slowdown has an impact on the customers com ing back and ordering wh ile the AUTC is registered once, i t gets registered. Also, i f you look at the online growth, online GMV growth for the year, FY24 over 23, or FY25 over 24, i t remains 18%. And if you even look for Q4 online growth, it is close to around 16%. So, which we feel is a fairly good number , in terms of the pure, sort of online segment.