Vishal Mega Mart Ltd (NSE: VMM) Q3 2026 Earnings Call dated Jan. 28, 2026
Corporate Participants:
Gunender Kapur — Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer
Amit Gupta — Chief Financial Officer
Analysts:
Shikha Puri — Analyst
Devanshu Bansal — Analyst
Percy Panthaki — Analyst
Unidentified Participant
Manoj Menon — Analyst
Garima Mishra — Analyst
Jignesh Kamani — Analyst
Nihal Mahesh Jham — Analyst
Presentation:
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Q3FD. Earnings conference call of Vishal Megamart Limited. As a reminder, all participant lines will remain 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 the operator by pressing Star then zero on your touch tone telephone. Please note that this conference is being recorded.I will now hand the conference over to Ms. Shikha Puri from Strategic Growth Advisor for opening remarks. Thank you. And over to you Shikha.
Shikha Puri — Analyst
Thank you. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us on Vishal Megamart Limited’s Q3, FY26 and nine month FY26 earnings conference call. We have with us Mr. Gunender Kapoor, M.D. and CEO Mr. Amit Gupta. I hope everyone got an opportunity to go through our financial results and investor presentation uploaded on the company’s website and the stock exchanges. We will begin the call with opening remarks from the management following which we will have the forum open for question and answer session. Before we start, I would like to point out that some statements made in today’s call may be forward looking in nature and and the disclaimer to this effect has been included in the earnings presentation shared with you earlier.
I would now like to invite Mr. Guninder Kapoor, MD and CEO to give his opening remarks. Thank you and over to you sir.
Gunender Kapur — Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer
Well, thank you very much and a very good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. A very warm welcome to this call. I’ll very briefly take you through the quarter three 26 and nine months of FY26 results and some of the highlights and then we will open the call for Q and A Firstly on the quarter 326 highlights. In this quarter the company did revenue from operations of rupees 3670 crores. This was a growth of 17% over last year.
Our adjusted same store sales growth for quarter three was 9.6%. This is after accounting for the fact that the Durga Puja sales this year fell in quarter two whereas last year they fell in quarter three. So it is the adjustment of 2.1% which we had also mentioned in the quarter two call. The EBITDA for the quarter was 605 kores which was 19.8% growth over last year. And our EBITDA margin stood at 16.5% visa vis 16.1% last year that was significant. Which is a 19.1% growth over last year. And PAT margin stood at 8.5% visa the 8.4% last year. Now I’ll quickly move to the first three quarters highlights. The nine months highlight. Now you would recognize that in the nine month numbers all seasonality gets equal between the two years. So there is. So those are let’s say totally comparable numbers. In nine months of FY26 the company did a revenue from operations of 9792 crores. This was a growth of 19.9% over last year. Our same store sales growth adjusted stood at 10.3%. So this is the real number for the first nine months. Because the impact of Durga Puja or any other festival shifting from one month to the other has been completely neutralized in the same store sales growth number of 10.3%. EBITDA was 1,459 crores which was a 24.4% growth over last year. And an EBITDA margin 14.9% vis a vis 14.4% last year. PAT was 671 crores which is a 30% growth over last year. And PAT margin stood at 6.9% vis a vis 6.3% of last year. We sustained our accelerated new store opening momentum and this quarter in quarter three we opened 29 new stores. 12 of these were in South India, in the states of Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka. We also opened two new stores in Gujarat where we have a total of six stores now and two in Maharashtra where we have a total of four stores now. This is consistent with our growth strategy that we had articulated. We further opened four new format stores. We have a total of 10 small format stores and these are doing quite well. For the nine month period, total new store openings stand at 80. You would recall that at the time of our IPO we had guided to 80 to 100 new stores every year. So for the current financial year we will end at the upper end or slightly over 100 stores vis a vis bad guidance. Our total store count now stands at 771 as of December end and we are present in 517 cities in India. We added 24 new cities in this quarter. Our trading area stood at 13.2 million square feet. Our own brand’s contribution to revenue has further gone up by 100 basis points and now stands at 74.5% for the first nine months of the year. Further, our Quick Commerce Initiative has expanded to 723 stores across 485 cities in the country and our registered users on Quick Commerce have increased to 12 million people across the country. We believe that India is poised for the next wave of consumption growth aided by initiatives such as GST rate rationalization and reforms in direct taxation, and are very optimistic about the positive impact that these changes could have on a business in the years to come. With these brief opening remarks, I would now turn to the moderator to start the Q and A session and I would be very happy to answer any and all the questions that you may have.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
Thank you ladies and gentlemen. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press Star and one on the Touchstone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and 2. Participants are requested to use their handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assemble. We take the first question from the line of Devanshu Bansal from MK Global. Please go ahead.
Devanshu Bansal
Hi, thanks for the opportunity. GK the normalized SSD as you mentioned is closer to 10%. I wanted to check if this is the run rate that we should consider or there were additional short term weakness due to delayed winters and even at the start of the year there was some component of lead which happened in Q4 which may have had some incremental impact. So wanted to check if there were some additional weaknesses in this nine month performance.
Gunender Kapur
Nothing significant. I would say that the first nine month SSG of 10.3% is broadly our average achievement in terms of SSG and we see no weakness around that number. Of course every quarter there are these minor issues which impact the business either positively or negatively. For example the last quarter there was some delay in winter specifically for the month of December. So that may have had some small impact on our business. But overall I must also tell you that our winter merchandise same store sales growth was also double digit for the full quarter.
Devanshu Bansal
Understood. Just a small follow up here. Can you split your growth in terms of transactions in bill size then of this 10%? How this is broadly divided.
Gunender Kapur
Majority of this is because of increase in transactions and half of that or slightly less than half of that was because of improvement in average bill value. So as you have seen in the earlier quarters, also majority of a growth is driven by transactions and consequently new footfall in the store. Because we are probably gaining market share from all our competitors and the mom and pop stores.
Devanshu Bansal
Intent of asking this question was to because there was this GST decrease. So ideally your bil size should have improved. So that is yet to play out right? So from that perspective I would say.
Gunender Kapur
No, I think that of a total growth you can assume that about. One second, just let me give you the exact numbers. 70% has come because of improvement in transactions and 30% has come from increase in build value. So those are the exact numbers.
Devanshu Bansal
So last question from my end. We did a winter in system marketing campaign with Manushi this time around. So what is the intent behind such campaigns? Was this undertaken to improve our growth profile with recruitment of new consumers or was it related to focus on improving gross margin with premiumization of overall?
Gunender Kapur
So you know it is to dramatize our proposition amongst our consumers which is to make aspirations affordable. And Manushi is aspirational for mass market consumers in two ways. One is that she is an extremely fashionable young upcoming actress. But equally she has a lot of commitment to activities which are aimed at doing good to other people and also to the society. So she started several campaigns and several initiatives in the area of, let’s say csr. So Manushi in that sense was a good spokesperson for a promise of do good, look good. Right. The perceived represented both the ideas. One is do good and the other is to look good. So and I must say that the campaign has been extremely successful.
Devanshu Bansal
Do we foresee.
Operator
Devans, I do apologize to interrupt you there. If you could please join by the queue for follow up questions.
Devanshu Bansal
Sure.
Operator
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Percy from iifl, please go ahead.
Percy Panthaki
Hi sir. Just wanted to understand that the deceleration in growth that we’ve seen from 22.5% last quarter to 17% this quarter, that entire 500 to 550bps change, is it just because of the festive timing change or is there some other reason for it?
Gunender Kapur
Largely it is a festive timing change. Percy, we have itemized the impact of the preponement of PUJA this year and that impact was 2.1%. Now that has a further impact on the EBITDA numbers for the quarter and the PAT numbers for the quarter. So I would say that it was almost entirely because of the the change in the festive timings. Further, Percy, if you were to look at our numbers for quarter two. In fact I highlighted this during the analyst call for quarter two. Our growth, same store sales growth was 12.8%. Adjusted for this one time impact it was 10.7%. Further, we had spoken about our EBITDA view where we said that we will grow our ebitda by about 25%. Y o y in quarter two we grew that by 30.5% and likewise we had guided that our PAT will grow at 30% and PAT had grown by 46.5%.
Now we can attribute all these incremental numbers reported in quarter two to the fact that the PUJA festival this year fell in quarter two, whereas last year it fell in quarter three. So almost entirely it can be attributed to that.
Percy Panthaki
Got it sir.
Gunender Kapur
The one thing which I’ll add to. To further underline that point, if you look at the nine months numbers, the first nine months of the year till December, all this gets equalized. Then a change from quarter two to quarter three, etc. Or quarter three to quarter two doesn’t matter. So if you want to look at our first nine month same store sales growth, it is indeed 10.3% and our EBITDA growth for the first nine months is 24.4% and our growth for the first nine months is 30%.
Percy Panthaki
Understood? Understood. So basically, yeah, so I was also doing the same thing. So averaging 2Q and 3Q SSSG around 10%. So is that what we can expect in the near future as well? Around a 10% kind of SSG. And secondly, on the total sales growth, again it would be about 19 to 20% on an average. So again, is this something that we can sort of take going forward in the near to medium term?
Gunender Kapur
That is what we expect and that would be our endeavor.
Percy Panthaki
Understood? Understood. Secondly, can you just tell us a little bit more about what you are doing specifically and differently versus the street in order to keep the SSSG at close to a double digit number? Because if we look at the retail space overall, you are clearly outperforming that. So just wanted to understand one is what are the initiatives that you have done in the past or you are putting in place now? And secondly, how are you differentiated versus the retailer so that you are getting a differentiated performance?
Gunender Kapur
So firstly, I would say, Percy, conceptually speaking, our proposition is extremely relevant for the Indian customers and consumers at this moment, which is to focus on making aspirations affordable. Because as you would find that the aspirations, mostly led by the digital penetration or the penetration of smart mobile phones, is growing exponentially, whereas from time to time there are affordability challenges. The fact that we bridged that gap is extremely relevant for all customers in this country and more specifically for the younger customers. Our same store sales growth has three components.
Firstly, I would like to mention that of our same store sales growth, the most dominant component is. Upgradation from mom and pop stores and market share gain. Difficult to differentiate between these two. But that is the largest bucket. Then the second bucket is the increase in the average bill value of the existing Vishal customers. Right. So first is new customers. Secondly increase in the average bill value of existing customers because they buy one thing more or two things more. And last but not the least is an improvement in our average selling price. Now again for the first nine months of the year our highest price points, which are the fashion price points grew on a SSD basis at 14%, our mid price points grew at 9% and our opening price points grew at 6%. So further we get 2% kind of growth because of upgradation which is continuous of customers from opening price points to mid and from mid to higher price points. So to summarize 3 parts market share gain both from mom and pop stores and other retail Are customers buying more things one more or two more? And likely the increase in average selling price by upgrading customers from opening price point to mid price points and mid price points to the upper or the premium price points. So these three components is what drives our double digit same store sales growth. Now the relative impact of these three is different at different points in time. But our entire business is focused towards delivering an end outcome of these three as a double digit sales to sales growth. So for example, when customers are the incomes and specifically the discretionary incomes are going up significantly, we find that the impact of people buying more more number of things is higher. But at this point in time we are finding that the biggest impact which is driving our growth positively is volume growth which is led by us gaining market share.
Percy Panthaki
Got it sir. My second question is on competition. Do you find that in your strongholds the pace of competition opening tours has sort of accelerated over the last one year or it continues at whatever pace it was earlier.
Gunender Kapur
It keeps changing from time to time Percy, but In the last nine months or 10 months I would assume that it’s pretty much the same. At the pace of new store openings.
Percy Panthaki
Got it? Got it. Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much. That’s all from me. All the best.
Gunender Kapur
Thank you, Percy. All the best to you.
Operator
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Manish Podar from Invesco amc. Please go ahead.
Unidentified Participant
Yeah. Hi, Jiggy. So I just had two questions. First, is this point which you mentioned about higher price point growing faster than mid and lower, is this a market phenomena or this is because of company interventions?
Gunender Kapur
This is totally because of company interventions, Manish. So for example, what we are doing deliberately as an input is that in every category of ours, in every large merchandise category, as we call it, every season we introduce one higher price point where the fashionability and functionality is significantly better. At a higher price point, equally, we improve. I mentioned earlier that we maintain our gross margins at the same level. And all the buying savings that accrue to us because we are buying more volume, they get invested in either quality improvement or pricing action.
So we keep improving the quality of merchandise even in our existing price points, and take deliberate promotion initiatives to get customers to try the higher price point. So this is totally deliberate. I wouldn’t quite believe that it’s a general market phenomenon,
Unidentified Participant
But would you say the market is actually moving the other way around? I’m just trying to. You’re trying to. Because then the 10% outcome is a great outcome. If the market is moving the other directions is what I’m trying to get some context.
Gunender Kapur
There is no real data for me to come to a definitive conclusion on that. So I can generally reflect the view in the last. Not specifically in the immediate past, but in the earlier quarters where there was a pressure on consumption and so on. And there was a lot of talk, not only in retail, but the consumer industry in general about consumption pressures. Now, if that were to be true, which I believe was certainly true, then it’s unlikely that people were buying more and more expensive price points. It’s unlikely. But quite honestly, Manish, I don’t have any data on that.
Unidentified Participant
Just one bit. I understand you are in different pockets, but are you sensing, let’s say, players across the street in terms of both discount.
Unidentified Participant
Going materially higher compared to what it was last year. Anderson Q2, Q3 Festival was played and on the same side, when you’re talking about rentals, are you seeing, you know, any sort of, you know, landlords now wanting to prefer larger, you know, probably more organized players compared to, let’s say a lot of new players which would have, you know, come up in the last two, three, four years? Is there any sort of trend happening on that front? These two variables, let’s say one from, you know, peers wanting to get cash because, you know, and doing more discounting because liquidity is crunched and the other part is on the rental part where you know, the landlords wanting to take you on board. Thanks.
Gunender Kapur
So Manish, on both on the more discounting there is some evidence that that’s happening and I’ll give you specifically the again, the underlying factors for that in Puja festival which I mentioned earlier, fell in quarter two this year and not in quarter three. We had a certain situation in Assam for six, seven days during the peak Puja festival when majority of the buying takes place where a very popular leader and singer of Assam lost his life in a very unfortunate accident overseas because of which the state of Assam was virtually shut. It had a huge impact on people and that time is one of the largest states for Puja festival.
And when you have sort of shutdown for 5, 6, 7 days in the very last peak period of Puja, it does impact everyone. And therefore in the balance period and in the balance states people do make efforts to promote more or discount more to ensure that they are not stuck with very large inventory. Likewise, earlier in response to a question, I mentioned that in December specifically the onset of winter was delayed by at the very least a couple of weeks, if not more. And again, as you know, winter is a very seasonal product in terms of merchandise. So people do then tend to discount more aggressively to ensure that they are not carrying forward all that merchandise because as you know, the next opportunity to sell would be the next day of December, which nobody really wants. Now this is what happened in the market.
Having said that, I must offer a comment on our numbers. Our winter sales still for the entire season grew at strong double digit same store sales growth. So the two are different. One is what really happened in the market was the first part of my response. But the second was also to differentiate what happened to us. And therefore we did not quite suffer from that issue.
Amit Gupta
Any pressure on rental?
Gunender Kapur
Yeah. Sorry Manish. No. You also asked me about rentals. See, rentals in rentals are relevant in the micro market. It’s not across the board but we are not seeing any significant pressure on rentals. There are some micro markets where if there is a sudden increase in number of retailers for a very short period the rentals go up. But by and large it’s the same. Because equally there are markets where there are store closures and therefore the rentals become a little bit more softer.
Unidentified Participant
So gk, if I had to ask one question.
Operator
Manish, I do apologize to interrupt you. Could you please join Bhaidha queue for follow up questions?
Unidentified Participant
Sure, I’ll do that. Thanks.
Operator
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, in the interest of time and fairness to others we request you to restrict to two questions per participant and rejoin the question queue. We take the next question from the line of Manoj Menon from ICICI Securities. Please go ahead.
Manoj Menon
Hi GP Amit and team. Good performance. Just I know that are rather fully aware that the questions about seasonality, you know, a lot of clarifications already offered. Just only one aspect I just want to check with you is that let’s say in the last decade plus of your, you know, experience. Is it largely the same way it plays out or is there something different which has happened this year in terms of the festival timing, is it just as per your historical understanding, is the same template is playing out or is there anything else you want to call it?
Gunender Kapur
It’s the same, Manoj. It’s the same. Because as you know our festivals follow the Hindu calendar and not quite the English calendar that we are used to. So they do fall in different months almost every year. So it’s a very normal thing which happens across the years. But you know, in the last 10 years all I can say is that we would have encountered every kind of difference. That is Pooja in quarter two, Pooja in quarter three. We’ve experienced all the combinations. So depending on when the festival is falling in the coming period we do adjust our buying and our promotion and advertising plans.
Manoj Menon
Loud and clear. Thank you. And the second and last question for now is in your experiments which you would be continuously doing on newer markets in terms of expanding the total addressable market. Anything which you could call out in terms of any of the, let’s say. You can use the word laboratory experiments you’re doing which is finding its scalability. And also a link question, because you’re allowed to ask two questions is on your comments about cube commerce. You know, the learnings from the last few months. Thank you
Gunender Kapur
Manoj. I’ll take on the pilots first. Firstly let me just touch upon the expansion into new states which is a part of these experiments that we have spoken about. So in Kerala we continue to make absolutely great progress as we speak now we have 19 stores in Kerala which are operational, performing very well and another 20 odd stores in Pipeline. So that part is going very well. In Maharashtra we’ve expanded our pilot to four stores and in Gujarat to six stores. We have currently some feedback on performance for the last two, three months. But that’s been largely autumn, winter. We will watch it for some more time but keep open one two stores in spring, summer also and then come to a conclusion on that.
And finally in our small format pilot, as I mentioned in Q2 we had six stores. Now we’ve added four more. Obviously we are feeling more confident about that. So at this moment we have 10 new stores in small format and they’re performing decently, as you rightly said. In addition to these, we always have at least one more idea in pilot or in laboratory. So there is that also. But it’s a bit premature to speak about them because they have not even reached the pilot stage as yet.
Manoj Menon
Thank you so much and all the best.
Gunender Kapur
Quick commerce. Manoj, very quick comment. We have expanded to 485 cities now and to 723 stores. So that’s good. Our revenue continues to grow and our contribution to the store revenue by quick commerce continues to grow. So we are going about it very systematically and in a sustainable fashion and we will continue to build.
Operator
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Garima Mishra from Kotak Securities. Please go ahead.
Garima Mishra
Yeah, hi. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I just had a quick question on the store edition numbers. Now you clearly said that you’re on track to actually surpass your earlier guidance of hundred stores for the year. You know, the higher end of the guidance. How should we look at this number for the next year? And internally, you know, in terms of execution capability, does the organization have the capability to actually add a much larger number of stores per year as well?
Gunender Kapur
So, Garma, we are retaining a guidance of 8200 because. And secondly, we have increased, further increased our capacity to add new stores. But the most important input into a number of store additions is the availability of properties which can become growing, profitable stores for us that we can identify. So obviously this year has been good and therefore we will be at the upper end of the guidance. But we would still retain a guidance of 8200 because we do not think that we should be chasing a target irrationally there and end up opening stores which either do not have the opportunity to grow or do not have the opportunity to be profitable.
As you know, historically in our sector in India, that has been an issue that one needs to be cautious about. So we will retain our guidance while reassuring you that we have increased our capacity. So if the opportunity does arise, for example, to open 110 or 115 stores, we would be able to execute that.
Garima Mishra
All right, thanks. Second question. See you’ve mentioned in the notes to accounts that there was practically no impact from the new labor codes on your financials. I was a little surprised. I would have thought, you know, there would be plenty of, you know, fixed term contract workers working at Vishal. So could you just, you know, around a little bit.
Gunender Kapur
So Garima, our comment was more that it’s not that the impact has been negligible, but it is not material for our results. So the impact has been around 8.4 crores so far and that is included in our quarterly and the first nine months results. Amit, do you want to add any color?
Amit Gupta
Garima, you are right. See, most of our employees are actually on our road and the impact which is coming on account of gratuity, essentially moving from 35 to 50%. Most of our store employees are already covered in that 50% bracket. So there we do not have any significant impact. It’s largely the managerial staff and corporate employees where we have seen. Seen an impact and the same has been assessed and accounted for.
Garima Mishra
I’m sorry, just to confirm, this 8.4 crore impact has been booked entirely in the third quarter and should be treated as a one off.
Amit Gupta
See, not necessarily in this quarter but on a nine month period it is accounted for. See, we keep on providing every month and then we do a YTD assessment. We were carrying this provision with us.
Garima Mishra
All right, got it. Thank you so much.
Operator
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Jignesh Kamani from Nippon India Mutual Fund. Please go ahead.
Jignesh Kamani
Congratulations for number even in tough time. Just a question 1. On the inventory side, you highlighted the winter. So how was the winter inventory both at our end and our vendor end? There is one thing second of the performance store wide you highlighted that the small store doing very well. We already reached 210 store. So how is the strategy to. First you can say consolidate see the performance first few months or we are ready to. You can scale up from 10 stores to 3040 store in next one or two years. Thank you very much.
Gunender Kapur
There was some disturbance in the line but I think I have understood both the questions. But if I do make a mistake, my apologies and please correct me. Firstly, on inventory which we all our vendors are carrying, as I mentioned, we have achieved double digit sales store sales growth even on the winter merchandise that we had bought for this autumn winter season. So we have no challenge on winter inventory. It is quite possible that the vendors in general could be carrying some winter merchandise. But at this moment I am not quite certain because while December was a weak month for winter, as you may know, January has been quite cold and winter merchandise is for example still selling both from our stores and other stores we believe.
So at the end of the season, whether there will be a big merchandise issue or stock carryover issue in winter, I’m not quite certain. Of course what happens is that merchandise and I’m talking generally not for any specific retailer, merchandise which sells in December sells at a higher price than the January merchandise in winter. Because by the end of December, early January.
Amit Gupta
The sales start. So in my judgment it wouldn’t be a serious issue. There would be pockets where there would be issues. Specifically in our case there is no issue because even in winter merchandise specifically this season, we have achieved a same store sales growth which is in excess of 10%. Second question on small, in the small format stores, our action standard or goal was twofold. One was that they should be as relevant as our current format stores and secondly the financial outcomes should be the same or similar. Now we are feeling more confident because per square foot revenue for the small format stores is pretty much similar to what we achieve in our large format stores.
So it is indeed as relevant for our customers as any other Vishal store. Secondly, I’m happy to report that the financial outcomes are also similar to what we achieve in our normal format stores. So on both the fronts we are hitting the target. But as I mentioned, even in the quarter two analysts meet, we would want to open 30, 40 new such stores and then get a very robust validation of our hypothesis and then we would increase the pace of the rollout. So it is progressing very well.
Jignesh Kamani
Second, on the micro market or the space specific, you can say our ramp up or the experience, you clearly highlighted that Kerala has been doing very well. Right now you have almost 20 store in pipeline. If I remember correctly last quarter we had almost 16 store in pipeline. So definitely ramp up is pretty incredible there. So apart from that which are the stake where you are more confident and the rain pup can be much better and at the same time which state or micro market, some headwind and you are setting slightly slow on that city.
Gunender Kapur
So you know, I’ll just give you a sense of where are we opening the stores. Quite Specifically in quarter three of the 29 stores that we opened, 12 were in South India of which four were in Kerala and four were in Andhra Pradesh. Andhra Pradesh is also a state where we are expanding and two each were in Telangana and Karnataka. In the north we opened seven new stores. In the west we opened seven new stores and these were two each in Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and one in Maharashtra. And in East. We had opened three new stores. Now the markets where our experience has been an outlier in terms of performance is of course, as you rightly identified, Kerala. But it is an early conclusion environment because as you know, we’ve gone into Kerala ONLY in 2025 in any significant way and northeast where we continue to outperform the other states. The last thing which I would say is that in all the states our performance is pretty uniform in terms of growth. SSSG Even across Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3, our performance has been pretty uniform. So yeah, there are some states which are absolutely outliers in terms of the upper end of the performance, but generally we are operating in a very tight range of performance.
Jignesh Kamani
Thanks a lot and all the best.
Gunender Kapur
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Nihal Mahesh Jam from hsbc. Please go ahead.
Nihal Mahesh Jham
Yes sir. Good afternoon TK and congratulations. Two questions. First is we have limited history and what we’ve seen, obviously Vishal has given a double digit growth. But if you look at the last decade or so and even now, despite the overall slowdown and the way peers are reporting, we’ve managed to report very high ssg. In which phase was it that say Vishal saw a muted SSG of say maybe less than 5% or so? Significant slowdown in. Because at this point in time the consumer environment is not creative and competitive intensity is high and we continue to deliver a very strong performance. So if historically we’ve seen a weak performance, you know, what were the additional factors and they led to that kind of a slowdown.
Gunender Kapur
So Nihal, we have seen this level of performance at least I would say for the last seven, eight years could be slightly more. And of course the only period I will quickly add where we saw a completely diminished operation and performance was during the COVID period. So other than that we have not quite seen performance which has been in any significant way lesser. Maybe way back in 14, 15 would be years when we had a low single digit, but since then it always been double digit. Nihal. So Amit is pointing out to me that in the years 2014 and 15, which were early days after buying this business which is bankrupt, we had seen same store sales. Growth levels which are single digit. So you could call that a somewhat lower level of performance. But generally speaking, other than Covid, for a very long time we’ve been at this level of performance.
Nihal Mahesh Jham
That’s very helpful. GK and Amit, the second question was on the store addition part. Incrementally, as the new stores are opening, they’re on an average 13, 14,000 square feet. So is this say the impact of the smaller stores that are opening or even the regular stores are sort of being optimized in terms of the square footage that we are looking at? And just to double clarify, when we are guiding 80 to 100 stores for the next year, this obviously excludes any small store pilots sort of scaling up beyond. Right. These are the questions.
Amit Gupta
So firstly, you know, in some cases we are deliberately capping the size at 15,000 square feet. I’ll give you specifically where that is our endeavor. For example, in Kerala the population is almost contiguous across the state. There are no well defined cities. So we are finding that we will have to open many, many more stores than we had planned. But we are cautiously keeping this size at 50,000 square feet because they are closer to each other than let’s say in A UP or even in SIM or somewhere else in the country. Secondly, as I mentioned in Maharashtra and Gujarat we are in a pilot at the moment. And since the cost structure, especially in Maharashtra and in parts of Gujarat is higher, we are trying to improve our throughput from a slightly smaller area so that we achieve the same financial outcomes.
So in that pilot also there are some stores which are smaller in size. I would say other than these two instances, we are not looking for a reduction in size. Yes, there is one more thing which has small contribution to that number which is I mentioned in quarter two call that in Karnataka we had found that our stores were oversized. They were 24, 25,000, 26,000 square feet. And to ensure that the optical revenue per square foot does not look small and therefore lead to the conclusion that we are underperforming in Karnataka, we had undertaken an initiative to rightsize the Karnataka stores. That initiative is making very good progress. And to the best of my knowledge, other than two stores in Karnataka, we have rightsized all the other stores. So that could also be contributing a little bit to that number.
Nihal Mahesh Jham
Got it. And the clarification on the smaller stores.
Gunender Kapur
As a part of the guidance, I would hesitate to make a commitment at this point in time that the number, all these numbers would be additive. So at this moment our store number of 80 includes the four small format stores that we open.
Nihal Mahesh Jham
Thank you so much.
Gunender Kapur
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Gaurav Jogani from JM Financial. Please go ahead.
Unidentified Participant
Thank you for taking my question. My first question, you know is with regards to the revenue per store from the southern market. And now if we calculate basis, you know, the breakup that he has given in the ppt, it shows, you know that the revenue there is around for the quarter at least around 4 crores or nearby. Whereas if you look at the northern and the eastern market, the revenue per store is a bit higher. So is it a function of because we are having smaller stores there and is it because these store editions are also newer which is impacting this and probably a scale up of these stores in the next couple of years could improve the the revenue per store there.
Amit Gupta
Gaurav, you are absolutely right. As you would have heard earlier, we are adding more stores in south and they are new stores. So obviously revenue per store is lower compared to the system average. Whereas in northeast historically also we have higher revenue per store basis because many of these stores are feeder stores. So that is the reason why have higher revenue throughput and out stores because they have a higher contribution of new stores. They have a lower number.
Unidentified Participant
And just lastly on the rental bit, I mean if you look at the, the absolute rental that is, you know, the rental that is not recorded or the pre India rental that we see we have as a trend, the limited trend that we have, we have seen that number kind of going down in absolute basis in Q3. So is there anything to read specifically here? Is there any quarterly variety that happens here that you would like to highlight?
Amit Gupta
Not really, Gaurav. There is nothing specific to be highlighted in the rental. Our rent per store on a per square feet basis is by and large in the same range. And we have agreed escalations and as and when they come up, you know, that is accounted for. So I just want to clarify actually the incremental remainder that is, you know, the EBITDA, pre index, EBITDA minus the reported EBITDA last quarter it was 154 crores odd. This quarter it is around 150 odd crore. So, you know,
Unidentified Participant
QQ basis, it has actually gone down, the number of stores increasing and hence
Amit Gupta
No. So that can happen because of some, some catch up or correction in some of the cases where we have renewals or escalation negotiations. But otherwise that. There is no specific, anything specific to be called out here.
Unidentified Participant
Thank you for answering the question.
Operator
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Prerna Junjunwala from Elara Securities. Please go ahead.
Unidentified Participant
Thank you for the opportunity. My first question is on SSG. Your press release mentions that reported SSG for nine months is 9.1 and adjusted is 10.3. When can we see this gap actually merging or is it likely to remain similar henceforth?
Gunender Kapur
So, Prena, that gap will always remain. And let me take this opportunity to firstly explain what is the gap? Firstly, we as a company are now almost 14 years old, maybe slightly more than that, and every six, seven years we need to refurbish our old stores. So when we refurbish the stores, they are closed because we have to change the tiling, we have to do the plastering, we have to change the fixtures, cash deals, everything. So the biggest contributor, if I remember right, to that adjustment is the stores which are actually shut for refurbishment, let’s say in quarter three this year, but were open in quarter three last year. Right. So that is a significant part of the adjustment.
The second thing which I spoke about is the resizing of stores. For example, we’ve completed that exercise in Karnataka. So the Same store in Q3 last year was 25,000 square feet, as an example, but in Q3 this year is now 17,000 square feet. So we adjust for that. And last but not the least, is the fact that some of our stores every quarter have to remain shut because of the infrastructure constraints which come up in our immediate context. And these could be anything like a road construction outside the store, construction of a flyover just opposite the store, or temporary closures of some areas.
Operator
[Ends Abruplty]