Nazara Technologies Ltd (NSE: NAZARA) Q4 2026 Earnings Call dated May. 13, 2026
Corporate Participants:
Nitish Mittersain — CEO, Founder and Joint Managing Director
Anupriya Sinha Das — Head of Corporate Development
Stuart Dinsey — Executive Chairman, Curve Games
Rohit Sharma — Executive Director
Mayank Kumar — Director Operations, Absolute Sports Pvt Ltd
Raymond Stauffer — CEO and Founder, Bluetile Games
Akshat Rathee — Founder, Nodwin Gaming Pvt Ltd.
Senthil Govindan — CEO, Datawrkz Business Solutions
Chris Jones — CEO, Space & Time
Manish Gaurav — Head of Business, Kiddopia
Jeff Amis — Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, WildWorks Inc.
Analysts:
Vivekanand Subbaraman — Analyst
Jinesh Joshi — Analyst
Atul Borse — Analyst
Pranav Mashruwala — Analyst
Presentation:
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Q4FY26 earnings conference call of Nisala Technologies Limited hosted by Ambit Capital. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen only mode and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during this conference call, please signal an operator by pressing Star then zero on your Touchstone phone. Please note that this conference has been recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Vivekanand from Amber Capital. Thank you. And over to you sir.
Vivekanand Subbaraman — Analyst
Thank you. Swapnali. Good morning everyone. A very warm welcome to all of you on behalf of Ambit Capital. We are proud to host the 4Q FY26 and FY26 post results conference call of Nazara Technologies Limited. I would like to take this opportunity and welcome the senior management team of the company joining us on the call today. Connected on this call are participants From Nazara including Mr. Nitish Mithir Sen, Joint MD and CEO Nazara Technologies Ltd. Mr. Rohit Sharma, Executive Director Mr. Rakesh Shah, PFO Ms.
Anupiya Sinhadas, Head of Corporate Development, Nazara Technologies Mr. Shreyas Menon, Head Offline Gaming Mr. Terry Lee, CEO Fusebox Games Mr. Seward Disney CEO Curve Games Mr. Raymond Stouffer, CEO and Founder, Blue Tile Games Mr. Manish Gaurav, Head of Business, Qdopia Mr. Jeff Amis, Co Founder and CEO Wildworks Mr. Mayank Kumar, Director Operations, Absolute Sports Private Ltd. Mr. Akshat Rakhi, Founder, Nordwin Gaming Private Ltd. Mr. Senthil Govindan, CEO DataWorks Business Solutions Private Ltd.
And Mr. Chris Jones, CEO, Space and Time. I would like to now call upon Mr. Nitish for his opening comments. Thank you.
Nitish Mittersain — CEO, Founder and Joint Managing Director
Hi, good morning everyone and thank you for joining us this morning. FY26 was a pivotal year for Nazara. Revenue reached INR1829 crores and EBITDA grew 66% to INR255 crores at highest ever with Q4 EBITDA margins reaching 19.5% almost doubling on a year on year basis. Importantly, cash generation also sent in significantly with pre tax operating cash flow growing 81% year on year to INR213 crores. More importantly, the shape of Nazara has fundamentally changed. In FY26 gaming contribution to EBITDA increased from 56% in FY25 to 90% in FY26 as we sharpened our focus on building a high margin globally diversified gaming platform across mobile, PC and console and offline gaming.
FY26 also included our largest acquisition to date of Blue Tile and Best Play, which significantly expands our casual gaming scale while adding AI, native development capabilities and a rewarded engagement network to our platform. At the same time, our existing gaming businesses and IPs continue to strengthen. Gitopia has returned to subscriber growth. We saw growth in Q3 and now again in Q4 and animal jam has expanded its margins. Fusebox has scaled its narrative engines across multiple IPs such as Big Brother, Big Boss, Traitors and our PC and console game.
Human fall flat crossed 58 million lifetime units globally. The operating system behind all of this is a Center of Excellence Playbook which we have actively strengthened over the last 12 to 18 months across user acquisition, data analytics, artificial intelligence growth and product. Every gaming IP we own and increasingly every IP we acquire plugs into the same system. Going into FY27, Nazara is at a materially different scale than it was 12 months ago. The quality and earnings capacity of the platform have also expanded significantly and we will continue to accelerate growth both in revenues and EBITDA in FY27.
I do believe our operating leverage is real and it is now starting to compound. With that. I will hand over to Anupriya to discuss segmental performance before we enter a Q and A session. Thank you very much and over to you Anupriya.
Anupriya Sinha Das — Head of Corporate Development
Thank you Nitish. Good morning everyone. At the consolidated level, as Nitish mentioned, Nazar delivered FY26 revenue of 1829 crores up 13% year on year and EBITDA of 255 crores up 66% year on year with our EBITDA margin expanding to 13.9%. In Q4FY26, the company reported revenue of INR398 crores and EBITDA of INR78 crores with EBITDA margin reaching 19.5%. Within this, our gaming business delivered particularly strong growth and profitability with FY26 revenue growing 107% year on year to INR1,072 crores and EBITDA growing 157% to INR265 crores resulting in an EBITDA margin of 24.7%.
In Q4 FY26 gaming revenue grew 78% year on year to INR278 crores while EBITDA grew 127% to INR76 crores. Within mobile gaming revenue grew 38% year on year to INR713 crores with EBITDA growing 33% to INR137 crores. Performance was driven by stronger execution across LiveOps user acquisition and data analytics through our COE led operating model. Gitopia had returned to subscriber growth in the previous quarter and has sustained that journey with improving unit economics. While Animal Jam delivered meaningful margin expansion during the year, our narrative games also continue to grow with multiple reality TV IPs getting launched in FY26 with additional launches planned in FY27.
During the quarter we also completed the acquisition of Blue Tile and bestplay which has significantly expanded our casual gaming scale and AI narrative AI native capabilities. This business will be consolidated from FY27 onwards pending some regulatory approval. TCM Console publishing business continue to deliver strong profitability with FY26 revenue of INR261 crores and EBITDA of INR101 crores. At 39% EBITDA margin, human fall flat crossed 58 million lifetime units globally in while our broader publishing portfolio continue to demonstrate durable monetization and growing platform reach.
Our offline gaming businesses with Smash and Funky Monkey also delivered profitability during FY26 with revenues of INR99 crores and EBITDA of INR27 crores. We continue expanding the Funky Monkey footprint during the year and progressing towards the launch of the reimagined Smash 2.1, a 2.0 format. Within our other businesses, ad tech delivered strong growth and profitability with both revenue and EBITDA growing 32% year on year. Fourth Kia remains profitable despite a softer traffic environment following Google Core updates supported by continued cost discipline and improving performance across near properties.
Nordwin, our associate company also delivered a significant ebitda turnaround during FY26, moving from a loss of INR14 crores in FY25 to a profit of INR21 crores in FY26 while continuing to scale its youth media and live events platform globally. With this I conclude my remarks and we’ll now open the call for Q and A.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
Thank you very much. We will now begin with 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 two Participants, you are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. A reminder to all you may press star N1 to ask a question. We have the first question from the line of Jinesh Joshi from PL Capital.
Please go ahead.
Jinesh Joshi
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity and congratulations on the margin performance. I have two bookkeeping questions to begin with. First is on the other income bet which was at about 51 crores in this quarter and apparently it appears to be materially higher. So was there any one off in this quarter? I mean I just thought of checking because there is no disclosure in the footnote that is one. Secondly, if I look at our share of losses from associates, I think in this quarter that flow figure was 31 crores and I believe after the deconsolidation of Nordville we will own about 46 to 47% stake in the company.
So is it safe to assume that the overall losses for Northwell in the quarter were at about 6566 crores. I just wanted to cross verify this thing because Norwell reported an EBITDA of 4 crores in this quarter which implies that the amortization figure is very high in the business. If you can just clarify on these two things.
Nitish Mittersain
Hi Janesh, this is Nitesh. So let me take both these questions. The other income predominantly driven by one is gain of 31 crores on our investment in Rust Media. The holding that he had in Rusk Media was revised upwards. We basis there no round of investment that they have reached. So that contributed 31 crores and the balance was a mix of things including some currency gains etc. On restatement of loans to Nazara UK. So that largely forms the other income including some mutual fund gains etc. In terms of the modern question on the losses from associates, these are contributed by 1, some losses from Moonshine which is continuing to find a way to, you know, recover some of its business in a program compliant manner.
But largely it came from Northwind which wrote off some goodwill it was carrying of 50 crores relating to an acquisition of OML assets done 3, 4 years back, predominantly coming from NH7 weekender which has not delivered the cash flows that were projected at the time the goodwill was established. So we took a conservative view and. Sorry, Rodman took a conservative view and wrote it off. Although NH7 Weekender as an it is bouncing back pretty well. So I think that’s largely what is driving at an operational level Northwind has been a bit profitable this year and also in this quarter.
Jinesh Joshi
Got that. 50 crores is the number that you mentioned, right?
Nitish Mittersain
Yeah,
Jinesh Joshi
Perfect. And so secondly on the, on the PC and console gaming, but I mean in the presentation we have mentioned that we launch a new IPs like dragon shelter, wax head etc. So if you can just give what is the timeline for the launch and also if I compare the full year revenue of 261 crores with the previous year there’s just hardly any growth. So what are the plans to kind of boost the organic traffic over here? If you can share some thoughts on that.
Nitish Mittersain
What I will do is I will call in Stewart who is the CEO of Curve who’s dialing in from London and also ask Rohit Sharmar Ed, who’s you know driving a lot of our PC and console business to also have add on comments. So if Stuart you can go in first and then give a little overview of your upcoming titles timing and then Rohit you can add your comments.
Stuart Dinsey
Yes, thank you Nitish. Yeah, in answer to that question, since acquisition there has been a period of transition. We’ve completed that in a way that hasn’t distracted the business. We’re very happy with that and we have begun investing in new games to deliver long term growth. We expect to launch at least six new releases in this current year, maybe a couple more. The games that you mentioned they will start Wax Heads actually released last week and other releases in the summer will include Sovereign Tower and Dragon Shutter.
We believe that the release of these games will bring long term growth for the company and we will continue to look at retaining a high margin from our low cost base where we can whilst increasing our development spend to build that pipeline.
Rohit Sharma
And this is Rohit here just to add to your second question. Previously before Nazara acquired Curve Games under the previous parent Curve Games was not for the last two years has not been signing a lot of games. So therefore you see that kind of growth. But the good part is that the our existing IPs like human fall Flat and Moblai have still given us the growth this year and as to mentioned now we have already gone on a very fast speed of signing new titles which will be launching in this financial year and subsequent financial year and that’s where we will see the growth as we go on.
Jinesh Joshi
Understood. One last question on Sportskeeda I think that revenue declined by about 38% in FY26 while the EBITDA margin has also come off quite a bit to about 12%. I understand this has been because of the Google core issue that you have highlighted in the past calls but I believe it has been four quarters since we are trying to get over this problem with limited success. So just wanted to understand, I mean Is it really possible to mitigate this challenge or should we build in a materially lower EBITDA margin of about 12 to 15% in this business going ahead and how to think of growth from here on?
Yeah, that is my last question.
Nitish Mittersain
Unfortunately I couldn’t hear it clearly. Can you quickly repeat it?
Jinesh Joshi
So the problem, I think the revenue decline and the margin problem that we have been seeing. Yeah, so on that
Nitish Mittersain
I think we’ve yet not seen the kind of recovery we want to see over there, we continue to do many things to try and achieve that. Although some of our existing other IPs outside of sports theater, like Pro Football Network and Prime Timer are showing very good positive signs and good numbers. So I think at this point of time we’ve continued to optimize costs. We continue to do that. We actually expect margins to increase in FY27 on potentially a smaller base. But I can also have Mayank coming here.
Mayank is leading sportskeeda and share his comments.
Mayank Kumar
Hi. Like Nitish said, the focus on this year was more to drive or retain the EBITDA than growing revenue. Recovering the revenue loss that we have seen in the last year. And that focus will continue going into the next year as well as we plan to mitigate our expenses and then also accordingly increase our effort in the next year.
Jinesh Joshi
Okay, sir, thank you. Thank you so much and all the best.
Operator
Thank you. Before we take the next question, a reminder to all. You may press Star and one to ask a question. We will take the next question from the line of Vivekanand from Ambit Capital. Please go ahead.
Vivekanand Subbaraman
Yeah, Nitish, how do you rate your preparedness as an organization, including your center of excellence, to now serve multiple gaming growth engines across segments including publishing and of course, new technologies. And of course these are all in addition to the existing ones that you have, like Love Island, Kidopia, etc. So that is my first question. And the second question is on Nordwin. So could you discuss the IPO timelines there and what is the plan you have for Nordwin? Will Norwind be raising cash?
Will you also be looking to monetize some of your shareholding? Yeah, I’ll stop with these and then ask follow ups when needed. Thank you.
Nitish Mittersain
So I think for your first question, you know, the centers of excellence that we’ve, you know, invested in and built over the last 18 months and accelerated in FY26, I think are really becoming center stage to support the expanding portfolio of it’s teams and technologies. Most of these centers of excellence are led by Very senior people with lot of in depth experience at scale, I would say. So I think we are feeling very confident that we’ve put in these efforts over the last 12 to 18 months and they will actually start showing real results in FY27.
I would say Kidopia is one good example of, you know, being benefited from the these initiatives which we’ve seen in Q3 and Q4. But this will play out more actively across the portfolio in FY27. AI, of course, is a very big theme for us. Not a narrative, but a very important aspect of what we are doing today and across the studios that we operate. Across the different functions of gaming, whether it’s the development process, how we do user acquisition, how we analyze data, how we engage with the user, we’re seeing a lot of uptake.
We’re also very excited about Blue Tile’s AI capabilities and maybe I can get Raymond just to interject two minutes how Blue Tile is leveraging AI, because some of that we hope to adopt in FY27 and many of our other studios. Raymond, you just want to give a quick update on that?
Raymond Stauffer
Sure. So in our case, and especially after the ongoing integration, we’re able to really scale our operations due to applying AI to each individual department that we have across all the different functions and processes. So from marketing, creative marketing, to marketing, operations, product development, technical development, ad monetization, data segmentation, we’re starting to apply AI in different capacities, both through LLMs and, but also through different complex algorithms such as reinforcement learning and other types of AI.
As Nitish mentioned, a lot of these capabilities are also being developed and leveraged from the centers of excellence. So the interaction between them and our specific team has been really fruitful and we’ve seen the capacity the team has now with these tools increase exponentially.
Nitish Mittersain
Yeah, just moving on to the second question. I think from a Nazara perspective, you know, we will look at potentially monetizing non core businesses. For us, this could be laundren, it could be sportskeeda, it could be the ad tech business in due course. We are not in any hurry, but we definitely see the potential to unlock value and redeploy in our core gaming business. So we will continue to evaluate opportunities as and when they come or get created with specific nonwind IPO related questions.
Akshat can come in and give an update. Akshat, over to you.
Akshat Rathee
Hi, can you hear me? Just a sound check. Yeah, yeah, we can. Thank you so much for the time and I appreciate the question. Look, Nordvin, being trained extremely well as a team listed company under Nazara for the last five years of our life. Right. So ever since Nazara acquired us, we’ve been in training and I think there is no better gift that a parent company can go ahead and give to a company like ours to go ahead and take us through everything from compliance to regulatory to go ahead and having the discipline to go ahead and have a closing our books every quarter and then going with guidances that we can go ahead and live up.
Northern itself has had a very good year. Despite the freaks hiccup that we had. We’ve been able to go ahead and do many more integrations and natural growth. Been sitting at between 25 and 35% of the whole business itself. And positioning as a live youth media company because gaming remains the core heart of what we do, has allowed us to have very meaningful conversations. And Northwind is looking both to raise funds between 100 to $200 million independently. And this will be a mixture of primary and secondaries.
And then also prepare for an IPO as soon as possible. But I say as soon as possible is let’s do it right. I don’t think we get multiple chances to go ahead and do this. And with the conversations I have with all of you in the analyst community and obviously our bankers, we’ve had very good outcomes to some of our conversations. So we remain in line to go ahead and go public independently with the blessings of Nadara as soon as the timing and the business is right.
Nitish Mittersain
Okay, thank you, Akshay.
Vivekanand Subbaraman
Thank you. Thank you very much for the comments. Nitish on Blue Tile specifically, I have a follow up just to understand the segment that it is operating in. You mentioned its casual social mobile games. My understanding is that this business is designed mostly for global audiences. Right. If you can help us understand the TAM that this business operates in and the kind of scalability that say some of the peers of Blue Tile globally have achieved, I think that will help investors understand how to think about Blue Tile, let’s say three years hence.
Nitish Mittersain
I think Raymond is best. Okay, to answer that. Raymond, over to you.
Raymond Stauffer
Sure. So we’re operating in several gaming verticals, but predominantly in the casual space, concretely in the casual evergreen space, which are traditional games that everybody knows they have a very large global exposure, such as solitaire, word search, word puzzles, other kinds of board games, and other puzzle games. So that will be the casual evergreen category. And in that category we can see other competitors such as tripledot, which has been valued at over a billion we also have easybrain, which was acquired by miniclip from the Abrasive Group by a billion dollars.
So there’s quite a few competitors with quite a large volume. The other space that we are actively developing games in is the hybrid casual vertical. These games are essentially a mix between the traditional hyper casual games that are being casualized per se. So essentially introducing launcher mechanics, social mechanics, and allowing users to play these games for a very long time, increasing long cohort retention. And so these games will have other competitors, such as a recent competitor has just sold to Scopely a stake in their company, a company called Loom Games from Turkey for over 500 million.
So essentially the market is extremely big and very profitable and it expands into pretty much any geography in the world.
Vivekanand Subbaraman
Okay, that’s great. I have one follow up for Akshat. Akshat, thank you for your comments on how you’re thinking about the fundraising. Now, as far as Nordwin goes, again, like we see the rest of Nazara pivoting more to global markets given the monetization constraints in India. Is that also something that you are now mulling? What will you ideally use the funds for in terms of expanding either either through new events or is it going to be mostly international?
Akshat Rathee
It’s a very deep question and thank you again for this. You literally had asked me the two growth levers of Northwind. And so Northwind is complex but very simple. We have two lines of our business. We consider them the live part of the business and the content part of the business. The content part of the business think of it as very grassroots. It allows people to discover their entertainment passion, young people to go ahead and discover their entertainment passions. And across the world their entertainment passions are multitude.
They can be games, they can be music, they can be pop culture, cosplay, they can be space festivals. It’s okay. And we don’t judge. It can be reality television that we do with Rusk, with playground, with our IPs. So that’s fine. That’s how all our influencer lineups, right? That’s the content play. In the age of AI, we believe this will go out and increase both in volume and value. In this would be organic growth of between 5 and 10% because monetization still will catch up over a long time. But this is the discovery in the Infernodern.
It’s profitable and will subsume both live and IPs. On the other side we have the live business. The live business is the manifestation of super fandom for the things that people love. So if you love an influencer. This is where you come and meet the influencer at a YouTube fan fest or a comic con kind of an event. This is the place where you go ahead and come for a music festival. This is the place where you come for a esports tournament, where you go ahead and meet the biggest players in the in the world and in the country to go ahead and do this.
And we believe both of them juxtapose against each other. One does the discovery and the other goes and gives you the super fandom. And super fandom obviously is much more profitable as such. And again subsumes both white label and. And the second part of the question is the growth path. Northwind runs on three vectors. Northwind’s core vector. The first vector that Northwind was going and doing an expansion something called the Global South. It’s a geographical play where we believe we are the youth media company for the world.
And for the world. We want to be focusing specifically on the Global South. The Global south being everything from Philippines to Mexico. Draw a line of which is the topic of Capricorn. And all those countries that are really large in size and material would be part of the play where we want to be. And I think now we are nearly there in completing the global belt around the South. We have empty spaces right now in Southeast Asia and in Latin America. And those are the ones we keep on exploring on.
And the other question on where do we do this? We also have the X by Z, the X is geography, Y is IPs and Z is ways to monetize for people. So we look at everything from merchandising being one way to monetize, but also new payment methods that might be really relevant in another country. So we build and acquire around youth media touch points and engagement across geographies, across IPs and across monetization methods. That’s our investment thesis for expansion. We believe we will always be an India company first because India remains one of the most robust places where not only the core engine runs.
On the contrary, for us through Proga, the law and the liability statement exploding in India. I think India is going to remain one of our 50% core markets.
Vivekanand Subbaraman
Thank you. Akshat and Nitish, those answers were very comprehensive. Thanks a lot. So Pronali, you may take the next participant’s question.
Operator
Thank you. Before we take the next question, a reminder to all. You may press star N1 to ask a question. We have the next question from the line of Atul Borse from JMFL. Please go ahead.
Atul Borse
Hi Tim, thanks for the opportunity. I have two three questions. First is on how do you think overall the Nazara’s growth or margin profile will look like in FY27 post the Bluetooth consolidation And you also mentioned that you plan to divest the non for gaming segment. Do you have any timeline in mind like by when you want to divest the sports or ad tech? And the last question is on ad tech that there was a sequential decline in ad tech. So any reason for that growth slowdown and how does the seasonality work for this segment?
Those are my questions.
Nitish Mittersain
Let me take the first one which is growth in FY27. So I think Nazara’s existing businesses we expect you know to drive organic growth and expansion of margins due to two things. One is the output or outcome of the centers of excellence activity that we’ve been doing in FYI. Second is stronger, faster implementation of AI and how that plays out for us. So while I don’t have specific guidelines, I think these two make us feel very positive that we will be able to deliver both on organic growth and margin expansion from this point onwards as well.
If you look at blue tile their CY25 numbers, calendar year 25 numbers was around 1450 crores INR revenue and 254 crores of EBITDA. The EBITDA profile for CY25 for blue tile was similar to what Nazara is reporting for FY26. So on a pro forma basis if you combine these two then obviously our EBITDA at the lease would double and then you can add organic growth for both businesses, you know on top of it. So we don’t have specific guidelines on, we don’t have a specific guidance at this point of time but very bullish on overall very strong performance on Financials in FY27 in terms of divestment of non core.
Like I said we will continue to evaluate opportunities. We are not in a rush but we do see the opportunity to you know, extract value and monetize and redeploy in core gaming which kind of is much more synergistic with our core business and now it’s stated goal also will help us drive higher margins going forward. I would imagine that we will try and have some action happen in FY27 and FY28 to achieve this goal. On the ad tech side I would like Senthil and Chris to give maybe Rohit can set the context and then Senthil and Chris can chime in on what’s happening on the Ad tech business.
Over to you.
Rohit Sharma
Thanks. Thanks. So yeah, I think on your question on ad tech I think we have. And Tanthin and Chris can add more. You know we have consciously. And that’s where there’s a bit of a decline. We have consciously taken a call to focus on our tech driven DSP business which is visible where we see more growth coming. And some of the traditional ad tech businesses which are anyways declining globally, we have kind of reducing our focus from there which were earlier contributing to some numbers for us. So in fact even Kanchil has now moved to uk.
UK and US are our key market tech product for ad tech is our key focus area and I think that is why because of the shift of focus and not going behind scalable revenues is where you have seen some bit of a decline. But Senthil over to you if you want to add on to this.
Senthil Govindan
Yeah, thanks Rohit. So. So just to continue from where Rohit left off. As he said. Sorry. As he said that. Sorry, can I be. Can everyone hear me?
Operator
Yes sir. You’re not. Yeah,
Senthil Govindan
Okay. All right. Just making sure. So yeah, so as Rohit was saying, we’re focusing a lot more on a product driven part of the business. We had relaunched our DSP visible about two and a half years ago and we’re seeing really high growth in that area. So what we are doing is reinvesting in that both from a sales and marketing standpoint. As Rohit mentioned, I myself have moved to the UK so that I can more closely oversee our growth in Europe and the us. We’re also rolling out additional products which are, you know, again through the acquisition that Dataworks in turn had made of space and time in the UK there are requirements that their clients have, that they have for their client set which we are now leveraging our product unit based out of Bangalore in order to build additional technology for their clients.
And through that the expectation is that we’ll also be able to expand these products to the broader market. So all told, there is a temporary decline. But what we are seeing is that the pivot to high margin led product led growth business is clearly underway and that shows a lot of positive signs for FY27.
Nitish Mittersain
Chris, do you just want to add to that on space and time since it contributes a large amount total revenues of ad tech? We have Chris on.
Chris Jones
Yes, hello everyone, can you hear me? Okay?
Nitish Mittersain
Yeah. Yes,
Chris Jones
Great. Yes, I would echo some of the points that were made by Central and Rohit there. I think from a space and time specific point of view, looking at Q4 specifically we saw a decline in overall revenue but this was anticipated earlier in the year. So in the full year picture we came, we finished slightly ahead of where we were expecting to be in the aop. And we’d expected this reduction in the final quarter for a number of reasons. The main impact on it is really to do with the market conditions we face in the uk.
So we operate in a number of verticals. One of the core verticals we operate in is the new homes market and that’s facing some very well publicized challenges at the moment and that’s just having a knock on effect in terms of their kind of discretionary marketing spend. Fortunately the business has a strategy to diversify our income into more product led and tech driven services which is meaning that that impact isn’t felt to the same degree at gross margin. And in fact obviously in the full year position we outperformed EBITDA quite significantly.
So our view on that variance is one of we’re not overly concerned because the business is well positioned to capitalise on the changes that are going on in the market and also the fact that the nature of what we do is becoming more focused on capturing gross margin and sort of profitability from the revenue as opposed to the revenue itself. So it’s kind of following a kind of very natural trend that’s in the industry at the moment as ownership of platform advertising platforms move in house. So we’re not overly worried by the trend and actually the full year position for the agency was very, very positive and we’re optimistic and bullish about the following FY27 as well.
Nitish Mittersain
Okay, thank you Chris.
Atul Borse
Thank you for the answer. Just one follow up that. So you think that this 4Q decline is temporary in nature. Right. It will bounce back to the normalized levels going on.
Nitish Mittersain
You want to respond?
Rohit Sharma
Yeah, I think as both Chris and Senthil have mentioned that in case of space and time there is a seasonality that is happening and the market is facing a bit of a challenge. But I think again space and time has built very strong tech and data and AI capability which is mitigating that for them. And similarly on data work side, as Senthil mentioned, we are shifting our complete focus to product driven tech driven businesses, especially in the western market. So to answer your question, yes, I think as we go on we will be able to see growth.
Atul Borse
Thank you.
Nitish Mittersain
Thank you. Next question please.
Operator
Thank you. Before we take the next question, a reminder to all, you may press star N1 to ask a question. We will take the next question from the Line of Vivekanand from Ambit Capital. Please go ahead.
Vivekanand Subbaraman
Hey Nitish. On the portfolio that you have, appreciate the job you’ve done in simplifying it and focusing the company on gaming while identifying appropriate non core businesses and divestment plans. Just to double click a bit more on this, we have seen that under the leadership of the founder of Nordvin Akshat’s leadership and of course looking at Nazara’s own support that would have gone in scaling up the business. We’ve seen this business scale up to maybe $70 million in revenue. Quite sizable.
Right. So when I look at Nazara today, it seems like the portfolio has many assets, individually small, collectively meaningful. That’s how I look at it. So just to understand better the success that you had with Nordwin in terms of scalability and now profitability as well, how should one think about your overall portfolio? Let’s say if one is taking a three to five year view today, what could be the one thing or two things that can be very big in size and also can gather investor interest in their own life?
Just like Northwind.
Nitish Mittersain
Yeah, so I get your question. I think our focus one has always been to build, you know, growing businesses or grow businesses businesses profitably. And while Northwind is one example that you spoke of, if you see our history over the last few years as we have invested and acquired companies, Kidopia was acquired, you know, with a 15 crore revenue run rate in 2, 3 years we took it to 200 crores plus. When we acquired Sportskeeda, it was a 15 crores revenue company which delivered 80 crores of EBITDA last year before taking credit in FY25, before taking a hit in FY26.
So I think our focus has always been that how do we acquire businesses where we can add value or grow the business after acquiring it. Another example is Fuse Box Games in the UK which has a story based, you know, games on popular TV shows. And they were doing very successfully one game, Love Island. After acquisition we worked closely with the team to expand that to now four titles. And you know, we will look at scaling. The second thought has always been is to have a diversified, profitable, cash flow generating business.
Because we’ve often seen that gaming businesses can get disrupted or become one hit wonders. Whereas our intent always was to one build a very resilient business. Second no have multiple IPs that can be leveraged across platforms and at these platforms, platforms and technologies change. So I think we’ve very successfully established that. I think the third Aspect that you said is, you know, a portfolio of small studios or smaller games which are combined become meaningful. I think it’s a, it’s a journey.
Right. And for us, you know, we’ve slowly over the years built our M and A capabilities. In the last 18 months we built our synergies, centers of excellence that are going to drive synergies. So I think those, the platform, the value add by the platform is only going to increase going forward and is giving us confidence to take larger steps. So if you see the most recent acquisition, which is blue tile, that in itself is as large as our combined business. So I think going forward you will also see a step change in terms of how we look to scale scale up the overall NUSARA business and platform through potentially larger acquisitions as well as focus on, you know, larger margin expansion.
We see multiple tailwinds on the margin expansion side. Couple of them on the top of my head. One of course is AI and how we are leveraging AI to deliver more content to our existing user bases while maintaining the same costs. Right. So I think that is definitely large margin expansion. The second is today the platform like Google etc take 20% of the subscription or IP fees but over a period of time that is also coming down and I think that will help lead in margin expansion. So I think you should look at Nazara as a platform that will continue to grow profitably, generate cash and the resilience is actually, you know, underrated asset for us where we can really, whenever there’s disruption in the market, you know, grow faster.
I hope that answers some of your question.
Vivekanand Subbaraman
No, I think Nitish, that’s a very, very good point that you make that don’t just look at it from the perspective of say a very big asset that you create. Rather focus on some of the other levers, the portfolio diversification and also the ability of the CEO is to leverage on technologies like AI and also drive towards greater profitability. I think that that’s great. Thank you so much.
Operator
Thank you. We will take the next question from the line of Pranav Mashruwala from Dolat Capital. Please go ahead.
Pranav Mashruwala
Yeah, hi. Am I audible?
Nitish Mittersain
Yeah.
Pranav Mashruwala
Yeah. Just a few bookkeeping questions from my side. So the depletion amortization expense in Q4 was down by about 24%. So which were some of the sub verticals that had witnessed this decline? Q on Q.
Nitish Mittersain
Our total depreciation in this quarter was 45.5 crores. Anupraya, you want to take this?
Anupriya Sinha Das
Yeah. So the total depreciation was around 45 crores. And because a large part of it is coming from Curve Games which continues to build games across your which have life of multiple years. And the deconsolidation of Nordvin has also led to the sequential decline in the overall depreciation number that we report. Because the depreciation from the Northwind business is not getting consolidated in the books and becoming ebitda. So that is the reason why you’re seeing a sequential decline.
Pranav Mashruwala
Okay, second on the blue tile. So as we have mentioned that we have completed the acquisition. So some color on the consolidation timeline, even some approximates would be great.
Nitish Mittersain
So the acquisition will actually close. We are still pending the Spanish FDI approval which is in process and we expect to close the transaction or the acquisition as soon as that comes in. At this point of time we’re expecting to it to come in in the next few weeks, I think three, four weeks and that’s when the actual closing will happen. We expect to consolidate from Q1 of for FY27.
Pranav Mashruwala
Okay, great few questions on the business if I may. 1 of in fusebox in Q3 we had seen almost a 49% Q1 Q decline due to seasonality and it bounced back well in Q4. So my question is, can some of the newer IPs like Big Brother Taters, which is poised to launch in FY27 meaningfully smoothen the quarterly volatility?
Nitish Mittersain
Yeah, I think there will always be some seasonality in these businesses. But I think we are very excited with what we are doing on those IPs and why don’t we take Terry, the CEO of Fusebox to give us an update?
Chris Jones
Yeah, I think as Nitish mentioned, there’s always going to be some seasonality. I think in regards to the other IPs that we have Big Brother Big Boss traitors offsetting some of that seasonality, it will take potentially a couple of years for them to meaningfully take a chunk out of the seasonality.
Nitish Mittersain
Terry, do you want me to give an update on where these new launches are on Big Brother creators,
Operator
Sir, Mr. Is not connected
Nitish Mittersain
Anupia, you want to update?
Anupriya Sinha Das
Yeah, sure. So that one is on the question of seasonality. We have a seasonality in the business because whenever there is a new TV show of the original Love Island IP scene, there is a good influx of of installs organically, etc. In terms of our and as Nitish mentioned, we launched two new games, Big Brother and Big Boss in the last year and we have a very extensive release roadmap in the coming year we are already live with another fresh seasons of Love island and Big Brother and we are looking to expand the Big Brother season from one season in the last one year to three seasons in this fiscal year as well as we are looking to launch Traitors in the current fiscal year as well.
This plus four seasons of, sorry, three seasons of Love island in FY27 will have a very well rounded season calendar which will see some amount of evening out of of the earnings, but there will be seasonality as Terry mentioned.
Pranav Mashruwala
Sure. This is a second one on Curve Games. So Curve Games had about 39% EBITDA margin in FY26. So as we scale with some of the larger launches on Switch to console, can margins be sustained about 30, 35%?
Nitish Mittersain
I do think they will sustain, especially as we’re launching new IPs that across, you know, many platforms. But I can let Stuart dive a bit more deeper in it.
Stuart Dinsey
Thanks, Nitish. Yes, our margin Target is always 50% on any game that we sign. Ultimately we’re a publisher, so royalties payable to the developers can vary depending on the agreement and the risk. But as we invest in new games, depending on the size of the investment, we would expect our margin to certainly be maintained on where we’ve been currently, which is actually comparatively high compared to the market.
Pranav Mashruwala
Thank you so much for answering. That’s all from me.
Operator
Thank you. A reminder to all Uniprest one to ask a question as at this moment, As there are no further Questions from the participants, I’ll now hand the conference Back to the management for closing comments. Thank you. And over to you, sir.
Nitish Mittersain
Thank you. Maybe what we do is we’ll just take two minutes each on talking a bit about Kidopia and animal channels. Both the CEOs are online and they haven’t had a chance to speak, so maybe Manish, if you can give a quick two minutes on what’s happening on Kidopia that will be used.
Manish Gaurav
Yeah, sure. Thanks. I hope I’m audible.
Nitish Mittersain
Yeah.
Manish Gaurav
So we definitely see recovery in pdopia and we feel very confident about it being sustainable. And it’s driven by largely 3, 4 growth levers. One is, you know, the center of Excellence has made our org much stronger and cleaner and that is giving us the growth that we needed in this particular business. The Second is the IT strategy. You know, we integrated four IPs in the last one last 12 months and that has seen a significant improvement in the overall funnel and that’s really helped. There has been a lot of focus in improving our data visibility across the org and that has made our decision making and the overall we are much more informed and faster in decision making and that has really helped.
And lastly the paid efficiency has also improved which has helped to improve the unit economics in the business. So all put together we feel very confident about this business. In the coming financial year we expect to launch few more apps as well in the adjacent category which will continue to drive growth in this business as well as more IT integrations. Free traffic growth and CRM will help us to monetize our traffic better. So those are some of the things that will drive growth this year in the coming years.
Nitish Mittersain
Okay, thank you Manish and Jeff, over to you. A quick update on Animal Jam and the new email offering.
Jeff Amis
Thanks Nitish. So this FY27 is an exciting year for us. In this upcoming quarter we’ve got our first IP integration with Mattel into Animal Jam through their Monster High property and it was successful in April and we look for quarterly updates that are going on over the next six quarters. We’ve been the beneficiaries at wildworks with the centers of excellence in both data analytics and prepping us for greater ramping of user acquisition. To really hit the engine is Animal Jam for the monetization of our players and Apple has been more than complimentary about the ability of our game to monetize.
It’s just getting the right users into the game and with the COEs now helping us do that, we’re quite optimistic about our prospects. Expansion of our IP to new platforms is important and as we’re launching Animal Jam into Roblox and a new Roblox native experience of the beloved Animal Jam property there and have great aspirations for what it can be in FY27. And as Nitish hinted, we are releasing a new game in Q2 of FY27 and that’s a hyper casual game for kids and women here principally in North America where we’re based kind of on the lines of Monopoly.
Go. Taking a page out of their playbook and experiencing a nostalgic property that we’re bringing to life again that’s been dormant for a while. So this is what’s ahead for wildworks and what we’re doing with Animal Jam now in its 16th year of operation. We take great pride in that and protecting the community that we built. We’re introducing a new moderation tool through iba, a Norwegian company that using AI in chat moderation and looking forward to looking for new opportunities for AI development in our new game as well thank you.
Nitish Mittersain
Okay. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. And have a good day.
Operator
Thank you, members of the management, on behalf of Ambed Capital. That concludes this conference. Thank you all for joining with us today. And you may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.