Fsn E-Commerce Ventures Ltd (NSE: NYKAA) Q1 2026 Earnings Call dated Aug. 12, 2025
Corporate Participants:
Unidentified Speaker
Falguni Nayar — Executive Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer
Anchit Nayar — Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer
Adwaita Nayar — Co-Founder and Executive Director
Vishal Gupta — Chief Executive Officer, Nykaa Distribution
Abhijeet Dabas — Executive Vice President and Business Head
P Ganesh — Chief Financial Officer
Analysts:
Unidentified Participant
Sachin Dixit — Analyst
Kapil Singh — Analyst
Vijit Jain — Analyst
Presentation:
operator
Sam SA. Jam. Hi Good evening everyone. This is Michelle from Chorus call. Welcome to FSN E Commerce Ventures Limited QNFY 26 earnings call. From the management at Nykaa we have Ms. Falguni Nair, Executive Chairperson, MD CEO Mr. Anchit Nair, Executive Director and CEO Beauty Ms. Advaita Nair, Co Founder of NYCA ET and CEO NYKA Fashion and Head of Own Brands Mr. Vishal Gupta, CEO NYKA Distribution Abhijit Tabas, Executive Vice President and Business Head For Naika fashion Mr. P. Ganesh, Chief Financial Officer before we start we would like to point out that some of the statements made in today’s call may be forward looking in nature and a disclaimer to this effect has been included in the earnings presentation shared with you earlier Earlier.
Kindly note that this call is meant for investors and analysts only. By participating in this event you consent to such recording, distribution and publication. All parties participant lines will be in the listen only mode and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation from management concludes. With that over to you Falguni ma’ am for opening remarks.
Falguni Nayar — Executive Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer
Welcome everyone to NICA’s quarterly results highlights Just really happy to report that the strong growth momentum continues with this quarter GMV coming at 26% year on year growth and the GMV being rupees 4180 crore for the quarter on a net revenue basis also the number is at 2155 crores which is stacking up as a 23% on your growth in net revenue. On the gross profit I think happy to report that the percentage of as a percentage of net revenue gross profit has come out at 44.6% which is which is about 27% growth year on year with gross profit stands at rupees 962 crores.
Also EBITDA continues to be at 6.5% of net revenue revenue and in absolute it’s coming out at rupees 141 crores. That is 46% year on year growth. Pat has has been reported for this quarter at rupees 24 crores which is a 1.1% of net revenue and a 79% year on year growth. I think the momentum has been strong across both beauty and fashion with the GMV growth for the quarter being at 26% year on year for the beauty business and the number is 3208 crores for the quarter. Just want to remind everyone that this is based on a vertical reporting where our beauty vertical is Omnichannel Beauty E Com physical retail house of Nika brands in beauty as well as the NICA superstore store is all under this vertical.
And on the fashion business we have again seen a GMV growth of 25 on a year on year basis the number is 964 crores for the quarter. And the fashion is also reported on a on what we call as a vertical basis where it includes fashion.com fashion private brands as well as it includes the Nika man platform, the lifestyle part of Nica man and the the LBB business that was acquired by Nika Fashion. On the NSV basis the growth in beauty was at 25 year on year. And for fashion the NSV growth was slightly lower at 2020 on a year on year basis it was due to composition of the growth that it has led to 20 year on year growth at the NSP level.
On the EBITDA margin front I think we are happy to report that the beauty business EBITDA has improved from 8.5% a year ago ago to 9% this quarter. So 9% EBITDA for the beauty business this quarter which is an improvement of you know, 0.5% over the similar quarter a year ago. And in the fashion also while EBITDA albeit is still negative at minus 6.2% it’s a huge improvement from about a year ago where about 300 basis point has been a reduction in the EBITDA losses and currently the EBITDA margin stands at minus 6.2%. So strong performance across all of the all of the verticals except Nika Fashion own brands where we are right now taking a little bit slower, consolidating our position and then grow faster from there.
But there’ll be more information going forward. In terms of NICA at one glance we now have 45 million customers who have ever bought a nika. That’s a 30 year on your growth and a pretty healthy growth of customer acquisition across the board. On beauty stores, we are now at 250 beauty stores across 82 cities. It is the largest specialized beauty store network in the country of course well beyond any other network that exists much smaller networks. On the brands front we now have about 9,000 plus brands across beauty and fashion. Almost 400 new brands were launched in the first quarter quarter beauty launched about 100 brands and fashion had a strong quarter with about 300 new brands being launched.
As you’re all aware we have launched a quick delivery service called Nykaa. Now it promises to be best in beauty products are being delivered between 30 to 120 minutes. It’s an offering that our customers have liked. You’ll hear more about it when Anchit speaks about it. We roll it out in seven cities with 50 plus rapid stores and almost 1.3 million orders have been served till date on this next network. With all of this, the annualized GMV across all the platforms of Nika is about $2 billion. A pretty healthy number and we are really proud of what we’ve been able to build and create.
We also decided to continue building on brand, you know, continue the brand building at Nika. And with this we have brought on board a number of brand icons that champion the Nika values. Sharvari Vag has come in as, as a, you know, as a ambassador for Nika retail business. And you would have seen her films. I’m sure if you’re passionate buyer of Nika, a consumer of Nika, you would have seen these ads that we’ve done with her. Lisa Hayden has come in as a brand ambassador for, she’s a global icon and we’ve taken her as a brand ambassador for Nika Lux.
Again a lot of experiential events are being rolled out for the Lux business that you’ll see later. Rasha Tharani is our brand ambassador for Nika cosmetics business. Ex. Rasha is, you know, full of energy, style and bold approach to beauty and you know, the young customers really relate to her. So it’s been an excellent choice for Nykaa Cosmetics And Shanaya Kapoor and Ishaan Khatter have come on board to be the brand ambassador for Nykaa fashion. And with great style that they both have and upcoming rising stars of Bollywood. I think we are really happy to have iconic, you know, team of both Ishan and Shanaya to represent our Nika fashion business.
With that we move on further. With that I hand over to Anshit to talk about the beauty multi brand retail business. Thank you.
Anchit Nayar — Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer
Okay, thank you very much for that introduction. So for the multi brand beauty retail business I think again it’s been a good, good quarter, good start to the year. Year GMV was at 3208 crores. About 26% growth year over year. Annual unique transacting customers at 16.5 million as of Q1FY26 and again 26% growth year over year. The third metric we want to call out has been our average order values have grown at 4% to just over 2,000 rupees. And I’ll just make a note that you can see that Both our core objectives as a platform which is penetration and premiumization seem to be playing out well.
You can see the penetration objective being achieved through the growth in AUTC and you can see the premiumization objective of ours now starting to play out nicely on average order value as well. And both combined are driving healthy GmbH growth of 26% which we believe is ahead of the market growth. So every quarter we talk about the growing relevance and the growing importance of India on the global stage when it comes to beauty and Nykaa continues to spearhead to be the partner of choice for global brands as they look to enter the India market. This quarter was no different.
We had some of the most iconic global brands launched with Nykaa. As you can see first and foremost Chanel Beauty and Fragrance, which is one of the world’s most marquee luxury beauty brands, has launched in India in a partnership with Nykaa. That is we are the the only multi brand retail platform to be retailing Chanel in India at this point in time. We’ve also launched Armani Beauty, Supergoop, Anua, Estura and a few more brands that are listed on the page. So we continue to see a lot of demand of brands wanting to enter India and given the kind of consumer base, the kind of scale our specialization and our O O strategy, we continue to remain and continue to be seen as the partner of choice for India for global brands.
Now one of the, you know, just double clicking on why we are seen as partner of choice beyond just the size and scale of our plat and consumer base. It’s also the fact that we have a full stack marketing capabilities which we are able to provide to our brand partners. And here you can see a couple of examples of some of the marketing we do on behalf of our brand partners. One is of course digital and non digital marketing both on platform and off platform. And on the middle of the screen you can see the kind of on app brand storytelling, storytelling and brand experiences which we have built for our brand partners which is considerably more immersive and experiential than you see on most other platforms in India at this point in time.
And lastly on the right hand side of the page you’ll see that in addition to on platform and off platform marketing, we also have the ability to target our consumers across WhatsApp app push emailer. So the fact that we can use all of these tools and add that to a very strong and use all these tools for a very large consumer base makes us a very very strong marketeer and that is a very important skill set for brands as they look to find a partner for India. Now, just spending a minute on premiumization. As I said, both premiumization and penetration are two core objectives for Nikon.
The premiumization front, we have doubled down our efforts this year and this quarter, especially with something we’re calling the Nyka Lux Weekender. As part of that, we launched Lisa Hayden as the face of Nykaa Lux. Nykaa Luxe is our assortment of all luxury and prestige beauty brands, which is also the largest assortment of luxury and prestige beauty brands in the country. We support the launch of the new face with very robust on platform and off platform marketing, including CRM, as well as experiences both in our physical retail stores as well as in other physical points of sale whereby consumers can come and educate themselves and experience luxury beauty at its finest.
And this of course is a large content and education play that gets combined very seamlessly with a very strong commercial strategy. And on the right hand side you can see that all of these content, content campaigns are being commercialized very effectively through on site curations and commercial offers. This quarter we again have had a very interesting and a very marquee, I would say campaign along with l’ Oreal Paris. So as many of you know, l’ Oreal is the largest beauty company in the world. They’re also very deep. We have a very deep relationship with l’ Oreal over the past many years and we continue to strengthen that relationship.
And in Q1, L’ Oreal Paris chose Nyka as its official partner for their Cannes Film Festival in France. And as you can see again, a perfect example of how NICA ties content and commerce together. We live stream this event directly from Cannes to the doorstep of all the Indian consumers who are watching on the Nykaa app. We also streamed and all the content on our social media platforms for all of our social media followers. We also got access to exclusive content which we created along with l’ Oreal leveraging Alia Bhatt, the brand ambassador to be again available on Nykaa platforms as well as offline in store activations including this beautiful l’ Oreal Paris pop ups which we did across multiple stores, across multiple cities.
And finally capitalizing on all of this great amplification and unique content creation by creating a commercial peg which is on the right hand side of the screen. Again you can see which included very strong commercial offers as well as exclusive launches during this 10 day period of the partnership. And this is just an example that shows how Nika is much more than just a point of sale or just a transactional relationship with brands. It truly is a very different deep, very deep consumer first 360 degree content to commerce relationship we have with all of our key partners.
Spending a minute on retail this quarter was important because we have managed to cross the 250 store milestones. So today we are and have been for the past few quarters India’s largest beauty specialist network. In terms of offline, we are now present in 82 cities. This quarter we launched in three new cities and two new airports and our retail space grew by about 36% year over year to 2.5 lakh plus square feet. In terms of some of the financial metrics, retail continues to put up strong growth numbers at 33% growth on GMV year over year year.
Like for like growth is again double digit. So a lot of the growth is yes coming from new store openings but very, very healthy like for like growth which is a good sign of the health of the business. And finally the entire store network is profitable and has been for the past several quarters. Just to again recap for the listeners on this call, the different formats that you currently have. We, we have obviously store format which has. We are at about 85 stores, 10 of which are what we call flagship stores. So these are much larger floor plates at about 2,500 square feet plus.
These are very experienced LED stores with giving brands a lot of space to do their storytelling. A lot of in store experiences like skin consultations and beauty services. This is a store with which is now present in several key metros. The Lux, the Nika Lux store, we have 75 of those across tier one, tier two cities as well. And finally Nika On Trend and NICA Kiosk which are our slightly smaller store formats, they lend themselves very well to tier 2, tier 3 expansion and they have more affordable brands and products in these stores which make them perfect for a younger construction.
So as you can see we have Nykaa Lux stores which again help us to premiumize the consumer. And then we have NICA On Trend and NICA Kiosk stores which help us to drive further penetration of beauty into smaller cities. So both our premiumization and penetration objectives also playing out nicely and being helped by physical retail. Just spending a minute on experiential retail. We believe that retail is all about experiential and young consumers are looking not just for a point of sale but a space where they can educate themselves and entertain themselves. Something which we call as edutainment.
These are some of the services which we’re now offering across a vast majority of our stores. In Q1 alone, we hosted over 50 events across various cities in India in our stores. Our stores also today now offer free makeovers as well as paid makeovers and we did about 63,000 makeovers in Q1 alone. We also offer skin consultations and facials, nail spa services and hair styling services. So very unique. Nykaa is leading the way in terms of driving experiential retail as the future of retail in India. Spending a minute on NIKAA now, something which we spoke about on the annual day as well as in the last quarter earnings, we have made significant progress in terms of the rollout and expansion of NICAA Now.
Today we are present in across seven cities and we have over 50 Rapid stores and almost 1.3 million plus orders have been delivered through NICAA now over the past several months since we launched NICAA Now. So NICAA now again is part of our broader strategy of improving speed and convenience while not compromising on the quality of the, of the product, the quality of the experience that we are providing to our consumers. And so you can see that today Nykaa now is actually the largest assortment of beauty products in India are provided through NYKAA Now. So we have the largest assortment of beauty products available within 30 minutes to 2 hours worth of delivery.
And you can see that this business is scaling sustainably and it is also getting a lot of consumer traction in the seven cities in which we are currently present. Finally in Q1 we also host the NICA Pink Summer sale. And this year the sale was again a successful sale. We grew at about 33% and it is India’s largest duty sale with 2.9 million orders being delivered during that 10 day period across 19,000 pin codes. We had an order come from 99% of all Indian PIN codes, placed an order on the Nykaa app. During the sale we sold one lipstick every two seconds, 16 fragrances were sold every one minute and over 400,000 luxury products were bought during the sale on our platform and we drove a reach of almost half a billion.
And you can see, as I said again, this resulted in a 33% growth on GMV, 42% growth on GMV for prestige and premium beauty brands on our platform platform and 51% growth on customer acquisition. So again, the sale is a good example of how both, again both the objectives of premiumization and penetration are being achieved through these metrics on the bottom of your screen. And with that I’ll pass it over to Advaita to take you through the House of Nika brands business. Thank you.
Adwaita Nayar — Co-Founder and Executive Director
Thank you, anshit. So Q1 has been quite strong for the House of Nika brands. These are the brands that we build ourselves themselves. And you can see that the Q1 annualized GMV number is about 2,700. It’s grown 57% year on year. And if we look at this over the last five years the entire business has scaled 7x. There’s been a host of brands that we built internally and a couple of acquisitions along the way. If I had to talk about Q1’s highlights, I would say that Do Key, one of the brands that we acquired about four years ago has now come crossed 1500 crores in GMV on an annualized basis.
And it’s the number one skincare brand on Nika today with a strong distribution strategy outside of Nika as well. And the second big highlight of Q1 is that K Beauty, which is our brand in partnership with Katrina Kaif, is going global in the next couple of weeks, launching with space NK in the uk and I think that will open more doors globally speaking as well. With that we can move on double clicking on just the beauty side of our own brands portfolio. So in Q1 our beauty brands delivered about 578 crores of GMV. And on the right hand side you can see the split across various channels and you can see how year on year there are slight shifts.
But in a nutshell, in Q1FY26, about 46% of the business came from Nika online, 8% came from Nika store stores and 46% from others which is a mix of third party e commerce platforms but also GT MT and Nika’s distribution business. So Nika superstore business. So there is a diversification of distribution going on and these brands are being built holistically across various platforms. We can move on double clicking on dot and key, which is, you know, like I said, a brand that we’re really proud of this quarter. It is the number one skincare brand on Nike, Mica and and by many metrics, you know, Amongst the largest D2C skincare brands out there in India today.
It had a very big new launch this season which was the niacinamide pink strawberry serum that the brand launched. In terms of highlights, like I said, It’s 1500 crores of top line. But I think importantly the EBITDA margins on this business are in the high teens. So there is a lot of profitability in this side of the business business. It has a very strong distribution strategy across Nika and other platforms as well. 250 beauty stores, 30,000 stores via the superstore business. And it is strengthening its presence across categories, whether that’s being number one in skincare, moisturizer and sunscreen, all very large skin categories that are very hard to disrupt and very competitive.
So I think it is an ode to the strength of the brand and the strength of the product that they they have. Moving on. Nika Cosmetics, which is sort of our, our namesake brand. It’s a brand that we’ve been building over the last six to seven years in a very serious manner. It has now crossed 350 crores of GMV run rate. It’s had some very strong launches this quarter, whether that’s the Mat Bullet lipstick or the 9 in 1 eyeshadow palette. Both those launches have actually propelled the brand to being number one in lipstick as a category and Eyeshadow as a category, which are again massive categories on Nika.com but again, this brand as well has distribution outside of Nika, including a very large GT presence for this brand.
I think what I’m really proud of for this brand is now 20% of revenue comes from new launches and I think that’s a marker of a lot of our innovations. Really hitting, hitting. Well, moving on, I’ll just show you a quick video about, you know, one of the recent launches in NYKA Cosmetics. And these videos are really to give you a sense and flavor of how we’re trying to build these brands and a very holistic manner. I’ll request the team to play this. I’m getting paid, you know I’m on the way pushing PCH crib feeling like a cage TV’s in the whip and they playing cell train hanging from my chest Rocking bell bottoms Baby boy on the west platform shoes Got me feeling top deck.
Moving on to K Beauty which is the celebrity brand that we have with Katrina ke. Again, it’s been a strong quarter for the brand. This is actually probably, probably our fastest growing brand in the portfolio with the GMB run rate of 250 crores and 56% year on year growth, very strong retention metrics, A lot of customer love around this brand. And again there was a very strong launch this quarter with the brand launching, you know, a Jelly Blush which became the number one blush on the site and also propelled the entire brand to being the number one blush brand.
Moving on. Mentioned this before briefly, but K Beauty will be going into space in K. I think it’s one of the first forays of an Indian brand going into space in K in such a meaningful way. Space in K, as many of you know, is One of the UK’s largest beauty retailers, most prestigious ones for sure. And I think, you know that this is a launch that really takes our brands global and it could be very compelling to see where, where this takes the brand even further. And we will be exploring, you know, more markets after this is.
Well, moving on again, I’ll show you a quick video about this brand to give you a little bit of flavor. Wow, wow, I got that wow, wow. Anything that I want I’mma get it now, now yeah I’m a diamond I look like money baby yeah, you can catch me where is Sunny baby, yeah all my haters they want to be some me, baby wow, wow, I got that wow, wow. Anything that I want I’mma give it now, now yeah wow, wow, I got that wow, wow. I be feeling like a knockout, baby Pow pow. A couple of other quick updates on some of our smaller brands that are now gaining momentum.
Three of them in particular Wanderlust, which is our bath and body brand. It is now the fifth largest brand on the site from a bath and body perspective. Then we’ve got Nika Segment Skin, which is the number one sheet, mask and face oil brand. It’s also had a very strong face wash launch recently. And the third is Earth Rhythm and Acquisition. We com, you know, a company in which we have 70% plus share at the moment, which again is a brand that we’re really focused on growing where we’re trying to bring the goodness of the earth to meet the science of skin care and trying to build a proposition there.
So all these brands are now picking up and I think there will be very big growth engines for the future. Future. Moving on, just briefly touching on our fashion brands. This is a smaller part of the portfolio, so it is about 97 crores of GMV in Q1. The growth is particularly focused on Nika platforms. I think there’s been a like sort of a strategy to focus more on our internal platforms and less on external. And that’s what you see here with the overall year on year growth being 7% but the growth on Nika platforms being 26%.
There’s been a lot of just sort of re energizing the brands on the platform and making it much more, you know, focused on what gaps they can fill on the platform and what, what value they can add there. And so you can see that also Reflected in the pie charts on the right where you see that the Nika share of business is going up and you know, channels like GT for at least fashion are being deprioritized. That’s definitely not the story in beauty, but in fashion we do feel that a more focused strategy, a more focused distribution strategy is the way to go.
I’ll double click quickly on just one fashion brand which is Naked, which is our lingerie brand. This is one brand where we feel we have excellent product market fit and in three years it is now 170cr brand. This is focused on lingerie, very much focused on comfort and innovation. It is amongst the top selling lingerie brands even on Amazon and of course on Nika Fashion it’s number one. But again this is a brand where we’re going for 360 degree distribution and we’ll try to make it a brand that really stands on its own own two feet.
And we feel that we have a lot of customer love for this brand. So with that I’ll hand over to Vishal who will be speaking about the superstore business.
Vishal Gupta — Chief Executive Officer, Nykaa Distribution
Thanks Advaita. Good evening friends. We had yet another quarter of good performance on our path to profitable scale. We have increased our customer base by 45% with little bit more than 3 lakh lakh transacting retailers. We have added about 1 lakh retailers across 100 cities in one year and we are now in 1100 plus cities which resulted in a 40% growth in GMV almost touching 300 crores for the quarter and which takes us to about 9% contribution to the beauty GMV next. And you know we have reached such a size and scale scale which is quite meaningful to our brand partners and we continue to attract and refresh our brand partners and you can see on the slide we added you know, 14% more brands and you can see some of the popular names that we have added and our scale also meaningful enough to actually do justice to distribution of our own brands like Advaita spoke about in Beauty and we have increased that by 8 and X in last one year.
Not only that, we’re also on a path to profitability. We are driving premiumization with 11% growth in ASP and almost half of our portfolio is the much more profitable part premium part of our portfolio. We are also leveraging lot of technology and digital to drive our field force productivity with lot of gamification and also a shift in how the salesforce engages the retailers from only physical to physical and digital in terms of how they interact with the retailers while orders are obviously always placed on the app. Next and this is resulting in continuous improvement in Our profitability with 139bips improvement in gross margins which is this contributed by increase in contribution of our own brands and 23% higher visibility income because of our size and scale our contribution margin improved by 309bps.
Again scale benefit and field force productivity through digital channels contributing to that and overall operating leverage resulting in a 515bps improvement in EBITDA margin. So overall a good quarter on track with our expectations. And with that I will hand over to Abhijit for the fashion piece.
Abhijeet Dabas — Executive Vice President and Business Head
Thanks Vishal. Next slide. So good evening everyone on the fashion side again you’re very happy to share with you that we continue to bring back growth to the fashion business. Some of you would recall that quarter four of the last financial year was already an upswing in growth for fashion and we have continued to see that same trajectory Continue. Fashion grew 25% year on year in terms of GMV reaching just north of 960 crore from our estimates. This is significantly higher than the rate at which the market grew in the first quarter of this year and we believe that this is now sustainably going to be the case going forward.
Along with that. Also very happy to share that we improved on our bottom line from minus 9% EBITDA in the in the same quarter last year to minus 6% which is a significant 300bps improvement year on year. So both on growth and profitability we believe we are headed exactly in the right direction going forward. A large part of that growth came from our continuing efforts to acquire new customers. New customer acquisition grew north of 30% year on year which reflected in traffic. But more importantly also the active user base that we have because that’s the more important number that we track in our business which is what percentage of our user base is active over a more recent time period.
So across the funnel we saw the goodness of new customer acquisition play out right from the total visits to the number of active users to overall also the cumulative customer base and as a result marketing cost also as a percentage of NSV improved year on year from 27.4% to 26.4%. Next slide. Another big plank of our strategy has been much like on the beauty and personal care side to bring in marquee international brand brands into the country. And very happy to share that this portfolio of brands outstripped even the pace of growth for the platform.
Overall our portfolio of international brands, which is what we call the global store in our world grew by 70% year on year and as a result their contribution to the business grew by more than 500bps. You see some of the names of these brands on the slide. Partnerships like Revolve, partnerships like Footlocker and some of the others that you see on the slide are the ones are which which significantly grew over the last quarter. Next slide. In the investor day we had spoken about how we are not just a platform which sells a product at a price, but we are a platform which is differentiated by the way in which we sell fashion.
We talk about trends, we talk about occasions and towards that end we created a property called the Nika Fashion Edit. In this last quarter still early days but we are seeing very very strong traction from our consumers in how they engage and shop from the NF Edit stores. These are stores which are occasion based, influencer led, festive led. We use a combination of manually curated trends as well as now tech enabled ways of scraping the Internet for various kinds of trends that we can find and try to curate assortment real time for those trends. It is just one attempt and you will see many more like these in the months to come.
One attempt to become a trend first platform and not just a platform which sells fashion merchandise. Next slide. Two subcategories within the fashion portfolio again outstrip the overall platform growth. We grew the men business by 74% year on year and that meant the contribution of the men business in the overall pie went from 12% to 16%. Women still contributes the lion’s share of business to our overall size of business but within that men’s significantly increased in salience over the last year and also kids continues to grow. Just like last year we saw good growth in in spite of a tough year in in the kids business.
This year again we are seeing very healthy 67% year on year growth. On the kids side we have continued to add marquee brands across all categories. You see some names towards the bottom half of this slide. Many of these brands have come onto the platform only in the last three to six months and within a short span of time they are contributing to the top five or 10 brands in their respective categories. Names like Snitch, Rare Rabbit, Hopscotch and so on. All of these are recent additions but very quickly have grown to prominence in the last six months in their respective categories.
Next slide. To summarize and this is the last slide. You know again we’ve had a quarter where we’ve been able to grow at a significantly higher pace than the market overall which is reflected in also efficiencies flowing in and we believe that this is a structural improvement and and confident that this same performance will reflect in the quarters to come as well. So that’s all from the fashion section. Thank you.
P Ganesh — Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Abhijit. Yeah. So we’ll start with a quick look at the financial performance and I’m happy to share with all of you that continuing from the momentum of last year, we have started financial year FY26 on a very strong note. Our revenue from operations grew by 23% during the quarter to 2,155 crore. We have seen robust top line growth of mid 20s consistently now for several quarters. With both of our core business verticals outperforming the industry. Profitability has also seen a meaningful improvement. Our EBITDA margin in Q1 also expanded by more than 100 basis points on a yoyo basis and stood at 6.5% for the quarter driven by a strong focus on driving efficiencies across the PNL.
Our PAT grew 79% on a YoY basis which is three times of YoY revenue growth, delivering a 1.1% PAT margin during the quarter. Going to the next slide. Yeah, yeah. This slides provides a snapshot of our profit and loss statement. I’d like to highlight and discuss a few of the elements in greater detail. Gross margin saw a healthy 132 basis points improvement yoy during the quarter standing at 44.6% which is the highest since quarter 3 FY23. This margin expansion was supported by strong performance from from House of Nika beauty brands and improving marketing and service income. Our fulfillment expenses remain relatively steady at 9.4% despite increased order volume and rollout of our faster delivery propositions. Our fulfillment expenses therefore, in spite of rolling out our rapid stores which ANIT also covered, have continued to remain steady.
And when it when we come to our marketing and SD expenses these are coming higher at 15.2% for the quarter versus 14.2% in the same quarter last year which is a 101 basis points increase. Marketing expense is higher as we continue to invest in customer acquisition across both beauty and fashion businesses which will help drive long term growth for these verticals. S increased with strong performance of few of our House of NICA brands such as Dot and Key across third party channels which has also led to higher commission costs. Our employee and other expenses as you can see have seen a marked improvement with leverage benefits starting to kick in.
So let’s now move to the next Slide. Slide. This slide gives a snapshot of our vertical results. As we can see from this slide, we have seen strong growth in both businesses at NSV and both businesses have delivered healthy EBITDA margin improvement. Beauty business witnessed about 50 basis points YoY expansion while fashion expanded by about 300 basis points. Point. The next slide gives a more detailed view of the financial of the vertical reporting across the business verticals. And we can see cost efficiency is delivering a blended EBITDA improvement of about 100 basis points. Going ahead. If we can move to the next. Yeah, that’s right. Now let’s spend some time looking at our balance sheet ratios. Our continued and relentless focus on driving efficiency on the balance sheet side. That’s evident from the ratios that are on this slide. Our fixed asset turnover stood at 9.5 times for the quarter versus 9.1 a year ago. Our working capital efficiencies have also improved further with working capital days now coming in at 30 versus 34 in FY25 and 42 in FY24.
ROCE also has been consistently improving over the years and now stands at 12.7% at a 1 Mica level. Going to the next slide. Next slide. Slide please. Yeah. So this is an update I would like to share. Our board has approved the acquisition of the remaining 40% stake in Nudge, a Nutri cosmetic beauty supplement brand. For a consideration of rupees 14.2 lakhs. We initially incorporated Nudge in April 2022 with Onesto Labs Private Limited which was responsible for business operations. Whereas nykaa held a 60% stake in this company. The company reached a peak revenue of rupees 1.7 crore in FY24 whereas FY25 numbers came in at about 35 lakhs.
With this acquisition taking our stake to 100%, we expect a sharper strategic focus, accelerated decision making and stronger business performance driving higher revenue growth. Our house of Nykaa Brands will further strengthen its play in an emerging category category that is Beauty supplements under Health and Wellness. We see a significant opportunity in this category and we believe with Nudge we have the right infrastructure and capabilities to capitalize on this opportunity. With that, I would like to now hand it back to the operator for Q and A. Thank you.
Questions and Answers:
operator
Thank you very much sir. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please click on the Ask A Question tab and separately. You can also type in your questions in the text box provided. Before asking the question to the management, please introduce yourself. Providing Your name and your organization name. If you. If possible you may switch on your video as well. Please limit yourself to maximum of two questions so we can accommodate as many as possible. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles.
We’ll take the first question from Aditya, please accept the prompt, unmute yourself, introduce yourself and proceed with your question. Aditya, please unmute yourself and speak. Speak. Aditya, we can’t hear you at this moment. Please unmute yourself as the current participant is not answering. We will move on to our next questionnaire. And the question is from the line of Sachin Dixit. Please accept the prompt on your screen, introduce yourself and proceed with your question.
Sachin Dixit
This is Sachin Dixit from JM Finance. So I had a couple of questions. My first question was regards to the mix of beauty business, right? So while I do understand that there is sensitivity with regards to sharing the exact margins of different channels of BP and where we stand on margins for our physical stores as well as House of Nika brands and and where do you see them moving as you proceed?
Anchit Nayar
Okay, maybe I’ll kick that off. So thank you for the question. So look, as you rightly said, the beauty segment is composed of four very different businesses. One being beauty.com which is the E commerce platform. Second is the physical retail stores. Third is the own brands, House of Brands and the fourth is B2B. So so all four actually have relatively different, very different types of margin profiles. Obviously we’ve not given the breakout in terms of what the exact margin profile is of each business. But what I can say is that the dot com business being more mature, more established has a stronger profitability than what the weighted average is.
And the retail stores also as I mentioned on my slide, it’s a profitable store network. So that business is also profitable. And the own brands business, as you know, consumer brand space, they have the kind of gross margins are what they are, they’re healthy. So even that, even that business has a decent margin profile and an improving one. Finally the last business is the superstore business which is also part of the beauty segment. And that is a very different profile. As we’ve mentioned in the past, that’s a volume, that’s a scale business, but the margins are lower.
And I think we’ve also shared with you that currently that business is still loss making but is on the path to profitability. So those are the four very different businesses. As I said, three out of four of them are profitable today and some more than others in terms of overall profitability. Profitability. But all I would say in a good place. And most importantly, all four businesses that make up the beauty vertical have room to improve their profitability from here on out as well through different.
Sachin Dixit
So my. Question was largely focused on the house of brands and the physical stores piece. So directionally do you see the margins improving? I don’t know, maybe 300 basis points yoy or like how much margin improvement.
Anchit Nayar
So we are.
Falguni Nayar
Because these are consolidated. Difficult to predict. But definitely House of brands has additional margins at 1 Nica level compared to just the retailer margins that are given to retailers. So I think it is a mix. Like Anshit said.
Sachin Dixit
That’s. I just wanted to understand the mix. Sure. I’ll move on. So my second question is trying the.
Falguni Nayar
Mix also changes, you know, quarter to quarter. So it’s very difficult to give. You know, it’s like it’s a composition.
Sachin Dixit
That’s okay, that’s okay. I understand. So moving on to the second question, this is largely to understand where the investment is going when I look at the beauty vertical. Right. So. So we do see that marketing expenses have risen QQ yoy as well and they were already inching upwards in the previous year. So some color on like is this investment going into acquiring more aggressively or incremental customer acquisition is becoming costlier. What is happening there? Secondly, on the other expenses piece, right. I see that piece has grown by almost similar growth rate, if not roughly exactly same to revenue growth rate as well for beauty business.
So where is that investment going? If you can break that down for. Me.
Falguni Nayar
I’ll answer that. I think on marketing we are clearly acquiring new customers. We don’t think marketing is getting more expensive. I think the opportunity for accelerating acquisition is there and our own corporate profitability supports more aggressive acquisition on the beauty front and in all of the beauty businesses. So you know, there’s a store rollout on an aggressive basis. There’s new customer acquisition on an aggressive basis. Own brands we accelerating our growth. Growth which we reported earlier in the presentation and EB2B is growing as per plan. So I think there is a significant marketing investment and also we are doing more brand building investment also.
A little bit more.
Anchit Nayar
Yeah. But just to just to add to that one one piece of course is that it’s not that it’s getting more expensive, it’s just that we are seeing opportunity to increase our investment because there’s more growth to be had. So that’s a positive. I think the other aspect of why the marketing investment is looking Higher is again back to the mix. The house of brands Nykaa House of Brands has had superlative growth this quarter and so it is starting to play a bigger role in terms of the overall mix to business. And given the margin profile they have, given the gross margin that business has, it can also afford higher marketing SPE as a percent.
So it does have slightly higher marketing spend as percent of sales versus the dot com and the retailer businesses. And as they continue to grow faster than the platform business and they continue to become a larger percent of the overall revenue mix, it’s also reflecting in the marketing as a percent of sales at the segment level. So I hope that helps to answer your question on the marketing piece.
P Ganesh
Yeah. Just to add on the other expenses question which you had number one, when you look at the beauty vertical, other expenses have remained in the same range versus a year ago as well as versus the weighted preceding quarter. What I’d like to add over here is that this is a combination of GNA employee expenses as well as our web and tech expenses. And I would like to add over here that we continue to invest in terms of web and tech, but in terms of, in terms of percentage this has remained range part.
Sachin Dixit
Sure, Ganesh. So largely, I mean the general assumption would have been we could see more operating leverage on that piece. So which is why the question. So if you can give slightly more color on how it’s rising, what is. The investment exactly
Falguni Nayar
on GNA or marketing.
Sachin Dixit
On, on the other expenses piece.
Falguni Nayar
Other expense? No, I think on other expenses there is a slight investment going on in the various areas of technology where we are doing upfront investment and then plan to recover it as software, as a service over a period of time for a number of first couple of clients now. And that is what we intend to do going forward. And I, I think and, and I think that’s on the tech side and I think on the other one I think expensive under contract control.
Anchit Nayar
There’s also depreciation, amortization of the stores. Right. Which we’re rolling out as well as employee expenses. Right. So there’s a couple of different things in there.
P Ganesh
Yeah Sachin. So just to add over here, when you look at employee cost, GNA etc, there is some amount of optimization which is coming in but given that from time to time we do invest in our web and tech expenses which is why on an overall all it’s at the same level.
Sachin Dixit
Got it. Sure. Thank you and congrats on decent set of results.
operator
Thank you. We’ll take the next question from Kapil, please accept the prompt, unmute your audio video and proceed to the Please introduce yourself as well.
Kapil Singh
Hi, good evening, this is Kapil from Nomura. Thanks for taking my question. My question is more general on the demand conditions for both BPC and fashion segments. What are you observing currently? Do you see improving trajectory for next year for the market in general and and for yourself as well. So would be helpful if you can share some color over there. The second question is on, you know, in price inflation and AOV is rising. So want to understand what is the general price increase we are seeing for both the segments BPC and fashion? Just trying to understand how much of the AOV increase is coming from pricing and how much of it would be coming from premiumization.
Thank you.
Anchit Nayar
Okay, I can kick it off on the BPC side. So I think it’s clearly we’re living in very strange times I think to say the least and there is clearly uncertainty and I think there is some amount of pressure that remains on urban. Again I’ll only talk urban because as you know our business is less weighted towards rural but on the urban side clearly there are some people pressure. So there are areas where the pressure is easing but there are areas where the pressure remains there. So I think as you look at other names who also reported, I think it’s a mixed bag.
So it’s not. We’re definitely not. I think there has been improvement in some areas but in other areas there seems to be uncertainty. But I think what’s important is despite a uncertain environment, I think Nykaa has delivered very, very, I would say commendable results on the bpc side. That mid-20s growth and because coupled with the macro environment also it has been a very competitive set of players focusing their energies and efforts on the BPC space over the past several quarters, as I’m sure you’re aware, quick commerce players, horizontal players, specialist beauty players. So despite a very very, I would say a lot of attention and a of lot, lot of focus on this category, Nika continues to deliver market beating growth despite already being the largest player in the space.
Right. So I think with the uncertain and a mixed bag of macro indicators and a highly elevated state of competition over the past several quarters in light of that, I think the growth we’ve put up is commendable and that bodes well I think for us for the coming quarters as well because we do think that certain pressures will ease in terms of competition and also certain pressures should ease and as we get more clarity on the way things Shake out with some of the macro and the trade concerns which we’re facing. I think as some of those things shake out to the positive, I think that will only be a positive for our business and for the category.
And if somebody would like to add on fashion, I’ll pass it over to them.
Abhijeet Dabas
So I’ll keep it brief because I think Anjit covered the macro picture quite well. Last year was, I think after many years of very strong growth in online fashion overall coming out of COVID Last year was an year which saw slower growth for the industry at large. We feel like things are improving, improving and there is uncertainty. As we all know. As Anshu rightly said, we live in strange times. But again, on the fashion side, irrespective of short term uncertainties, we believe that with some of the fundamental resets we have done to the business and strategically just investing behind the right pillars, which is customer acquisition, working more closely with brand partners and so on and so forth.
We believe that us coming from the place where we are, we are a much younger business. On the fashion side, we will continue to outstrip market growth in the coming quarters. When we spoke about a similar question a few months ago, we did say that things should get better this year compared to last year. But again from the NYKAA perspective, the fashion business should very comfortably outstrip market growth whichever way it goes in the coming quarters.
Falguni Nayar
I think what I’d like to say is that the growth is very deliberate. It’s not coming easily because of the environment and Nika is doing a lot of optimization strategies and we are not seeing any, you know, the, the marketing cost per view or cost per impression going up, but that’s for hours the way we are doing it. So can’t comment on the whole industry. So I think overall we do feel that there is opportunity available for Nika to grow rapidly both for its platforms and also for its own brands. And similarly, we are feeling for the superstore and we are grabbing all of the growth that we are able to to garner in a deliberate manner and we’re able to do it in the guardrail that we always set for ourselves.
Kapil Singh
Thank you. The second question was on AOV inflation and premiumization. If you could break it down, whatever are your thoughts?
Falguni Nayar
I think the inflationary AOV growth was some time ago, six quarters ago. I think inflation has been held down now for a while. So I think most of the AOV growth is due to premiumization. It’s a very small growth because it’s on a very large base and at certain level new customers are being added from far off markets like tier 2 and 3 markets. So I think in light of that, all of the growth is based on personalization journeys which are so much more possible now with improved AI and you know, and ability to use all of that into our platforms.
Kapil Singh
Okay, thank you.
operator
Thank you. We’ll take the next question from Vijit Jain. Please accept the prompt, unmute your audio and video, introduce yourself and proceed with the question.
Vijit Jain
Hi, thank you. This is Vijay Jain from Citi. My first question is, you know, great performance on dot and key as well this quarter. Again I can see that the GMV is now double digit of total GMV there and it’s still the run rate, growth rate is 100%. YoY. If you can talk a little bit about where nkey could go in the next two to three years in terms of run rate it could hit. And secondly, the margins as well, you already have highlighted that this is at currently this is high teens EBITDA margins. You know, with this kind of a growth rate with high teens margins currently, where could it go that you know, that you’re, that you would like to call out? That’s my first question.
Adwaita Nayar
Yeah, so I can take that. So I, you know, I think it’s been a, it’s been a really good sort of couple of months and couple of quarters for do key. I do see that the growth is, is continuing in a very strong manner. I think they’ve got very strong categories that they’re playing in, whether it’s sunscreen, moisturizer, both where they have market leadership position and they continue to take share. But also, you know, the serum play that they’re trying to get into, this is a new category where there’s a lot of growth possible where they have relatively less share compared to those other two categories.
So I think there’s a lot of acceleration possible there. So yes, I see the growth growth continuing in a strong MANNER. Probably not 100% year on year, you know, for many more quarters. But there is very significant growth that we’re seeing here. I think what we have more certainty on though is on the margin side. I do feel that there is a clear path to even higher margins here. And I think here we’re looking at all the strong FMCG brand companies both in India and globally where you know, 20% is what most companies strive for with these types of brands and we will work towards that.
So both we do see growth continuing in a very strong way and there’s further margin expansion possible as well,
Vijit Jain
all right.
Falguni Nayar
And just the last thing I can add to what Adita said is that the brand has grown quite wide in terms of its distributions and is is doing GT MT distribution along with you know, being on 3P platforms and basically all areas of distribution are being, you know, done well. And I think as you’re aware that we are taking couple of own brands international like we began with K Beauty and I think he also may have an opportunity in future to go global.
Vijit Jain
Got it, thanks. And you know, just double clicking on that margins comment. Right. So I mean in this you are both the manufacturers as well as retailers. Right. So you know the 20% plus margins I know on your own platform as retailer you’re making close to 10. So is that how I should think about the breakup there? I know you distribute it through third party as well, but 10% as you a retailer on that brand and 10% you as a manufacturer, is that how one should think about it?
Adwaita Nayar
So actually that twin, that sort of high teens EBITDA marginal mentioned on that slide is all sort of accounted length transactions with NICA platforms. So they are being sort of platform standard margins to Nika both on E commerce and on retail.
Vijit Jain
Yeah, okay. Yeah, thanks for the clarification. My second question and my last question here, you know, is there any tangible benefit that you guys will have from the uk India, you know, deal. I know that includes cosmetics and I know some of your partners that you’ve called out in the past are UK based. So I’m just wondering what impact that has has on everything from you know, what you can sell on the platform, at what prices as well as your margins there. Thank you.
Falguni Nayar
It could have some positive this thing anit you want to go but I think it depends on the supply chain. Yeah, go.
Anchit Nayar
Yeah, yeah, I think you covered it. I mean, yeah, there are brands of ours which are uk I mean you know, founded by UK founders or. But I think a lot of it depends on the where the manufacturing is being done. So we’re looking into it. And yes, there are some brands where it could be a net positive and any benefit that’s there we will take a call on whether that gets passed along to the consumer in the form of pricing or that just is more or we kind of keep that as margin benefit. So I think it’s all being evaluated, it’s yet to be seen but I wouldn’t expect it to be meaningful because as you know most of the most global beauty brands of size and scale are either US or Europe or Asia based.
So The UK is few high quality brands but the scale is still small.
Vijit Jain
Got it. Thank you. Those are my questions.
operator
Thank you. The next question is from Anand gc. Please accept the prompt, unmute your audio video, introduce yourself and proceed with your question. Anand, please accept the prompt. Anand, I have unmuted your line. Please proceed with the question as the current participant is not answering. We’ll take the next text question which is from Latika Chopra from JP Morgan and the question is marketing expense expenses as percent of NSP for beauty vertical have risen q quarter to quarter and year to year. Which sub segment has driven this? Where you this trending over the coming quarters?
Anchit Nayar
Okay, maybe I’ll take that. So Latika, as we mentioned earlier, some of this increase in marketing spend as a percent of sales can be attributed, as I said, to mix impact. The fact that certain brands within our house of brands portfolio have seen significant growth and are now accounting for a larger percent of our overall revenue mix within the beauty segment and some of them do have a higher spend in terms of marketing as a percent of sales than the retailer businesses. So as they start to grow as they continue to grow faster than the retail, than the platform business, albeit of a smaller base and they have a slightly higher marketing spend in percentage terms.
That is why the beauty segment is showing higher spend in percentage terms. That’s one major reason. And the second, as we also mentioned earlier is there is a tremendous amount of opportunity to create continue to go behind quality customer acquisition. It’s a strategy which we’ve been following for the past several quarters which we’ve discussed openly with you as well in the past about India. There is a huge room for penetration of this category. There is a huge room for digitization of beauty in India and there’s a huge room for premiumization and we want to continue to lead that growth.
We want to continue to be category creators and we are continuing to invest behind customer acquisition as part of that plan. So I think it’s a combination of both. But we are seeing meaningful outcomes in terms of new customers acquired and strong GMV growth as well basis that investment which we’re making.
operator
Thank you sir. The next question is from God of Singhal and the question is are you on track to meet your investor day guidance of breaking even in fashion at EBITDA level sometime this year?
Abhijeet Dabas
Yes. So the short answer to that is that yes, we retain that guidance and we are seeing positive movement in the bottom line as we’ve already shared. So we are on track to breaking even during during this year.
operator
And the next question is how is new versus repeat ratio in BPC this quarter? Are higher marketing spends leading to more GMV from new customers?
Falguni Nayar
Sorry.
Anchit Nayar
GMV coming from new customers. So I don’t think we are disclosing the mix of business between new customers and repeat. But as we’ve said in the past, we are very lucky to have a very, I would say very sticky, very loyal base of consumers. And we do a lot to continue to drive existing shoppers to shop more frequently and to shop for more items on the platform. So what we call as repeat customer annual consumption value is a priority of ours. And repeat buyers contribute a majority of the business on our platform. That being said, new customer acquisition is also an important driver of growth, but it’s also more than a driver of growth in the quarter in which those customers are acquired.
It is a driver of future growth and it’s an investment for future business and for future premiumization opportunity on that customer base. So it is a priority of ours. It’s in fact increased in terms of prioritization over the past several quarters new customer acquisition and it continues to grow very, very well. But in terms of mix, it’s not something we can, we are disclosing. But as we said in the past, majority of our business does still come from repeat buyers.
operator
Thank you sir. Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question we can take today. You may reach out to NICAA’s investor relations team for any additional queries. I would now like to hand the conference over to the management for closing closing comments. Thank you. And over to you.
Falguni Nayar
Thank you very much everyone for being on the call with us and I hope we’ve given adequate direction to all your questions. But thank you very much for being with us again today and thank you very much for my to my team for being here again today.
Anchit Nayar
Thank you.
P Ganesh
Thank you. Thanks everyone.
operator
Thank you members of the Mass management on behalf of FSN E Commerce Ventures limited that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us and you may now exit the meeting. Thank you. Jam.