IndiaMART InterMESH Ltd (NSE: INDIAMART) Q1 2026 Earnings Call dated Jul. 18, 2025
Corporate Participants:
Unidentified Speaker
Avijit Vikram — Head of Investor Relations
Jitin Diwan — Chief Financial Officer
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal — Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer
Brijesh Kumar Agrawal — Whole-Time Director
Prateek Chandra — Chief Strategy Officer
Analysts:
Unidentified Participant
Sachin Salgaonkar — Analyst
Anirudh Shetty — Analyst
Prashant Agarwal — Analyst
Nikhil Choudhary — Analyst
Abhisek Banerjee — Analyst
Presentation:
Avijit Vikram — Head of Investor Relations
Good evening, everyone. I am Abhijit Vikram, Head of Investor Relations. On behalf of India Mart International Limited I welcome you all to the company’s Quarter 1 FY26 Earnings Webinar. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen only mode and there will be an opportunity to ask questions after the presentation concludes.
Joining us today from the management side, we have Mr. Dinesh Agarwal, Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Brijesh Agarwal, Old Time Director, Mr. Jatindeevan, Chief Financial Officer and Mr. Pratik Chandra, Chief Strategy Officer.
Before we begin, I would like to remind you that some of the statements made in today’s conference call may be forward looking in nature and may involve risk and uncertainties. Kindly refer to slide number three of the earnings presentation for the detailed disclaimer.
Now I would like to hand over the call to Mr. Dinesh Agrawal for his opening remarks. Thank you. And over to you sir.
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal — Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Abhijit. Good evening everyone and welcome to India Mart’s quarter one FY26 earnings webinar. We have circulated our earnings presentation which is available on our own website as well as stock exchange websites. We are sure you would have gone through the same and we would be happy to take any questions afterwards. India Mart has delivered a consolidated revenue from operations of rupees 372 crores in the quarter one representing a year on year growth of about 12%.
Collections from the customers have grew to 432 crores 430 crores representing about 17% Y on Y growth and deferred revenue grew to 1735 crores representing a buy on by growth of about 1718% in quarter one. Unique business inquiries were 29 million for the standalone business India Mart representing an year on year growth of about 17%. Total number of paying suppliers stood at two 18,000 net paying subscribers in in the quarter one was about 1500 addition. Our platinum and gold customers which constitute approximately 50% of our customer base and about 75% of our revenue continues to have very good upsell and retention rates.
We are committed to improving the platform through product enhancement, better interface, better customer service and onboarding quality of the suppliers. We are also leveraging generative AI and machine learning to address key issues and use cases to enhance our offerings and make it easier to do business on India Mart. Our focus remains on consistently raising quality standards and optimizing the user experience to maximize the value delivered by our platform.
Now I will hand over the call to Brijesh to update about busy infotech. Thank you. And over to You.
Brijesh Kumar Agrawal — Whole-Time Director
Hi. Good evening everyone. Busy has done a net billing of 50 crores in Q1. As we had shared in the previous calls, we had implemented a change in the payout structure for our partners and this was done in Q3 of FY25. The impact because of this billing change that you see in this quarter is about 15 crores and therefore the normalized year on year growth will be 64% in the net. Billy. The revenue from operations stood at about 25 crores and the deferred revenue is at 101 crores. At the end of Q1 and again the normalized rate of growth year on year basis is 29% and 61% respectively. The cash flow from operations in Q1 is 21 crores. During this quarter, we also sold 12,000 new licenses taking the total count of licenses sold to about 4,9000. Looking ahead, we continue to focus on enhancing the product, enhancing the user experience and increasing our growth rates.
With this, I will hand over the call to Jitin to discuss the financial performance.
Jitin Diwan — Chief Financial Officer
Thank you. Jesh. Good evening everyone. I’ll take you through the financial performance for the quarter ending June 2025.
Reported consolidated collection from customers was rupees 430 crore representing in Y&Y growth of 17%. Excluding the reclassification impact of busy which we talked about, the normalized growth stand out to be 13%. Consolidated deferred revenue stood at 1735 crore an increase of 18% on a buy on buy basis. On a normalized basis, buy and buy growth stood at 16%. India Mart standalone collection from customer for the quarter was 374 crores resisting Vyanware growth of 10%. Standard revenue from operations stood at 346 crore. Resisting Vynwire growth of 10%.
Our growth in revenue was primarily driven by improvement in realization from paying suppliers. EBITDA of IndiaMART standard business stood at 135 crore representing margin of 39%. Consolidated net profit for the quarter was 154 crores and consolidated cash generated from operations was 161 crores. Consolidated cash and treasury balance stood at 2762 crores as in 06-30-2025. Thank you very much.
Now we are ready to take questions. Over to you Amjit.
Questions and Answers:
Avijit Vikram
We will now begin the Q and A session. If you wish to ask a question to the panelists, kindly raise your hand and allow camera and microphone access. Alternatively, you may type your questions on the chat menu and we will revert on it. Please restrict to two questions so that we may be able to address questions from all the participants. We will wait for a couple of seconds while the question queue assembles.
operator
Best question is from the line of Sachin from BofA. Hi Sachin, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Sachin Salgaonkar
Can you hear me guys?
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
Yes we can.
Sachin Salgaonkar
Okay, great. So I have two questions. First question would be great to get a bit more clarity in terms of online advertisement, how India Mart is looking at it, what is the budget, how much of that is actually spent and what is the time frame you guys are looking and more frankly the output of that. Should we see net ads for example accelerating as we come out of the safe spending on online advertisement.
And second question is on Gen AI what you guys mentioned. Clearly we’re seeing companies globally who are adopting Gen AI seeing some benefits either in terms of their revenue growth or in terms of cost control. Anything you could talk from a medium term or a near term perspective for India Mart how they could benefit by adopting Gen AI. Thank you.
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
Hi. As informed in the last quarterly con call we had started doing some experimentation with the advertising performance marketing and some experimentation on the affiliate marketing on YouTube and meta also these are early days I think in this entire quarter we have spent close to 5,6 crore rupees as against, you know 1 odd crore rupees that we spent in the JFM quarter and the results are early results are increasing.
However a lot of optimization needs to be done in order to derive full benefit as well as go at the scale. So currently we are keeping this budget around 6 to 10 crore rupees per quarter so that we can do a better optimization and utilize that. If you see the early impacts of that we used to grow unique business inquiry at 10 odd percent, 11 odd percent, 12 odd percent in the previous quarters that has shown some jump of about 16, 17% so that 5, 6% additional growth and the unique business inquiries this particular quarter is showing up in the additional buyers that we could gather.
Having said that, I don’t think these numbers. First of all these are too early to make any larger impact on the overall net add or net retention. Once we do a consistent advertising over the 3/4 or so then I can come back and tell you that okay, it is working or not working. On the second question on the AI side, in the last six, seven years I think we have been using AI, the traditional machine learning AI to do a lot of automation and cost optimization. If you remember last year I had informed in the JFM quarter that we have started to use WhatsApp chatbot for our buyer side lead confirmation as against the call center earlier and that had two different benefits.
One, a lot of buyers were not expecting call from India Mart for their lead confirmation. Secondly, at the time of call the buyers were probably not ready to pick up the call. So that chatbot has been scaled and I think that led to almost a million dollar space, million dollar saving in the last year alone. Apart from that, we have been using in the product categorization and in the by lead recommendation system, photo search, voice search, lot of restricted content detection. I have been telling about indic language and misspell searches. So you can try that many of these traditional AI ML things that we have been using now with this agentic AI system hopefully we will get a lot more audit capability and lot more classification capability that we were trying to build in house.
Now because these models are trained on word knowledge and they can be given context which is a lot of data which is very, very proprietary to India Mart. So for example the buyer seller calls, the customer to us calls they have a lot of proprietary information which is not available to even these AI models to be able to train on. I think we have a lot of data that is only and only available to India Mart and we could use some of that data to probably do further automation and all that.
On the B2B side, I’m yet to see revenue opportunities using AI. I think with the lot more young people coming in, whether it is at our board level or whether you are seeing some of the people joining at, you know, next generation level at India Mart, I think they will find, I’m sure they will definitely find revenue opportunities over the time. But as of now I think cost opportunities and automation opportunities and as well as better effectiveness and better customer experience opportunities are definitely coming and they’ve been happening since 201819 itself. Thank you
Sachin Salgaonkar
sir. Anyway, you could quantify the benefits at the cost side would be in the medium term.
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
as I said, a lot of benefit that we have accrued about 4 or 5 crores every year. Kind of a benefit that has accrued to us in the last four, five years. So you can see our margins improving from 25 odd percent in 2018 to you know, almost like 35% now despite the fact that there has been run up in the salaries very heavily in 2021 time frame, 2122 time frame going forward also I think it will accrue slowly and slowly but I think we are not really worried at the cost side of it. For us revenue growth is and the experience is the quite important and we will continue to invest more and more in the experimentation. If you are trying to get any hang on the bottom line I think let’s go with our traditional guidance 30, 35% margin guidance. Let us not build upon that.
Sachin Salgaonkar
Got it sir. And sorry a quick follow up sir. Clearly the focus is to spend on advertisement for a couple of quarters. The question out here is what if we don’t see the intended benefit? Is there intention to continue to spend on advertisement or are there any other measures where the company intends to take to further accelerate the net adds from these levels?
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
I mean on lot of guys have been suggesting for the for last many many quarters that we should start spending on the advertising and I have been saying that first we will correct the product market fit that we find and we I myself personally went to almost 50 plus customers and noted down things.
Most of our team members went to so many customers to find out a small small thing and we have corrected the quality of leads, the intent of the buyers, the localization search. So many of the blind spots that we found that we have corrected over the time and that gave us some confidence that we can now spend on advertising. Since we haven’t spent on advertising for the last 10 odd years. I don’t think we have a DNA in the company ready made which is optimized for a large scale diversified industry and diversified location based advertising which we are trying to optimize on that.
If it will not yield the benefit we will close that down. But I am saying at 10 crores per quarter here and there, I think another three, four quarters of experimentation is required.
Sachin Salgaonkar
Perfect. Thank you sir.
operator
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Anud from Solidarity Advisors. Hi Anud, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Anirudh Shetty
Hello. Yeah and you’re audible please go ahead. Thanks for the opportunity sir. Just to clarify so I see that step up in your sales and marketing from 14 to 16%. So is this primarily the ad related spends that we just spoke about or are there any other investments that we’re making and you know in terms of the progress that we’re seeing in terms of you know our silver customers.
I think the last time you spoke you felt that we were somewhere around you know, 60 kind of, you know the you know, solve the problem per se, you know, anything any progress from there, you know since we last spoke.
Jitin Diwan
So hi, on the first question, the increase from 47 crore to 55 crore is majorly the performance marketing which we have been doing, which Dinesh just talked about. So about 6 crore of performance marketing we spent against 1 and a half crores. So incrementally about 5, 6 crores of performance marketing. So that is why you are seeing this wedding over here in this dynam.
The gross ads majorly the acquisition it remains same what we have been doing in the last few quarters.
Anirudh Shetty
Okay. And in terms of just qualitatively in terms of how much of the you know, issues that you know, say a Silver customers, you know was facing say three months back. Have you made any progress there? Maybe some qualitative inputs?
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
I. I think. Let me clarify. It is not the silver customer what is facing the silver customer face multiple other problems which are related to [Foreign Speech] or I don’t have a person to follow up or the price they are asking is too difficult or the inquiry that they are looking for is very local set of inquiries.
So what we tried to correct is the general problems that were being highlighted by Silver, Gold and Platinum, all of them together. And, and we found that many of them highlighted towards the incompleteness of the lead quality. Many of them had highlighted the. The weaker intent on the lead quality. And I think we have addressed some of those things and many of them had highlighted the why am I seeing non local business inquiry whether it is buyer or seller. So we have corrected those things and I think it is too early because if we started to correct them about nine months ago or 11 months ago, the benefits of that started to accrue about four, five months ago.
And we continue to make minor adjustment here and there on that. Expecting a clearly step function jump on any renewal or retention would be probably too early to do, early to expect. If it was a sales and service problem, I think that can clearly give you a result in 2, 3/4. But if it is a product and perception thing then I think it may take a little more longer than expected. And that is what we are trying to do. The good part is that the noise in the market when you go to many many customers, if there were five different complaints they have reduced generally and they are now very customer specific complaints that we are seeing.
The three, four common complaints that people were generally asking for, I think we have reduced one. One common complaint that has increased is that now the inquiries are so good I am unable to find one. How can I get many more of that? So let’s see how do we solve for that.
Anirudh Shetty
Got it. No, that’s heartening to see. So and just one final question is in terms of our pricing power with our, you know, our Gold Platinum customers just If I look at the ARPU for the top customers, top 10 customer, 10% customers, the proxy, are we seeing a bit of, you know, pushbacks over there or the, the price hikes that we’ve taken in the past? We think we can kind of maintain that going forward as well.
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
I think so. We have always guided that. If, if we are growing on the customer base also and the. Then typically the anywhere up to 10% of the growth comes from ARPU and anywhere up to 10% growth comes from the customers. Currently since there is no customer growth, then ARPU is doing all the heavy lifting and also it is getting the benefit of the denominator being not growing. So both the things are looking at double digits growth. Otherwise it should have been anywhere between 5 to 9%.
Anirudh Shetty
Got it. All right, thank you. Thank you for taking my questions. I’ll join back in the queue.
operator
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Prashant from Pictet Asset Manager. Hi Prashant, please unmute yourself and go ahead with the question. So Prashant, please go ahead with the question.
Prashant Agarwal
Hello, can you hear me?
Avijit Vikram
Yeah, yeah.
Prashant Agarwal
Okay. Yeah. Sorry. A few, few questions here. One is if you can tell us what has been the churn now. How does it kind of compare in the past?
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
So there is no change in the churn. So channel remains elevated for silver monthly and silver annual customers and churn remains well under control for gold and platinum customers.
On the silver side, as I said on the annual side, 4% on the monthly side, 7% and the golden platinum remains at about 1% plus minus on the monthly side.
Prashant Agarwal
Why the churn is not coming down. Sir, if they are making such good changes on the product side.
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
I mean I’m. I’m only saying probably, let’s wait for two quarters and see once I have — b ecause there are two kinds of customers in our business. One is the monthly customers. Monthly customers have their own because they have put in only 3000 rupees or second month, 3000 rupees. So while they have an intent to do Internet marketing, they have much lesser intent than those who are paying 30,000 rupees.
The second part is they themselves have affordability issues. So they’re in the monthly customer base. Typically most of the customers are less than 40 lakh rupees turnover. Third, since they are committed lesser money, they are also committed lesser resources to do the digital marketing. Handling of the digital marketing versus somebody who has paid 30000 rupees. And so only the newer last three months customer who have paid 30000 rupees are probably experiencing this new business, new way of doing things.
Their renewals will come up sometimes starting from February or March next year. So that’s why maybe we are not experiencing that. While in the monthly system we have yet not got much benefit. Maybe another quarter we should get some green shoots on the monthly side or at least on the gold and platinum side.
Prashant Agarwal
Okay. Okay. Understood. And sir, in this inquiry growth that you are seeing now, are there any important categories where you’re seeing this increased traction?
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
So we divide our hundred thousand categories into four different segments. One is the based upon our internal brackets. One are the categories where the seller demand or the seller traction is higher. And if we divide them into top quartile, second quartile, third quartile and bottom quartile, most of the advertising effort that we do or most of the improvement that we keep doing is doing on the second quartile or first quartile only. We try and let the bottom quartiles build on on its own. Once they reach to the, you know, third quartile or so from. From bottom then we start working on them. So most of the work that we do is to reduce the bottom quartile and to increase the top quartile.
Prashant Agarwal
Okay. Okay. Interesting. And sir, when I look at your ratio of total inquiries to the unique inquiries that has come down to 3.3 times now. This is way lower than what we’ve ever seen. And our expectation was that when this ratio becomes like less than 4, that is when you will probably look to step up on the addition of new paid sellers as well. Is that kind of going to start now or you think you still need time to improve the quality of the business.
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
One is our expectation is that when it goes down to four or three, that’s when probably is a good time to say that okay, competition side for a seller to compete against many other sellers is better. But however these numbers are across all the four quartiles I’m not going to give you the numbers of each of those quartiles but for each of those quartiles the numbers are still very very different. For the bottom quartile it could be 2, 2 and for the top quartile it could be 6. So we are still where the most of the business is happening. We are still introducing six and that is still good from nine or 10 that we were doing earlier. And we believe that as soon as this start to show up in the churn or retention and that’s when we will press the pedal on the sales and marketing.
Prashant Agarwal
Okay, because the only concern would be whether the buyers are now maybe getting less satisfied if their inquiries are not reaching appropriate number of…
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
In fact repeat buyers are highest ever. So repeat percentage is the highest. Our internal NPS is also highest. If you see 58% repeat buyer this is the highest since the COVID shortage time. When the COVID shortage was there, everybody was just coming every day and checking if there is a mask available or if there is a sanitizer available or if there is oxygen available. Ever since then 58% is the highest repeat buyer and is also seen in the Play store rating.
If you see is also gone to highest ever at 4.8. And you can read all the positive comments as well as critical comments. These are publicly available on the Google Play Store. Most of our users are Android users. They are not iPhone users. So you will find a lot of comments, positive and negatives on Android while you will find very little traction on the iPhone. Our internal metrics are also showing that buyers are also equally satisfied better. However, when will that start to result into very very frequent repeat? That we don’t know. So we are doing multiple things like advertising like correcting the buyer experience.
See seller experience was the easiest low hanging fruit because we could go and talk to our paying customers which were in thousands or 200,000 and quickly gather what are the top two three KPIs that they are looking at. While the buyers are a lot more variety and a lot more experiential. Somebody is retail buyer, somebody is SME buyer, somebody is a large buyer and and each one of them have a very different Persona of what IndiaMART can help me with. Somebody thinks of it as Can India Mart become my sourcing agent? Somebody thinks of it, why can’t India Mart deliver me one single product in the same manner as Amazon and Flipkart does.
So I think the buyer side problem is lot more difficult and in the past 30 years we have been mostly solving for price and variety for buyers. On the experience side I think there is a lot more work that can be done on the buyer side which we are continuously working to see what will click for a very large platform like this which is very similar to what Google does or what Meta does.
Prashant Agarwal
Interesting sir. And just one last question is when we look at the associates, the losses from associates has been continuously going up up over years and even in this court this, this quarter also it’s higher late. Would this cash burn kind of continue? How should we think about that and where it is Mostly kind of going
Brijesh Kumar Agrawal
14 crore. So prashant losses has not increased this time. So there was one investment which we had made in Fleet X by which by virtue of it now it has become the associate and therefore little loss from Fleet X also started getting added into these metrics and, and therefore you’re looking at that 2cr has been added. Otherwise the losses has remained more or less same what it was in the last quarter.
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
Oh so it was 17% of the fleet tax, now has become 22%.
So fleet tax got classified from
Brijesh Kumar Agrawal
strategic investment to now associate.
Jitin Diwan
So actually Prashant in the Fleetex loss till last quarter was not there the associate, the share of loss of associates because it was being recorded as an FPTPP investment. So since it has become associated with 20+ now we are recording their share of + also which is resulting in this increase.
Prashant Agarwal
Okay, understood. On the last quarter. But in general the longer term trend has been of increasing associate losses. How do you think about that?
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
I mean longer term is like so Vampire was one, then Fleetex is another one, then Bizom is another one. So every time we end up investing in a company which is going to become profitable over the next three to five years time frame, their loss also keeps coming back. Also in VPR we have increased our shareholding from 26% to now 29 odd percent. Similarly in the bezone we increase our shareholding over the last two, three years from 22 odd percent to now 31 odd percent. So that is why you are seeing a little bit of increase in the losses from associates.
Jitin Diwan
And also Prashant, I mean when we invested in these companies they were at slightly early stage. Now as they are also achieving scale overall on the each company basis you would see still companies moving towards the line of profitability. But yeah, in the aggregate number will be a function of how many investments and how many new investments that we would have for every quarter.
Prashant Agarwal
All right sir. Okay, thank you Mitch.
Avijit Vikram
So now we have a question from the chat box. The question is from Mr. Aditya Pari. Your unique business inquiries by paying supplier metric has been showing improvement. Is this a relevant metric to look at?
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
Yeah, that’s a very relevant metric. That’s a very relevant metric because that is the number of unique buyer available between all of these being suppliers. And, and that is why we started measuring from a business inquiries delivered per seller because the seller himself sees only the business inquiries delivered to him. While we can see how many unique buyers that we are distributing. So this number is slowly and slowly improving and which is A good thing. Highest of that number was in FY21 22 when there was a Covid shortages.
And then as the markets opened up a lot of that went back to doing business offline way. However, with the product and improvement, service improvement I think slowly and slowly we have seen some uptick in that. Also with the advertising. Now I think 29 million is the highest ever that we have touched.
Avijit Vikram
Yeah, because we can take the next question.
operator
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Nikhil from Nuama. Hi Nikhil. Please unmute yourself and go ahead with the question.
Nikhil Choudhary
Hello, can you guys hear me?
Avijit Vikram
Yes.
Nikhil Choudhary
Hey, thanks for the opportunity. Sir, first question on the churn part. What? You highlighted 7% CH especially for monthly subscriber. So while I understand your thesis, especially on an annual subscriber given those are the one who are experiencing these changes for the first time and maybe using the platform much more frequently.
But why this logic do not apply to monthly subscriber given? I mean we have been investing for some time now. I mean you highlighted 1 crore in JFM and then 6 crore in April, May, June. So shouldn’t the improving unique business inquiries or unique ratio or improving some internal KPI should ideally reflect in lower churn especially per monthly.
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
Yeah, it should. But it is taking time, maybe another quarter or so. Otherwise you know, probably we need to find more more such levers.
Nikhil Choudhary
Got you sir. But basically just to confirm we haven’t seen improvement even then to June.
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
Over 40 50,000 customers that we have in the monthly. And you are right, at least 10,000 of them or 20,000 of them have came in the last six months. They should be seeing some positive. So there should be some early churn advantages. But we are not yet seeing any of that.
Nikhil Choudhary
Got it sir. Next one on the correction side, the consolidated collection grew to 17%. You also highlighted that adjusted for Busy billing It is 13%. So just want to understand from collection to revenue growth perspective is 17%. Collection growth makes more sense while projecting revenue growth or 13% going forward.
Jitin Diwan
So Nikhil, 17% is a reported number and as Brijesh explained that there was a change in payout structure and therefore the normalized number looks like 13. But for the projection of revenue it would be 17% reported only because that will convert into the revenue from deferred revenue perspective.
Nikhil Choudhary
Got it. Then the next question from Vijay is how the suppliers or users of Busy are reacting to this change in policy. Have you seen any any change there? And also you have previously talked about that the margin in Busy, the intent is to keep it low. But clearly we have seen significant improvement during the last three quarters. So is it going to be the new run rate going forward?
Brijesh Kumar Agrawal
So when we did the change in the billing, we started making this change from Q3 of last year. So the implementation has been done over new quarters and therefore the acceptance levels of our partners to whom we’ve been doing this billing and to our customers, that has been absolutely in line. We haven’t seen anything negative essentially coming in from any side. And therefore we hope that when this entire financial year gets completed, we would see normalization of the reporting numbers. Also, on the increase in the margin side of it, if you look at when we are saying margins will be under pressure, it is because when we start to accelerate the overall number of customer activations at a much faster pace than the growth that we get in the renewals and upgrades from the customer customers and currently what we are doing is there is an exercise on customer winback which is being done because of which we continue to see strong revenues coming in even because of renewals and upgrades in the long run, however, we do foresee that customer acquisition will start to see higher investments and that is the time when the margins may not continue to be as high and our priority will remain on increasing the overall customer base, adding more new customers so that we continue to see higher growth
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
as well as arpu.
Nikhil Choudhary
Got it, got it, got it sir. The next one on the marketing spend, especially digital marketing spend, are we tracking some internal targets for for this investment? I know you guys have just started and you know are doing it for the first time. But what kind of return you are expecting or target you have, Is it more on unique business inquiry? Is it more linked to churn something some color there in terms of linking those investment with some targets internally?
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
So leading business leading indicators are first one is the traffic, second one is the unique business inquiry and the third one is the business inquiries delivered how many times the RFQ gets consumed. So these are the leading indicator because they they are immediately there. B ecause you are advertising somebody is clicking and coming back to your platform. So if it’s coming to your platform, every click is a traffic, every conversion is a unique business inquiry and every transaction after that in the RFQ level is a business inquiry delivered. So at the end of the day the lagging indicators are Chairman ARPU and maybe reduced COCA but so the leading indicators we are trying to get we believe that in the last three months and it is a lot more complicated than a pure simple e commerce advertising we have to advertise every product in every geography separately than because we are not the sellers and we don’t switch the sellers from behind the scene.
We are directly connecting buyers and sellers with each other. So it’s a lot more programmatic effort across hundreds of cities and across thousands and thousands of categories and across millions of products. We believe that the top line of that to be optimized it is going to itself take a couple of months. And that is why the internal budget has been taken at I mean 2,3 crore rupees every month and probably 9,10 crore rupees every quarter. The good part is that the early indicators are correct. Whether they will result into the lagging indicator of churn and revenue and lower cat that is to be seen.
And I mean for that you need to go past for a size of this kind of a business at least 100, 200 crore rupees to be spent to be seen any greater impact in the market on the brand visibility or on the retention or on the arpu.
Nikhil Choudhary
Thanks. Just last one on margin. How should we think about margin going ahead? Is the investment is going to pick up and what would be…
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
For this particular year. I mean, you can safely assume until, unless we come back and announce , you can safely assume, you know 5 to 10 crore rupees per quarter kind of investment. It is not going to go you know heavily above the 10 quarter mark, 10th road mark per quarter.
Nikhil Choudhary
Got it. Yeah, yeah.
Jitin Diwan
No, no. So you were asking on the margin. I was just saying that 10 crore in a quarter translate to about 3%. So our margin at this point of time our EBITDA is hovering around 38, 39% with the end when as we have said that when we believe that the retention problem now has been solved, all the product things have been now started converting into the renewals of seller. We will also push the paddle on the gross ads.
So you should assume 32, 33% of the margin as the sustainable margin.
Nikhil Choudhary
Yeah, got sir, that was very helpful. Thanks again for taking my question and good luck for coming back.
operator
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Anmol. Kirk Anmol. Please unmute yourself and go ahead with the.
Unidentified Participant
Yeah. Hi. Am I audible?
Avijit Vikram
Yeah, yeah, you’re audible.
Unidentified Participant
Yeah. So couple of things from my end. Firstly, any plans for going into transaction based structure. So do you believe that the classified plus model that we are operating at the size of that is kind of limited to 200 to 50,000 paid suppliers and to maybe grow further we have to kind of switch To a transaction based model where we provide logistics and complete end to end transactions at least in few of the cases.
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
It’s not that we are completely averse to that. We have done tried doing that between 2014 and 2017. So for four years and to launch at 2014 I think we started working in late 2012 to 13, four, five years we did tolexo in the name of Tolexo transactional platform for B2B industrial products and B2B product. It didn’t succeed in at that point of time probably our DNA probably the market readiness and probably the ability to pay then also we did not stay behind once the Monotaro who is the industry leader in Japan and which is the joint venture of which was the joint venture of Granger and Sumitomo Corporation in Japan and Granger is the big daddy of B2B transactional business.
So when they acquired a similar business called to Lexo call industry buying then we again invested another 100 plus crores in that business and we continue to work with them to see if that succeeds. Hopefully that answers your question. So we are not averse but are we going to change the India Mart into a transactional model suddenly? I don’t think so.
Unidentified Participant
Understood? Understood. Just one more thing that I wanted to understand is see our unique business inquiries have increased because of the ad expenses that we have done in this quarter. However, what confidence do we have that this will result in increase in the paid suppliers? I mean particularly when the main issue remains the churn and the ad expenses.
My guess is that will only help in the gross additions which anyways remains healthy for us. So do you believe that
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
They’re already doing. We are only doing buyer side advertising and buyer side advertising help us only and only reduce churn and increase arpu. It doesn’t help increase gross addition.
Unidentified Participant
Sure. So sir, according to you how many quarters would it take as a best estimate that this will start resulting in positive results on the churn side?
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
I mean I have taken an internal target that at least nine months of work is required. Three months is only happened at least six. Six to nine months more work should be done then only this should be measured at the churn level. On the leading indicator side I think it is already giving us buyer unique buyer inquiry.
Unidentified Participant
Understood. And yeah sure that’s. That’s it from my end. Thank you.
Avijit Vikram
So we have a question from the chat box. The question is from. From Mr. Rehan Sayer with 22762 crore cash on books and 19 yoy growth in reserves do we have any immediate or medium term capital deployment plans whether for platform upgrades, acquisitions or return to shareholders. So thanks Ehan. So from shareholder return perspective we have just returned in the last quarter itself 300 crores of dividend. What we have done.
Jitin Diwan
So the overall capital allocation perspective, how we think as a management is that we give the safety cash which is the advance which we have received from the customer and then we see that if we need to invest in any business and of course we go to the board and take the approval from that and it should be in sync with what we are doing, whether it is, it should be in the Internet business, it should be something related to B2B and it should be related to the MSME. So as and when we get the right opportunity, we go to the board for the operator and we do that as for the like whenever it comes, the right time comes, we’ll report that as well.
And distributed, I have already talked about that. We have given the dividends hope that answer your question.
operator
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Abhishek Benji from ICICI Securities. Hi Abhishek, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Abhisek Banerjee
Yeah, hi. Am I audible?
Avijit Vikram
Yes, you’re audible.
Abhisek Banerjee
Thanks. So my question would be with regards to , I mean would it be able, I mean, would you be able to give any sense of what is the business inquiries delivered to the various segment of suppliers that you have Visa mean, you know, the top 10% customers and then the remaining paying customers and what proportion of, you know, business inquiries delivered actually goes to the non paying customers? And also wanted to kind of understand, you know,
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
your voice is not clear. Your voice is having a lot of echo or a very high frequency voice. Maybe there’s some echo on the voice.
Abhisek Banerjee
Okay, is it, is it better now?
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
Yeah, maybe you can try speaking a little slower and then we can probably note down.
Abhisek Banerjee
kay, so what is the proportion of business inquiries delivered to the different classes of sellers on your platform? That is the top 10% paying customers, the remaining paying customers and the customers who do not pay, I mean the suppliers who do not pay you. If you could give a proportion of that, that would be really helpful and also wanted to understand. So what is happening with regards to adding new categories that you have spoken of in the past? Are you being really able to, you know, create more categories which can, you know, potentially bring in more paying suppliers in, in the medium term? If you, if you could speak on these two parts.
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
Yeah. So on the inquiry side between 80, 85% of the inquiries go to the paying set of customers and anywhere between, you know, 13, 14 to 17, 18 inquiries are typically delivered or goes to free suppliers. Now within that Golden Platinum I don’t have the number in this manner in terms of the percentage, but I know that on an average Approximately, you know, 70 odd inquiries go to silver and then so I can come back with those numbers.
I don’t have those numbers handy with Silver, gold, Platinum that I can tell you what is the percentage of inquiries that are delivered I I must be having in the data book but I will take some time to figure that out. I’ll come back on that and my IR team will send you that number.
Coming on to the second part. Expanding on the category side. So our top 10% used to contribute about 40% of the revenue about five years ago and whenever revenues itself was much, much lower. Today our top 10% of the customer contribute about 50% of the revenue.
And if you remember from five years ago we used to say that platinum customer base and about 10% are same, we no longer say that. So platinum customer count has exceeded far more than top 10%. So the number of categories have also expanded. If I remember most of our business used to happen into top 20 to 25% of the categories. Earlier today, almost 40, 50% of the categories we have good amount of business happening. So if you see the number of total paying suppliers, if you compare this one with the, with the five year old screenshot or a six year old screenshot the first time we put it in 20, 20 or so, then you will, you can very well see that these two 3% numbers at that particular time and that 2, 3% number at this particular time.
So lot more categories have become a high, high moving category and that’s a very core KPI that we measure internally and our category team measures internally and works to bring a similar bottom up pyramid kind of a category moving them upwards to.
Abhisek Banerjee
Understood sir, understood. So. So have you ever, you know, tried to evaluate the feasibility of charging something like platform fees across the board? As in, I mean with upi is is it even possible to you know, charge something to the guys who are not paying anything?
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
So there are not, not many examples of classified websites charging for a consumer on a consumer side or on a buyer side fee. However, there are recent experimentation by Twitter or by Instagram to buy a blue tick by consumer. So we keep contemplating every now and then what could be equivalent to Amazon prime in a classified business. But not yet. I think that’s a long moonshot
Abhisek Banerjee
thank you so much.
Avijit Vikram
Thank you. Abhishek Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question for today.
I now hand over the conference to Mr. Tanesh Agarwal for his closing comments. Over to you sir.
Dinesh Chandra Agarwal
Thank you ladies and gentlemen for joining our quarter one FY26 conference call. We have tried to address your queries in the time available and we have also given a detailed information on in in our presentation.
Detailed financials are also uploaded on our websites as well as the stock exchange website. If you still have any questions, please free to connect with our investor relations team. Their email ID is available on the website and thank you very much. Have a nice weekend.
operator
Thank you. On behalf of India Mart, we thank you for joining us today. We now conclude this webinar. You may disconnect your lines.