Nazara Technologies Ltd (NSE: NAZARA) Q4 2025 Earnings Call dated May. 26, 2025
Corporate Participants:
Unidentified Speaker
Nitish Vikash Mittersain — Chief Executive Officer
Anupriya Sinha Das — Head of Corporate Development
Akshat Rathee — Co-founder and Managing Director
Puneet Singh — Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Analysts:
Unidentified Participant
Jay Shetty — Analyst
Jinesh Josh — Analyst
Samarth Patel — Analyst
Presentation:
operator
Ladies and gentlemen, you have been connected to the Nazara Technologies conference call. Please stay connected. The call will begin shortly. Participants who are connected to the Nazara Technologies conference call, please stay connected. The call will begin shortly. Thank you. Foreign. Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to The Nazara Technologies Q4NFY25 earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen only mode and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing Stop star than zero on your touchdown phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Jaishatti from ICICI Securities. Thank you. And over to you sir.
Jay Shetty — Analyst
Hi everyone. On behalf of ICI Securities I welcome. You all to the quarter for FY25. Earnings call of Nadara Technologies. We have with us the management represented. By Mr. Nitesh Mitra Sen, CEO and joint MD of Nazara Technologies. Mr. Rakesh Shah, a CFO of Nazar Technology. Ms. Anupriya Sina Das, Head of Corporate Development, NADA Technology. Mr. Terry Lee, CEO of Fusebox Games. Mr. Akshat Rati, Co Founder and Managing Director of Nordvin Gaming. Mr. Ajay Pratap Singh, CEO Absolute Sport Private Limited. Mr. Puneet Singh, Co Founder and CEO. Of Baji Games and Mr. Senthil Govindan. Founder and CEO of Databridge Business Solutions Pilot Limited. I would like to hand over the. Call to the management for opening remarks. Over to you Nitish sir.
Nitish Vikash Mittersain — Chief Executive Officer
Thank you. Good evening everyone and thank you for joining us. Especially on a very rainy day In Mumbai in FY25 we delivered our highest ever annual EBITDA of INR 153.5 crores on revenues of INRs 1624 crores with a PAT of INR 62.5 crores. Our gaming EBITDA margins stood at 20% as well as generated healthy operating cash reinforcing our intent to focus on core gaming business going ahead. In Q4FY25 we delivered revenues of INR5 20.2 crores up 95% year on year and EBITDA of INR51 crores reflecting a 74% year on year increase. I am also happy to share that since our IPO in FY21 four years ago, Nazara’s revenues have grown 3.6 times and EBITDA has grown 3.4 times translating into a compounded growth of 38% and 36% respectively.
During this year we have been fairly busy building out our strategic plans. We acquired Fusebox Games in the uk establishing a stronghold in narrative based mobile gaming. We also entered offline gaming with Funky Monkeys and Smash, creating a 360 degree gaming ecosystem. We took full ownership of Kidopia, enabling fungible cash flows for faster and for faster strategic execution. We made our largest investment to date in Poker Bazi, strengthening our leadership in skill based real money gaming and we also acquired well known gaming IPs from ZeptoLab. We’ve made strong progress on key leadership hires and strengthening our internal capabilities.
Our centers of excellence are in user acquisition, analytics and AI are rapidly taking shape and they will drive cross group efficiencies and enable organic scale up in FY26 as we look ahead the coming year, FY26 is poised to be a year of acceleration with increased contribution from high margin gaming business expected to further send in our profitability. Our latest acquisition Curve Games enhances our global publishing capabilities with a strong portfolio of PC and console titles, further expanding Nazara’s footprint across Western markets. We remain focused on building a sharper and globally relevant gaming platform defined by creativity, execution, excellence and strong IP ownership.
With our growing presence across North America and Europe, strategic global acquisitions and recognition among the world’s top gaming publishers, Nazara is steadily making its mark on the global stage not just as India’s gaming leader but as a rising force in the global gaming ecosystem. With this I would like to request Anupriya to talk to you about segmental performance. Thank you and over to you Hanupriya.
Anupriya Sinha Das — Head of Corporate Development
Thank you Nitish. Good evening everyone. Moving to the gaming segment in Q4FY25 our gaming segment revenue grew by 72%. EBITDA grew by 111% with EBITDA margin of 21.4%. In FY25 the segment revenue grew by 27%, EBITDA by 27% with EBITDA margin of 19.9%. Jufox reported revenue of INR 161.6 crores and EBITDA of INR 30.2 crores in FY25. For the period it has been consolidated in the books of Nazara Q4FY25 revenue stood at INR 79.1 crores and EBITDA at INR 13.1 crores up 149% year on year higher US spend in Q4FY25 led to a strong top line growth with a temporary margin dip.
These UA investments are expected to drive growth in FY26. Momentum will also be boosted by new game launches starting with Big Brother and Big Boss in itself. Moving to Kdopia in FY25, Kidopia posted revenue of INR 191.8 crores and EBITDA of INR 43.7 crores with a strong EBITDA margin of 22.8%. Revenue stood at INR 46.3 crores with EBITDA of INR 9.3 crores in Q4 FY25 with an EBITDA margin of 20.1%. Kidota launched branded mini games in FY25 through strategic licensing deals with Moonbug and Mattel featuring Little Angels and Barbie respectively. A new partnership with Hasbro will introduce PJ Masks themed content featuring Catboy, Owlet and Gecko set to launch later this year.
Moving to Animal jam, revenue grew organically 11% to INR 104.9 crores while EBITDA rose 16% to INR 21.9%. In Q4FY25 revenue increased 12% to INR 26.8 crores with EBITDA surging 69% to INR 4.9 crores. This growth was driven by strong engagement with premium features such as wishing coins, super boxes and theme content highlighting the effectiveness of our LiveOps and monetization strategy. Animal Jam signed a partnership with Slinky in January 25th and is developing a new casual game aimed at cross generational appeal. Now moving to Funky monkeys. Nazara acquired 60% of funky monkeys, a leading indoor play center for kids aged 2 to 14 years in tier 1 Indian cities.
FY25 revenue was INR 17 crores and an EBITDA of 7.3 crores with flat growth due to temporary closures in Gujarat partially offset by gains in Chembo and Bandra. Q4 FY25 revenue was INR 4.3 crores. EBITDA rose 45% year on year to INR 1.6 crores. Focus in FY25 was on stabilizing operations and reopening centers. FY26 will prioritize expansion, center revamps and enhanced marketing in CRM with Nazara’s strategic support. Moving on to Poker Bazi Moonshine. Poker Bazi’s parent is accounted as an associate and not consolidated in our books. Poker Pasi delivered strong operating metrics in Q4FY25 gross gaming revenue up 50% year on year, gross transaction value up 38% and deposit up 35%.
Moonshine reported revenue of 588.3 crores in FY25 with an EBITDA of minus 57.5 crores. Q4 revenue was 180.5 crores with EBITDA of minus 22.1 crores. March 2025 was Poker Party’s best ever revenue month driven by NPS 2025 IPL and Sharp Tac campaigns and increased mid to high stakes engagement, strengthening monetization and top funnel growth for FY26. Moving to other segments, Northwind continues to execute its strategy of strong organic growth and targeted acquisitions backed by hands on integration across teams, geographies and internal delivery centers. Q4FY25 grew 50% year on year post wings deconsolidation. The business update will be covered by Akshat in a later section.
Moving to DataWorks in October 2024, DataWorks through its UK subsidy acquired 100% of space and time for an equity value of GPP 4.8 million or INR 52.3 crores. Following the acquisition, S and P has been consolidated into Nazara’s financials on a standalone basis. Dataworks reported 3% year on year growth and 13% year on year EBITDA growth in FY25. This performance reflects a successful shift towards more profitable business lines in its independent ad tech operations. Absolute Sports including sports, Kiva and PFN gross revenue and EBITDA by 22% and 19% respectively in FY25. The core sportscreator business continues to grow well with revenue and ebitda increasing by 25% and 25% respectively in FY25.
PSN revenue grew by a robust 51% in Q4 FY25 in revenue, reflecting a strong recovery with each quarter. This business continues to have strong ebitda margin in Q4FY25. In May 2025, Absolute Sports has signed definitive agreements to acquire two it’s tjrwrestling.net and itrwrestling.com from Titan Insider Digital in an all cash deal valued at 1.25 million or around 10.5 crores. Before we open the floor for quick Q and A, we’d like to take a moment to spotlight two of our key businesses, starting with Norvin. I’ll hand over the mic to Akshat. Akshat over to you.
Akshat Rathee — Co-founder and Managing Director
Thank you everyone. Just doing a sound check if you can hear me.
operator
Yes we can.
Akshat Rathee — Co-founder and Managing Director
Perfect. Thank you everyone for going and joining the call. I’m Very happy to go and take you through what Northwind’s been up to the last year. As you can imagine, as a very public action item company, we have been acquiring some assets and we very, very actively get our hands dirty to go ahead and do consolidation but also integration of those assets into our businesses. And typically we acquire companies for growing one of three verticals for us, one of three metrics for us and very always important to we either grow in geographies we care about, we either invest into IPs we care about or monetization metrics that we care about in any activity.
You’ll be happy to know that our live business vertical which typically has DreamHack, the Gaming Matters, all that Matters, NF7 and all our Comic Con properties is doing extremely well. When we acquired Comic Con they were running five IPs and we have gone from five to eight in the first year of acquisition and we are now expanding from eight to multiple cities in double digits now this year. And we’ll also since we acquired this internationally, we’ll also be expanding Comic Con internationally to multiple markets this year. We’ll also go and talk about our portfolio of the matters.
So Gaming Matters went into the uae, Cricket Matters with the ICC in the usa with Sport Matters with Hong Kong, and for that matter remains the large one that sits out of India. DreamHack obviously does really well and you’d be very happy to know that now as gaming and esports are all doing well, we have states that come to support us in our activities. It’s all very great news for us. Our content ip, which is typically our influencer business and our media business and our broadcast business keeps on growing really well. Playground happens to be one of our marquee properties.
You might have seen that we just announced a big partnership with Endemol Arijay to go ahead and expand that into multiple languages in the country of India and also co develop this into other languages across the world. We’ll also be building other properties with Endermol and Banijay in different markets. Our influencer partnerships on our MCN are again doing extremely well with master partnerships in Multiple geographies with YouTube, meta and X. We’ve also been going and doing something which is the flywheel approach, which is the ability to go and get really large clients to go ahead and keep on engaging with our portfolio approach which has allowed us to go ahead and get over 100% growth in all our large client bases, the people who typically pay about a million dollars to us.
So across the World that is doing the esports business itself with our BGMI properties, BGMS on Star Sports. We are also executing bmps and the Valorant Championship in India. And also the starladder has announced the world’s largest major on counter strike in Budapest in December that we are going and doing. Tickets are selling out like hotcakes. Finally, our Central Asia division is doing again very, very well. We’ve been able to go ahead and make beachheads into Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan while our German operations with Prime League on Esports continues to do well. And that has allowed us to be market leaders in CIS in Africa within 18 months of operations and setting up a bit.
And these are typically growing because some of our founders we acquire, you typically have two, three people founder teams. They go out and take new missions and they go across the world to go ahead and find newer and crazier things to go ahead and do. And they’ll help us to go ahead and have very high momentum in what we’re building. Finally our Middle east, which is uae, Saudi Arabia and Egypt continue to do well. The EBITDA loss that you actually go ahead and see is predominantly because of our NF7 Pune cancellation and the freaks for you EBITDA hits that are there.
And the good news is we’ve been able to go ahead and absorb most of those hits because of the diversification and the integration we were able to go ahead and do I often like to say not with the big ship that we fly and sometimes we don’t know which engine gets hit. Every year either a game gets banned or something bad happens. But the diversification and the integration has helped us go ahead and not be hit as badly as that. And we are also focused very clearly into turning around Freaks4U into Core EBITDA positive engines as we go forward.
Final note, on brand scale, which is wings, we had put proactive measures in play for a one time impairment of 15 crores on the OCD investments that we had done that were in Q4 of 25 and there are also an additional loans worth about 25 crores which will be provisioned in due course based on recoverability and fixing of that business. And finally we’d also like to go ahead and declare that Nordwind will continue to go out and raise additional capital to fuel its growth in the future as we go out and carry forward this momentum and become trying to become one of the largest people in the youth media culture in the world.
Back to you Anupriya. Thank you.
Anupriya Sinha Das — Head of Corporate Development
Thank you Akshat. I’LL now call upon Puneet Singh who is the co founder and COO of Poker Bazi Business. Puneet, over to you.
Puneet Singh — Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you Anupriya. Hi everyone. Just to begin with, you know FY24 to 25 journey has been about capturing the market share and also optimizing deposits to the gross revenue percentages. We all know that the new GST regime on deposits came into effect from October 23. A strategy post October has all been about optimizing the deposits to the gross revenue numbers and also about brand building. In terms of deposit to gross revenue percentage we went from 33% to 57%. Currently in terms of the gross gaming revenue we grew from 848 crores to to 1,363 crores. That’s almost 60% growth from financial year 24 to 25.
We were able to achieve this because of our product optimizations and scale. The growth from quarter four financial year 24 to 25 represents that. We grew our GGR from 229 crores to 343 crores while optimizing the deposits. The deposits grew only 35% during that period. Brand building becomes even more important post the new GST regime because at scale we need to reduce our marketing spends to achieve higher EBITDA margins. We have spent monies on properties like Shark Tank IPL to create that top of the mind recall for Poker and Pokerbase. Apart from that, we’ve also launched and spent monies on IPs like National Poker Series and Circuit to support the brand recall.
The result of all this is an excellent March 25th where we have recorded a peak numbers. Our focus will continue to grow on the entire poker system and the ecosystem around poker. A focus will be on the pillars of the game like Watch, Learn, Play, Analyze and Glorify and for all such features we have made some products around that as well. We have developed a Poker TV app to support the Watch aspect where a person can personalize and content based one poker journey can be seen about. There is for the Learn aspect we have the Poker Buddy School app which focuses on the learning aspect of the game.
Then we have for the Play aspect we have the best in Class desktop and the mobile products which are highly engaging in terms of the gameplay. For the Analyze we have the Poker Shots tool which helps one analyze and improve one’s gameplay and for Glorify we are building our products like an IP’s like national poker Series and Indian Poker Masters which helps the winners and we help and also helps us in glorifying that going forward our focus will, you know our focus will be will continue to be spending on the ecosystem of poker and a main driver for the long term growth would be the levers like watch, learn, play aspect and glorify.
We all know poker is a global recognized game and we the category leaders currently will be focusing on growing the market of poker in India which will indeed benefit our numbers going forward as well. Thank you. Anupiya, over to you.
Anupriya Sinha Das — Head of Corporate Development
Thank you. With this I conclude my remarks and we’ll now open the call for Q and A. I would request Nitish, Rakesh and rest of management team to join me for the session.
Questions and Answers:
operator
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touch tone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and 2. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Janesh Joshi from PL Capital. Please proceed.
Jinesh Josh
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. Sir. My question is on Nordwind. I mean what is the path to profitability over here? I mean we have seen an EBITDA loss of 15 crores in FY25 and you also mentioned in the opening remarks that performance of Freaks4U has been a bit subpar and we intend to turn that around in the near future. In addition to that I believe additional provision of 25 crores from wings might also come through. So just to get the big picture right, I mean how should we think about profits coming back into esports? While in terms of scale we are doing reasonably well but I think consistently we have been in the negative territory at the EBITDA level.
So your thoughts on that?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Hi, this is Nitish here. As you know for us all along we are focused on growth for the esports business and the Nordvan business given that they are market leaders and we want to ensure that we build the right kind of modes for this business going forward to take advantage of the macro trends that esports offers us and the market leadership opportunity that it offers us. So I think broadly we’ve all along been okay with kind of breakeven business as long as it’s going strategically and growing fast. I think that’s what we have approached. A little lag on free for you profitability and the, you know, surprise last minute cancellation of NH7 Weekend colored the P L a bit.
But we are quite hopeful that FY26 will see better. Comments to this.
Unidentified Speaker
This is exactly what Kishit said and my answer to this is our core businesses remain extremely profitable. The reason why you can go ahead and see us have my small EBITDA loss that we had now are aberrations that you want to go ahead and do right. And to us these are the nature of the business of things. When you build you’ll see that across the world. Very few companies in the world, in the esports and the pop culture space that we are in are profitable because most of them go ahead and invest into long term growth and that’s exactly where we want to go ahead and do.
We do not like losing money. It’s very against our DNA. People continue to go ahead and make sure that we hedge our businesses as we go forward, but we do live in a territory where last minute aberrations are the nature of these. Rest assured that I want to bother me so that having an EBITDA positive is extremely important for us. But we’ll continue to go ahead and create momentum as we want to be the best in the world.
Jinesh Josh
Sure. One bookkeeping question from my side. So if I look at our commission cost, it has gone up to about 61 crores in this quarter versus the past run rate of about 15 to 18 crores. Now I believe this cost predominantly pertains to the App Store commission for our early learning business. So has there been any change in the share with our App Store partners? So that’s one. And secondly another bookkeeping one is if I look at our stock in trade it is at about 39 crores in this quarter. But I believe after the deconsolidation of brand scale we do not have any product centric business. If I’m right. So what does this exactly pertain to?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
So Janish, I’ll take this on your first question around the App Store commission. This is part of addition of the business of Fusebox. So it’s not only for learning but also for the addition of Fusebox which is a much larger business. So I think that’s what’s happening. I think what you should look at is that globally the app Stores are on significant pressure to reduce commissions. There have been recent ruling to let people bypass. Can I expect everyone to be on mute because I can hear a lot of stores etc. And starting to see early signs.
I think internal mandate is to, you know, push downwards on these commissions that we pay. I hope that answers your first question. I’m not sure I got a second question properly. Could you just repeat that sir, the.
Jinesh Josh
Purchase of stock in trade in this quarter that figure is 39 crores. And I believe we don’t have any product centric business after the deconsolidation of a brand scale. So what does this pertain to?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Janesh, I will have to check on that and come back to you.
Jinesh Josh
Sure, sure. Sir, just one last question from my side and that is on Poker Bazi, I think in Q3 we were in the positive territory at the EBITDA level with about 18 crores of EBITDA and in this quarter I think we are into losses at about 22 crores and also for the full year given the change in tax regime, I think our EBITDA loss, what we have stated is about 58 crores. So from a, from a two, three year perspective, how should we think about the path to profitability given the fact that we are operating in a slightly unfavorable simple regime? And what would be that breakeven level which we should ideally look forward in this business?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Sure. So in terms of Poker Bhazi, I give it the first shot and then you know, I think clearly again with Poker body, right. He’s by far the clear market leader and it’s imperative for us to create the maximum mode for this business and you know, the biggest brand which will become a long term differentiator for us. And I think from that perspective the Poker Bazi team is quite aggressively using the current market situation to build out this brand. You will see the movements in profitability depending on the season and the spend. So for example, the first quarter Q4 you would have seen a lot of spends on Shark Tank Q1 of 26 you will see significant spends on IPL.
So I think some of these spends are seasonal in nature. When the large opportunity provides ourselves and that’s what you’re really seeing. Puneet, do you want to add something here?
Puneet Singh
Yeah, thank you. So just to add on it, you know in the poker market in India we already hold around 60% market share. Like Nitish rightly pointed out, the quarter four negative was because of the spends which we had done in the on the Shark tank and the ITIL spends which fall in the first quarter of financial year 26. The idea behind is to grow the market. Being the market leaders, we will be the first ones to benefit once the market grows further in terms of poker and we are very confident on doing that going forward.
Thank you.
Jinesh Josh
Sure. Thank you. Thank you and all the best.
operator
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Samarth Patel from Aquarius Securities. Please proceed.
Samarth Patel
Thanks for providing me the opportunity. My first question is on Nordwin. So can you just help me with Nordwin’s revenue mix between, let’s say ticketing, IPs, sponsorships and merchandise.
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Akshat, can you take that please?
Akshat Rathee
Of course, the way to think about the Nordwin business is actually not that. So I’m happy to take you through a very one minute crash course on this. IPs are not independent, right? So I’ll give you an example. Nordvind works on a strategy which is called the triple dip strategy. That means our influencer that we manage to playground and we discover through playground is the person we go ahead and create content with. That influencer goes and offers to go ahead and do brand endorsement if that influencer also comes and plays at our festival and then also participates in our esports tournaments which is there.
Right. And then finally we launch business lines with this influencer for any merchandising. So where do we put what becomes there? You can actually go ahead and look at categorization across all our downstream subsidies in our consolidated results which has line by line into the separate businesses that go ahead and do this. On the top of that you will actually have intra company transfers where those services, those products are then utilized across the board. So when you actually go ahead and look at our standalones of our downstream companies, I think you’ll be able to go ahead and look at some semblance of an answer.
But we actually do not go ahead and report lines of revenue or profitability in any of our segments.
Samarth Patel
Understood. That was helpful. My second question is on Cow Games. So with the Cow Games global publishing reach, how do we plan to scale, let’s say Indian developed games through this channel? And what would success look like for us over the, let’s say medium term over the next two to three years?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Sure, I’m going to take that. This is Nitish. So I think, you know, what we have been noticing in the Indian market is that increasingly a large number of games are being developed on the PC platform. And we see this even in, you know, IGDC etc, which is the large gaming conference that happens in India, that there’s a lot of velocity of Indian developers. Now with AI available to a lot of the developers in India, they can also make PC games faster, better and somewhat bridge the talent gap that has been there on certain aspects like monetization or graphics, etc.
Right. Compared to global global titles. So I think India is going to have a large opportunity and large funnel of games. Coming in. But a lot of these developers in India don’t really have access to global markets or the marquee publishers. So I think with Nazara now owning Curve Games, Nazara becomes a perfect bridge for Indian developers to the world. Curve already has fantastic relations with them major distribution platforms on PC and console and I think Indian developers can take advantage of the same through the Nazara gateway. So I think that’s what we are quite excited about even from Curves perspective.
Right. Getting high quality games at potentially lower cost would improve their unit economics a lot. So I’m sure they will be very excited in coming down to India and spending time on ground with us, you know, discovering what the Indian market has to offer in terms of what success would look in the next two, three years is our ability to work together with the Curve team who’s already very strong. They have a fantastic management team who understands, you know, what games could potentially work if we can add the Nazara network credibility brand to them and jointly be able to negotiate and, you know, get a good funnel of games to publish and see some, you know, breakouts from that funnel that we launch in the next year or two.
I think that would be very successful for Curve. They’ve already seen successful titles like for the King, Human Falls Flat, humans fall flat, etc. Which have been very popular and we are very hopeful to get more such titles in our funnel over the next couple of years.
Samarth Patel
Understood, Mitesh, that was helpful. My next question is on capital allocation. So for FY25 I believe we would have deployed around 1500 crore towards inorganic growth. Now what IRR threshold that you have in mind across verticals and how does that shape our FY26 capital deployment?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Yeah, I think for us what is important is that the business that we acquire, it’s not short term IRR that we are chasing. It can strategically plug into the overall ecosystem we are building. Obviously, as you know, we like to acquire businesses that are profitable, cash flow generating and can, you know, help scale take us to the next level. So I think one thing we are quite clear about is we are seeing across our investments that are core gaming investments where we are having a thesis of acquiring established gaming IPs, good teams, decent scale of revenue, existing profitability.
We really like that segment of the business because there are a lot of tailwinds coming ahead of us. Like I mentioned earlier, the App Store commissions are potentially coming down. AI is going to help us improve the velocity of content at the same cost or potentially optimize the Cost. So we see future margin expansion happening in these businesses and also very healthy cash flows. These businesses are usually working on positive working capital. You know, they get paid by an Apple or a Google before they have to spend money on user acquisition, etc. So we like that as well.
So I think this year we are surely going to double down our capital investments towards that segment.
Samarth Patel
Understood. That was really helpful. Thanks for taking up my questions.
operator
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Madhavendra, an individual investor. Please proceed.
Unidentified Participant
Yeah, hello. Hello, I’m audible.
operator
Yes sir.
Anupriya Sinha Das
Yes.
Unidentified Participant
Yeah, Sir. I have two, three questions. First, our depreciation and amortization has increased significantly in FY25. So where do you see this in FY26? And the same for advertising and promotion expenses. And the third question is like the utopia is still struggling means I think it’s been two years and the segment is still struggling. And the recent acquisition means I was checking its last three years revenue is stagnant. So how do you plan to bring growth in this segment? And the third one is like we have acquired a lot of businesses in the last two, three years and revenue have almost doubled really increasingly.
But the bottom line is still, I think not showing that growth so means can’t we just consolidate all these entities as of now and aims to bring the growth in these entities rather than again going into acquisition means in the year ahead.
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Those are many questions, so I’ll try and answer some of them. I didn’t really get your first and second question. Well, but let me answer a couple of questions and you can ask the follow ons. So with respect, with respect to Kidopia, as you know we took control of this business a few months ago by acquiring 100% stake from the founders. And thereafter we have put in our own growth strategies in play. We are starting to see results. As you can see from our presentation in this quarter you’ve seen a significant drop in the cost per trial which had gone up to 40 $42 has come down to 33, 34 dollars, almost a 20% reduction on cost per trial, while more or less maintaining the amount of money we are spending and the number of trials we are getting.
So I think that is a positive sign. We’ve also increased monthly pricing from 9.99 to 12.99 somewhere in the middle of Q4 and we will start seeing results of that. That has been fairly well accepted and we’ve not seen any real negative reaction to that. It’s also helped us increase our annual activations to 40% from 30%. Usually the annual activations give us, you know, better ARPU. So that’s again a positive. So I think we’re seeing a lot of positives in what we are doing. We put in technology layers which allow us for faster A B testing.
There are a lot of different experiments we are doing to try and get a sweeter spot that allows us to scale the business. Lastly, we’ve spoken many times about building IPs or bringing IPs to Kidopia. The good news is that you’ve started seeing that happen. We launched a small IP called Little angel from Moonbug and we’ve seen good results from that. Then we’ve launched Barbie from Mattel, which has seen even better results. So the early signs show that the IP strategy is working for us and should show positive results going forward. So I agree that the last two years have been, you know, a lot of, I would say, efforts without measurable results.
But we continue to feel optimistic that FY26 will be the year of turnaround for Ketopia. So I hope that answers your question on that.
Unidentified Participant
Yeah.
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
In terms of, you know, your question around the many acquisitions we have done and their growth versus new acquisitions. Right. I think if you look. Yeah, so I think if you look at, if you zoom out, since the time of our IPO, right. Which is. Which was in March 21st, has been four years. If you look at products like Kidopia, Nordvin Gaming or many of the other businesses, sportskeeda, they have actually grown extremely well. Sometimes when you zoom into one or two years of these businesses, they may have plateau, but if you zoom out, you will see that a CAGR on them still remains very efficient and we will obviously continue to focus and prioritize organic growth wherever we can.
That said, I think especially in the gaming space, we are at a moment in time when Nazara is perfectly placed to very aggressively expand globally because we have the brand in place, we have a playbook in place and we have very, very attractive valuations and opportunities in the global markets due to a multitude of reasons. So I think this time will not present itself to us forever and therefore we must act on it simultaneously. That’s our view.
Unidentified Participant
Okay. And curve them. Revenue is a stagnant for three years. So how do we plan to scale this business?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
I think, you know, the business, there were a couple of issues. They blocked it up a bit into the run up of COVID you know, during the boom of COVID and then came off in terms of revenues post Covid, which a lot of gaming businesses have. But a lot of the optimization that was required to be done over there has already been done. So we’re buying a business with a strong team. A lot of the cleanup has already happened there. And therefore we can focus on positive growth going forward. Which is why we bought this business.
It has good revenues, strong profitability and very good cash flows. Will be able to reinvest by its own cash flow in its growth. And we will of course continue to support the team.
Unidentified Participant
And sir, one small question. Where do we see depreciation and amortization spends in FY26 and advertising and promotion expenses? Because there has been a significant jump in FY25.
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Yeah. See, the thing with amortization is because we are a very, very acquisitive company, right? We tend to bring on a lot of intangibles onto our books through the acquisitions which lead to a non cash amortization which has been growing, which is why our PAT looks much lower thanks to the amortization that is happening on these acquisitions. You will find that our cash flow is actually much higher than the PAT we report. And even in the current year, I believe close to 75% of our EBITDA has, you know, been converted into OCF pre tax OCF.
So I think we’re very focused as a company on our operating cash flow. The cash to the EBITDA to cash that we are generating as key North Star metrics for ourselves. In terms of the user acquisition, I would say it’s very dependent on what the opportunity with each of our gaming businesses provides us. If we get a sweet spot where we are able to scale user acquisition and scale the revenues, we will definitely press on the accelerator. So we don’t have fixed budgets for it. We’re looking for profitable growth and if we see profitable metrics, we will spend as much as we can.
Unidentified Participant
For such a nice explanation.
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Sorry, did you ask another question?
Unidentified Participant
Yeah. Thanks for the excellence.
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Yeah, thank you.
operator
Thank you. Before we take the next question, we would like to remind participants that you may press Star and one to ask a question. The next question is from the line of Ram Anuj Chandak, an individual investor. Please proceed.
Unidentified Participant
Hello. Am I audible?
operator
Yes, sir.
Unidentified Participant
Hello. Yeah, my question is regarding your ad tech platform. What kind of ad tech platform does Nagara have? Is it open ended like Meta or Google or is it a close ended platform only for limited customers?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
It’s open ended where we have. I think it will be best for me to get sent until he’s on the call to answer this question in more detail.
Unidentified Participant
Can you hear me?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
There’s a center.
operator
Yes.
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
So question broke up a little bit, but I think the question was do we have an OpenStack advertising or ad tech platform or is it closed within?
Unidentified Participant
Can common people access our ad tech platform directly?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Oh, I see. Understood. So yes. So we have product which is 100% self serve. Right. So anyone who wants can actually go to the platform. It’s called Visible V I Z I B L AI and they can just log in into the credentials and pay as they go. Right. So the whole purpose of that stack is to try and democratize ad tech for people who are relatively smaller in size as well. Otherwise there are some very, very large minimum thresholds for people to get access to silicon products if they were to approach the market at large.
Unidentified Participant
What is the pricing plan? How is the pricing decided?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
So it’s a question, how is the pricing decided?
Unidentified Participant
Yes. Yes sir.
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Okay. So the pricing is essentially a percentage of the. So essentially whatever amount is placed on the platform data works through. Our visible platform will essentially retain a percentage of that advertising budget and the rest of it will go towards the actual media that is being purchased.
Unidentified Participant
Google have a pay per click or they have pay per view. Do we, do we have like this?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
No, currently the platform is. It essentially allows impressions to be bought. So every time you see an ad it’s an impression. So currently it allows the impressions to be purchased. It gives algorithms internally which allow you to optimize towards clicks or conversions.
Unidentified Participant
Do you see any more acquisitions further needed to expand our asset platform or are we, is this sufficient what we have as of now?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
So I think the current intent is to focus on the acquisition that we have. Obviously, you know, as with the larger Nazara ecosystem, if there is something that opportunistically we can look at, we might review it. But our current energy is going towards ensuring that we are able to extract synergy from the acquisition that we made last year, which is patent time.
Unidentified Participant
So my second question is regarding Poker Bazi. Are there any tax litigation pending on Poker Bazi? And if there is any, what is the current status of that?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Sure. As you know, there has been an ongoing GST litigation on past tax, which I can ask Puneet to talk a bit more in detail.
Puneet Singh
So as of now there is only the point of the retrospective gst, which is, which is in the code. That’s, that’s an industry matter, which you know, which affects the whole gaming industry and all the companies, all the gaming companies in India are already in the Supreme Court and the court is currently heading that matter. Apart from that there is no other tax issue which is pending at poker body side or I can see on the gaming side.
Unidentified Participant
So I want to know more about the. About Poker. Buddy, like we have seen, Nagara is a global company. We have a well established market in Middle East, Northern Africa, Europe and usa. Is there any opportunity that we could send Poker Party into these other markets also, not just India?
Puneet Singh
Nitish, you want me want to take that?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Sorry, can you repeat that? I have not heard it properly.
Unidentified Participant
We have seen in earlier our games have been very successful in usa, Europe, Middle east and other Naki battles. So do you want to expand Poker Baji into those markets? Also, do you want to keep Poker Bazi only for Indian market?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Yeah, sure. Look, I think right now Poker Bali has an amazing opportunity to really grow big in India. And it’s very important for the team and all the capital that is being allocated to focus on, you know, achieving what is possible in India. That said, Poker Bazi has a fantastic technology platform. It’s an in house technology platform which they’re continuously updating. And I believe the product is already very competitive in global markets. So at the appropriate time the team may consider taking it global. At this point of time they are focused on the Indian market.
Unidentified Participant
What’s the current environment?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
No, I think different countries have different regulations. A lot of countries are open to skill based gaming, including the US markets. But yeah, every country has its own specific regulation around skill based gaming.
Unidentified Participant
Compared to other countries, how do you find Indian regulation? How is our regulatory environment compared to others?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
I think I would say except for at this point of time the GST taxation issue, right? There is not a national regulation put out around skill based gaming. There was some talk about it earlier but it hasn’t come through yet.
Unidentified Participant
My last question is what kind of company should we see as the competitors of Nazara? We have seen right in from 2021, Berkshire Hathaway tried to take control of Activision business. So later on they could not. So should we consider gaming companies as our competitors or whom should we really treat as the competitors of Nazara?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Look, we have quite a diversified platform and of course gaming companies definitely have, you know, different IPs, different games and we would be competitors to them. At the same time we’re more diversified than a standalone gaming company. So I would say it really depends on how you look at it. You can compare us to a tencent in China. You can compare us to Electronic Arts in the US there could be much smaller companies, much larger companies. I would say we are our own first company from India with our kind of approach. Can we move on to questions please? Because I think there would be others in the queue.
Unidentified Participant
Okay. As a holding company, are there competitors like Nazara who have same business model like us?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Like I said, there are different companies with different platforms and yeah, it’s difficult to compare exactly any company to us. I would say.
Unidentified Participant
Thank you sir. Thank you for taking my question.
operator
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Abhiram Reddy, an individual investor. Please proceed.
Unidentified Participant
Hi everyone. I have two questions. One, Poker has been code growth driver for Moonshine. So what are our plans to expanding into adjacent categories in RNG space like Rami and Fantasy, both at Moonshine level and also at Nazara level.
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
And your second question? Okay, yeah, go ahead.
Unidentified Participant
Yeah, I’ll ask the second question.
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Yeah, sure. I think right now for Moonshine the biggest focus is on poker given their market leadership on that space and the rapid growth that they are experiencing. That said, of course they will continue to look at all opportunities and you know, do what is the right thing for the business from an Azara perspective.
Given the size of our investment in Moonshine at this point of time, we are not taking other initiatives ourselves directly on the skill based RNG space. Like I mentioned earlier, at least in FY26, a lot of our capital allocation and focus is on the core gaming studio business.
Unidentified Participant
Got it, thank you. And the second question is what’s the current revenue of Smash if you can share that and what are the plans to make it either EBITDA positive or profitable and also grow the business moving forward?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Yeah, we are, you know, we will probably get control of this business sometime in June. So we will be in a position to share specific financial numbers maybe next quarter or the quarter after that. But we do see a lot of low hanging synergy between what we do online as well as offline Smash centers. So after we acquired it, the first approach, first, first plan is to, you know, because it’s been in NCLT for two, three years to get it up to speed and then start driving synergies. For example, we have a large online user base which we can drive offline. We have a lot of partners with large ecosystem players which we can bring offline. So I think we have a lot of ideas but we will detail it out maybe in the next quarter.
Unidentified Participant
Got it. I’ll. I’ll wait for next quarter quarter for more insights on this. Thank you. Thanks Nitesh.
operator
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Nikhil Purwal. Please proceed.
Unidentified Participant
Hi, thank you for the opportunity. My first question is related to Nordvin. So I think earlier in the call archetype mentioned that the core business remains profitable. So what is core here? Does it exclude freaks and NH7?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Yeah, Akshat, I’ll let you take that.
Akshat Rathee
Of course. We have not three core businesses that Nordman runs. One is live business, one is the esports business that we have and the third is the media business that we have. These are the three core engines of Nordvin. But as an example of the Freaks business, when you talked about. Freaks is a company based out of Germany. They do Gamescom work which is typically what happens in Cologne, Germany. They also do market entry, consulting and agency work. They have an IP called PrimeLead that they go ahead and run. And so across this you see that they are spread across 3, 4 verticals, which is there.
We like to go ahead and keep the core business going which is either the festival business, live business or the media business or the esports business. The other businesses which are much more agency our businesses we actively try to optimize for centers of livery across the world. Right. It makes no sense for us to go out and have manpower sitting very expensive. That is doing just agency business across the world. And those are the optimizations that take time to go ahead and rationalize. Our core businesses remain the three long term creation businesses of media, esports and of life.
Unidentified Participant
Got it, Got it. In the long run, what’s a steady state EBITDA margin possible for Nordwin as a consolidated business? And how long will it take for the company to achieve that?
Akshat Rathee
I wish I knew the long term answer to this question and I’m not going and just being smart about it and answering this, I’m being very honest. See, I think you have to understand where Northwind is in its journey. We started off as a 99 year old company and we’ve been able to go ahead and make our name that governments and residents and prime ministers now invite us to go ahead and build for them. I believe Nordwin will continue to go ahead and grow its top line while defending its profitability on a level for the next two to five years.
We don’t like losing money now it’s the best, we believe very strong IP steady state on EBITDA is typically, if you look at any sports IPs there 25% costs, you have 70 to 80% EBITDA that come from long term. That’s the one that creates for you. That’s the reason which you create that. But it needs five, typically five to seven years to go ahead and build those out. And you’re seeing it right? You’re seeing it with when we do BGMs, we are in season four right now, playground season four. The cost that you would invest typically to go ahead and build IPs would be between two and four years of cash breakeven.
But then they go ahead and reap numerous rewards in the future. The only question is how many can I go ahead and invest in and obviously accept the fact that there will be failures as we go ahead and do it? Because no one’s got and I wish I knew the answer of which IP will work or not. So very simple answer. On steady state Ebitdas on a long term basis on IP we are looking at between 60 and 80% EBITDA us on long term IPs on a consolidated basis because we will keep on running experiments and those would fail.
They would go ahead and bring down that EBITDA into more sustainable levels. We do believe on a long term basis that Norwind should do between anywhere between 30 and 35%.
Unidentified Participant
Got it. You already answered my second question. Partially. I wanted to actually ask what kind of investments have gone into building few own IPs like BGMI or even Playground for that matter. And I’m sure that some of them have already made money.
Akshat Rathee
The number of things that you see us make money, we actually lose money on a lot that you would not know about because we tried smaller expensive experiment, right? A 20 lakh experiment here, a 50 lakh rupees experiment there, an 85 lakh rupees experiment there. We all hear about the big ones when we do a Comic Con and we’re doing 11 comic con but behind every comic con at least three. But we need to try, otherwise they’ll never be enough supply for us to go ahead and have these big ones that are successful.
Unidentified Participant
Right, right. Got it. Got it. My next question is related to publishing. So Nitish, probably pardon my ignorance. Can you talk about how does this business work in general? Now you acquired Curve Games and you are also trying to publish a lot of games out of India, take them to the world. But in terms of revenue and etc. How does the business work?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Publishing is basically where you partner with third party developers or you publish your own games which are first party games and the focus is market the games better, monetize them better, leverage distribution platforms and relations over there to be able to get these games distributed widely. Live ops is another important thing. These games require ongoing updates, support to keep it interesting for the user. So I think there’s a host of publishing activities that need to be done, which is a value add for the developers who can’t usually do it themselves. Publishers also, many times, you know, fund the development process for the developer.
So I think that’s whether it’s on mobile, whether it’s on PC, console, whether it’s in India, whether it’s globally. I think that’s what the publishing business about in India. We are trying to push the Nazara publishing business because we believe that as a Indian publisher, we can add a lot of value to local developers as well as Google developers wanting to promote their games in India effectively. Curve is already established globally in the PC and console space. So they have a existing business that spoke so well. They understand them. We just plan to put a lot more into the funnel.
Unidentified Participant
Got it, got it, got it. And in general, you just acquired Curve. How do you look at the return on capital employed in such businesses?
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Like I mentioned earlier, I think this business, you know, is a high EBITDA margin business. On the current business of 20 million, they’re doing maybe 9 or 10 million pounds of EBITDA. But post CAPEX, EBITDA is also pretty good 4,5 million. There’s high free cash flow generating. So I think the business is in a good stage right now. A lot of the cleanup I was talking about, a lot of the optimization has already been done and is behind us before our acquisition. I think the whole focus right now is on getting the right games and pushing it.
The return on capital is already very high in this business.
Unidentified Participant
Okay, my last two questions are related to Poker Buddy. So in this presentation I see the GGR growth has been higher than the GTV growth. So does that mean the take rate has increased?
Puneet Singh
The take rate has not increased as of now. The whole GST hit is something which we are taking and we are not passing it on to the end user. And you know that post the new GST regime post October 23, GST margins or GST is on deposits, that’s 28% on deposits. So because of that hit and which we are taking, most of it gets reduced from the gross before it comes to the net.
Unidentified Participant
Right? No, I particularly asked about the current quarter where the gross, meaning revenue growth has been higher than the, the gross transaction value. So how does that usually happen?
Puneet Singh
So you know, okay, that, that is because of the smaller stakes tables. Because what, what we have also seen in the past quarter is that smaller stakes tables and mixtape tables traffic has increased and usually the percentage of, you know, rake, that is a service fee is slightly higher and as soon as you go to the highest tick tables, that percentage goes down. So, so that’s the reason why you have, you are seeing that percentage, you know, decrease as compared to the GR.
Unidentified Participant
Perfect. The blended take rate has increased broadly for the business.
Puneet Singh
That’s more to do with the traffic which is. Which we get because the users which we acquired on lower and midstick tables that has increased.
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Can we move to the next question in line please? And prior to that Anupia, can you clarify that one question that was there earlier which was not answered?
Anupriya Sinha Das
Yeah, sure. So the 40 crores of purchase of stock in trade is all related to epin, which is a digital recharge inventory that Nordvin sells for Google, Steam, Roblox and Riot Game recharges. I hope that clarifies.
Unidentified Participant
Okay, thank you.
operator
Thank you. Due to time constraint, that was the last question. I would now like to hand the conference over to the management for the closing comments. Thank you.
Nitish Vikash Mittersain
Thank you everyone for logging in today. I hope the call was productive for you. Thank you and goodbye.
operator
Thank you on behalf of ICICI securities limited that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us and you may now disconnect the lines.