Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the Affle India Limited Q4 and twelve-month Financial Year 2023 Earnings Conference Call hosted by Dolat Capital. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Rahul Jain from Dolat Capital. Thank you, and over to you, sir. Thank you, Ziko. Good morning, everyone. On behalf of Dolat Capital, we welcome you all to the Q4 and 12-month fiscal 2023 conference call of Affle (India) Limited. I take this opportunity to welcome the management of Affle (India) Limited, represented by Mr. Anuj Khanna Sohum, who is Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the company, and Mr. Kapil Bhutani, who is Chief Financial and Operations Officer of the company. Before we begin the discussion, I would like to remind you that some of the statement made in today's conference call may be forward-looking in nature and may involve some risk and uncertainties. Kindly refer to slide 28 of the company's Q4 earning with presentation for a detailed disclaimer on that. I will now hand over the call to Mr. Anuj Khanna Sohum for his opening remarks. Thanks, and over to you, Anuj. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the call today. I trust all of you are keeping in good health. Affle continued its track record to conclude FY 2023 as a landmark year, having delivered over 5x growth in top line and profitability over the last five financial years. It was an exciting year, marked with several important milestones and well-supported by our focus on enhancing the quality of revenue, bottom-line fundamentals by further scaling our tech platforms and ecosystem-level partnerships. I am pleased that despite the global headwinds that have impacted businesses globally, Affle delivered robust growth for the year, powered by our ROI-linked CPCU business model. Our consumer platform delivered 256.8 million converted users, crossing the 250 million mark for the first time, and our CPCU revenue increased by 35.3% year-on-year. Our cash from operations increased at a CAGR of 52.8% since FY 2019. We are stronger than ever before, and we are committed to deliver sustainable growth over this decade. Kicking off Q4 performance, Affle delivered revenue growth of 12.9% year-on-year with meaningful margin expansion, resulting in greater year-on-year growth in EBITDA of 22.1%. We achieved a revenue CAGR of 64.4% in Q4 over the last three-year period, much ahead of the industry growth trends. Our CPCU business continued to be resilient, delivering 62.5 million conversions during the quarter at INR 51.2 CPCU rates. Our strong anchoring on India and other emerging markets enabled us to perform well with 20% year-on-year growth in Q4. Our differentiated market position as a consumer-centric and ROI-driven platform for advertisers has helped us further enhance our productivity and CPCU pricing. This resulted in a steady CPCU rate leading to year-over-year margin expansion and a strong competitive market leadership position across emerging markets. Our FY 2024 outlook for India and emerging markets remains optimistic and in line with our continued growth trends. Macro headwinds continue to impact our business in developed markets in Q4 FY 2023 in a few verticals, like FinTech and entertainment. To mitigate this short-term impact and to accelerate success on the existing pipeline of opportunities in developed markets, we have actioned a multi-pronged 360-degree turnaround plan with decisive steps taken immediately in Q1 FY 2024 around people, partnerships, products and platforms, and that will give immediate measurable outcomes in FY 2024. First, we have reorganized our people teams that were focused on developed markets to ensure that these teams are aligned to upsell and cross-sell all our platform use cases on CPCU business model and not be limited by any one platform. In line with our hands-on entrepreneurial culture, I will directly lead the developed market-focused business units in FY 2024. Accordingly, the reporting structure of teams and operating resources have been realigned with attractive incentives linked to attainment of aggressive turnaround growth plans across all key emerging verticals in all our developed markets. Second, we have realigned our strategic partnerships and execution strategies with deeper focus on product and platform lock-ins for multi-year growth focused on higher value conversions with multi-million dollar contracts with select supply side partners, OEMs and operator partners across these markets. Third, we have recently introduced all our CPCU use cases on our CTV connected TV product with household sync capability. These integrations are now completed with leading mobile measurement platforms to strengthen our competitive advantage as the only CPCU model-based CTV platform for advertisers. This should result in greater growth of our higher value CPV plus CPCU propositions from Q2 onwards. Fourth, our first mover advantage on Apple iOS SKAN advertising product is further fortified as we have successfully rolled out Apple's App Store related multiple touchpoints, thus providing our advertisers with the most differentiated and ROI-driven use cases on iOS SKAN and Apple's App Store. We are also working on App Store related touchpoints with other OEMs and operators on Android as well. These initiatives are expected to drive greater growth for our CPCU business across all markets immediately from Q2 onwards in this financial year. Fifth, we have recalibrated our inorganic growth plan towards acquiring deeper access to customers' first-party data in high-growth verticals such as gaming, with key execution strategies to deepen all our use cases of CPCU business to unlock the highest lifetime value of consumer conversions for our advertisers. Our growth action plans for developed markets, as outlined above just now, are already in execution under my direct leadership, and by Q1 itself, the internal reorg would be completed. The new contracts and integrations with strategic partners would be completed. The key product initiatives across CPV and OEM app stores will be scaled up with deeper focus on emerging verticals, and the turnaround impact of these initiatives will show in our operating results from Q2 onwards. We will continue investing in our organic growth operations, augmenting our OEM and operator partnerships with some of the largest global brands, as well as actively evaluating inorganic opportunities with greater emphasis on higher growth industry verticals like gaming. This will fortify our moat and ensure sustained meaningful growth with further uptick coming along the next few quarters this year as well as beyond. To reiterate our strength of delivering unique consumer experiences, we had in total shared 21 case studies in our earnings presentations over the last seven quarters. These were focused on some of our key industry verticals, including e-commerce, EdTech, entertainment, finance and banking, FMCG, FoodTech, gaming, HealthTech, and retail. Continuing to share our customer success stories, this time we have also included three case studies which are focused on HealthTech, whereby we are looking at driving greater consumer adoption of online health, diagnostics, and wellbeing services in India. We have also shared a gaming related case study, which is a fast-growing vertical driving user growth across geographies. We've also shared the insurance super app focused on growing the reach and adoption of essential financial services. These case studies demonstrate our ability to provide innovative solutions and drive outstanding results for the advertisers globally. Affle continues to be recognized as an industry thought leader, and as a testament to that, we were awarded the best use of programmatic advertising at the India Digital Awards organized by the IAMAI. We were ranked amongst the top media sources globally to deliver ROI on Apple iOS SKAN campaigns in the Singular ROI Index 2023. We also won five awards at DIGIXX in 2023 across various high impact categories such as technology, programmatic and performance marketing, and more, as well as one award in geo-targeting category at MMA APAC 2023. With that, I now hand over this discussion to our CFO, Kapil Bhutani, to discuss the financials with you. Thank you. Over to you, Kapil. Thank you, Anuj. Wishing everyone a good day and hope all of you are keeping safe and well. Continuing our growth momentum, we concluded FY 2023 with a revenue of INR 14,340 million, a robust growth of 32.6% year-on-year and Q4 FY 2023, our revenue stood at INR 3,558 million, a growth of 12.9% year-on-year. We delivered a revenue growth of 20% year-on-year in India as well as emerging markets. Except for developed markets which anyway had a lower contribution for us on a consolidated basis, our business across global emerging markets remained resilient with an overall bottom line growth momentum and margin expansion year-on-year. During the quarter, India contributed 34.7%, while international revenues contributed about 65.3% of our revenue. We recorded an EBITDA of INR 2,930 million for our full year, an increase of 37.2% year-on-year. For the quarter four, we had INR 716 million as EBITDA with an increase of 22.1% year-on-year. As you're aware, our quarter three in any year is the highest quarter due to seasonality. However, the cost of operations in quarter four remained broadly at par with quarter three. In terms of OpEx, our inventory and data costs stood at 60.8% of revenue from operations in this quarter. This is in line with Q3, while it witnessed a significant margin improvement from Q4 last year. Our employee cost during the quarter remained relatively stable sequentially. Our other operating expenses increased by about INR 18.3 million, largely on account of annual audit fees or other professional services. PAT on full year stood at INR 2,453 million, an increase of 33.8% year-on-year. PAT on the Q4 PAT stood at INR 6,634 million, an increase of 18.4% YOY on a normalized basis. Just to remind that last year in Q4, we recorded a gain on fair valuation on financial instruments of INR 162 million net of tax. Please refer to slides four and five of our earning presentation for detailed working on the same. Our effective tax rates were lower this quarter on account of recognition of deferred tax assets of a subsidiary. We remain focused on working capital management, continue to see a robust cash flow from operation. Our collections were robust, and the ratio of our cash flow from operations and profit from tax stood at 106% for the financial year 2023. We have been extremely prudent in our customer profile, and as such, there were no material changes in the collection risk. We could remain confident, for our long-term business prospects, invest further in our business, and stand committed to deliver long-term sustainable growth. With this, I end our presentation. Let's open the floor for questions. Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star one on their touchtone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. Ladies and gentlemen, the first question is from the line of Mr. Rahul Jain from Dolat Capital. Please go ahead. Yeah, hi. Thanks for the opportunity. you know, on the commentary has been improving selectively for some of the global peers in this quarterly earnings. Would appreciate if you could share a bit more on what you are witnessing across your key markets like India, Southeast Asia, and developed markets. Secondly, if you could share that how the newer revenues such as connected TV that you talked about would have bearing on our key metrics such as CPCU costing or margin in general. Finally, last bit from my side would be that could you comment on this inorganic strategy wherein you are looking towards capturing first-party data. Any more color here would be helpful. Is it like we're getting into the publishing side or any more input there would be helpful? That would be great. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you, Rahul, for your questions. Well, definitely I would say that the India market or emerging markets for us globally, we are no longer seeing, you know, the kind of headwinds or the economic headwinds that were very strong in the last financial year. You know, even though we performed with quite a lot of resilience in the 20%-25% growth range for India and emerging markets globally in FY 2023. In FY 2024, our outlook remains optimistic and positive with respect to India and emerging markets, which is already, you know, 81%+ of our business at the moment. I think we are in a very strong footing there, given our. I mean, our confidence and conviction is even more because in the last financial year, we were able to deal with those headwinds and still deliver an honorable level of growth. I think going forward in FY 2024, our confidence is high that we can, you know, continue to maintain that level of growth in, you know, 20%-25% organic growth range. In terms of developed markets, I think, I've already given a fairly detailed commentary about how we are looking at focusing and doubling down on certain differentiations that we have created in our product lines. Like, for example, with CTV combining it with CPCU to go for even higher margin, higher value conversions, as well as iOS, as most of us know, is a higher margin play. Within iOS, we already had a first-mover advantage on the SKAN changes that happened in 2021. We have actually further enhanced our differentiation by adding into there certain touchpoints from the Apple App Store, where we are combining that for the advertisers and taking it. Again, the impact from, you know, margin perspective or the CPC rate perspective should be, you know, going into more of these are higher value and higher margin segments, both CTV plus CPCU as well as Apple SKAdNetwork and Apple App Store plus CPCU. I think these are very positive initiatives that we have undertaken. This will help us not only in developed markets, but also these same initiatives would be actually great first-mover advantage for us in emerging markets. I see very positive trend lines there, and I'm very optimistic about it. In terms of your question on the inorganic growth plan, I did mention very clearly that we're looking at more first-party data of the advertisers coming in. No, we are not shifting to, let's say, becoming more on the publisher side. We are doubling down on our CPCU business. We are saying we need to go deeper on certain verticals, and we believe that gaming is one such vertical where the advertisers who are also game publishers, they have deep, you know, first-party data, and how we can work closely with them with deeper product integrations and so on, and bringing all our use cases to those customers. Any inorganic growth acquisition that we're looking at right now is actually focused on these very specific capabilities that we're evaluating, and we have been evaluating this for the last four to five months, and we are continuing to be carefully categorized until we are absolutely sure. Yes, we are looking at more deeper verticalization focus and gaining first-party deeper integration with these advertisers in verticals like the gaming vertical. I hope I have covered all of your four aspects of your questions. Yes. Perfect. That's it from my side. Thank you, and best of luck. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Karan Taurani from Elara Capital. Please go ahead. Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. My question was around two things, one is if you could give us some kind of indication around the growth rates in U.S., U.K. markets and the other emerging nations. Just to get a sense in terms of what is the quantum of decline that U.S., U.K. is facing right now, and how much time do you think this would take, you know, to come back on track? Thanks. I think in terms of growth rates for the overall industry trends, I think we are still very, very optimistic that the long-term tailwinds of digital continue to be very, very strong. In fact, in our earnings presentation, we've included some specific slides towards that to see if you look at some of the markets like developed markets, including, let’s say, markets like China and so on, you would find that, you know, the digital spends in these markets have already gone to much higher levels. Like in China, digital spends as a percentage of total advertising spend is around 80%. In U.S. and Europe, the number is somewhere between, you know, 65%-75%. Overall, if you look at this, you know, digital spends have gone up substantially, whereas in India, Indonesia, Africa, LatAm, basically emerging markets, these numbers are still very under-calibrated. The long-term growth trends for at least our India and global emerging markets business continues to be very, very strong. Therefore, there is no reason for us as Affle to not be looking at at least 20%-25% organic growth from these markets over a period of this financial year. With respect to developed markets, the addressable market is very large, and we have, you know, only a much smaller sort of footprint in the developed markets. Last year, what we saw was a scenario where our footprint was small, and yet because of the macro factors, some of the customers in FinTech and some of the customers in entertainment category were impacted. With the initiatives that I've outlined, I'm actually leading this directly hands-on. I mean, therefore I can give you even further clarity and conviction that Q2 onwards this year we will see a turnaround situation because of the very clear and very concise action plans that have already been put in place, and most of them will come to a conclusion within this quarter as well. The decisions are being made, the actions are being taken, and I'm directly leading this, you know, with the teams reporting to me on a daily basis. Making sure that we absolutely go for a winning turnaround position from Q2 onwards in developed markets. Once we achieve that, you would absolutely see that this financial year we will come back to the same kind of growth trends that we were always having guidances for, and we will continue to provide that kind of an outlook going forward as well. There is a huge addressable market in developed markets, and we're just scratching the surface with our products that differentiates, with our platform propositions are compelling and, you know, we're just making sure that we provide the right kind of entrepreneurial drive that is needed to enter these markets and create a meaningful impact. I'm pretty confident that we will see a very strong turnaround for developed markets within this year itself. You know, Q2, then Q3 onwards is on a time drive for the October, November, December quarter. All these initiatives are taking the conclusive footing now in this quarter. Q2, we would ramp up. Q3, we'd be ready to you know, tap into the growth. Got it. Thanks for those insights. The second question would be around this developed markets. Obviously, the macro environment is one very big reason. Is this Apple privacy policy also kind of having an impact? Because what we hear is that, you know, conversion rates are down there, data costs are going up. What are the kind of disruption that you're seeing in developed markets today? Is this also a very big reason for, you know, the growth being neutral or probably seeing a decline? See the disruption of related to iOS happened in 2021. We are in 2023 now, we have already sailed through that. In fact, you know, I gave my commentary earlier that on SKAN network we are doubling down and solidifying our first-mover advantage of having embraced these changes, right? We had very little baggage. Our iOS exposure has been very low before. I see iOS as a growth area for us because our product is complete, our product is differentiated, and we are able to demonstrate CPCU-based business model on SKAN iOS solutions to the advertisers. We are able to bring in unique propositions with the Apple App Store related touchpoints and so on. I think what we are offering is unique. What we are offering is competitive and compelling. The privacy related issues, we have already navigated that to bring these solutions already to market. I don't think that that is any further, any kind of a concern. On the contrary, because of these discourses, we have the ability to tell the advertisers that when you're working on iOS, the consumers are more premium, the challenges are addressed by our product, and therefore you've got to pay more. I think the ability to charge a higher CCU rateThe ability to extract better margins on this particular segment will actually work to our advantage versus to a disadvantage. I think we've already demonstrated that in the last few years, and we are now going to, you know, double down on that with respect to bringing iOS. In developed markets, iOS is 50% of the market share with respect to number of devices or, you know, the advertising spends going on iOS versus Android. Whereas, as you would know, in emerging markets, it's over 90% Android. I think there is a very clear, you know, direction that we are taking, that iOS is a growth proposition both in developed markets and a high margin growth proposition even for emerging markets. I think this will be a growth segment for us as we execute this year. Right. Just one last, if I may, so i mean, we have been hearing that- Thank you. Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Karan. May we request that you return. Yeah, absolutely. No worries. As there are several participants waiting for their turn. Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Mayank Babla from Enam AMC. Please go ahead. Good morning, thank you for taking my question. Sir, I had just one question around the changes in or the new contracts that you are rolling out with clients that you announced in your speech. Could you give us a little more detail about, you know, what parameters or key deliverables that have been changed in the contracts with your clients that gives you so much confidence for a quick turnaround in the next one or two quarters itself? Right. so, you know, this is still getting concluded as we talk, but I think the broad parameters are that working with these supply side partners and OEMs and operators to lock in some of their touch points with the consumers pretty much exclusively with respect to how they work with Affle's platforms and do a deeper integration together with them, both on their first party data, both on the touch points with their consumers. Ensuring that, you know, we have a longer term lock-in relationship with them for, let's say, two years, three years, in certain cases longer. I think that's the nature of the dynamics of these contracts, where we're trying to go to them and saying that we are the partner which has the end-to-end consumer platform propositions and initiatives. When they work with us, there could be at least some of the key strategic touch points on those devices, be it the app stores, be it certain other, let's say, important touch points. As we make any material, let's say, contract changes, we'll also be disclosing and announcing that, right. Some of those contract changes are not yet material to go into, you know, any regulatory disclosures, but then some of them are. Once those contracts are signed, we will also proactively make sure that our investors and yourselves are informed about them so that you would know how to calibrate that forward, right. We are already working with all of these partners for many years. Now, what we're doing is just locking in deeper relationship at the highest levels in these companies and trying to do longer term contracts. It gives them a certain predictable path of revenue. Actually for us, it becomes a much stronger competitive differentiation and a higher margin ability to, you know, go and deliver it into the market. It will also help us with getting longer term contracts with the advertisers and the agencies once we have a very strong strategic partnership with them going. That's the kind of direction that I'm taking, and I'm already directly in touch with most of the leadership of our partners, and we are on high final stages of conclusion. Some of the contracts have already been concluded, but they are more like proof of concepts, and they're not material for us to go and make any specific disclosures. There are some material ones which we are also working on, which are on final stages, and we will announce them as they conclude. Sure. Thank you so much. My last question was around, you know, the international revenues. Just then I believe the YOY growth was only around 9%. Could you highlight which geographies specifically were there a headwind? Sure. I think I did already mention in my commentary that India as well as global emerging markets, we within this quarter, Q4, also saw over 20% year-on-year growth. Therefore, consequently, if the overall growth is lesser, it implies that the developed markets continue to see the headwinds. I mentioned two verticals, FinTech and entertainment. These two verticals shrunk for us in developed markets in this quarter, even in the previous quarter. This is where the headwind impacts have been. If we take it on a consolidated basis, you know, India and emerging markets clearly is showing great resilience. Even with all the kinds of headwinds that were there, we are still in that range of 20%-25% organic growth. Whereas in developed markets where we were under-calibrated, we have not been as strong to respond to the headwinds, and we have seen the impact and shrinking in the developed markets in some of the verticals. To solve for it, I've given clarity that what are the turnaround action plans that have already been put in place, and I have a lot of conviction and clarity on what needs to be done. I'm hands-on involved in leading this and turning this around, and I'm confident therefore that we will see clear, measurable outcomes on this from Q2 onwards, being ready for the festive quarter, October, November, December, Q3, which is typically our highest quarter. I wanna make sure that we are all guns blazing on all of these initiatives, maximizing the advertiser budgets in our favor in developed markets. You know, that's the color that I can give to you. You know, which markets are included in those developed markets? It's primarily U.S. and Europe. These are the two sort of bigger contributors within our developed markets. Yeah, this is where we are making sure that we put in the focus and turn this around. We have a right to play. Our products are strong and differentiated. We just need to make sure that we do smart execution on the ground, and for that, the appropriate teams are already wired with the right incentive structures. When they report to me, there is a lot more, let's say, hustle in the process, right? We are definitely bringing it a lot of action on the ground, and I'm pretty confident that the pipeline is already there, and we will be seeing conversions starting from Q2 onwards. Great. Okay. Well, best of luck for the future. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Vikrant Gupta from ICICI Pru Life. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning. Thanks for the opportunity. I had mainly a question on the inorganic growth plans that you outlined. Could you talk a little bit more in detail about, what sort of geographical exposure we're looking for, or would this largely be on the emerging markets again, the gaming acquisition which you're talking about? Second, are we largely looking at acquiring some sort of a demand-side platform here? Thank you for that question. The fact that we haven't announced, you know, any transaction yet, you know, there'll be a limit to what level of clarity I can go into, and I also don't want to give any negotiating lever to the targets that we are negotiating with, or evaluating, you know, for the last six months. I think just wanted to, you know, be conscious of that, and I hope you'd appreciate it. Yes, you know, broadly what we are looking at is our core strategy has been verticalization. In that verticalization strategy, we have already enumerated what are those verticals that we are focused on. Gaming as a vertical for us as a whole group across developed markets, emerging markets is under calibrated. In emerging markets, gaming is still an upcoming vertical. It's not that advertising is spending huge amounts of money in gaming at the moment in the emerging markets, but we expect in the next three to five- years, gaming will also be a very, very strong vertical in emerging markets. In the developed marks, in advertising, in digital advertising, gaming is actually one of the largest verticals for most of our peers, which are listed companies. Most of them, gaming would be like north of 50% or in some cases even 80% of the revenue. Whereas for Affle as a group, gaming is, you know, less than 10%, you know, of our revenue. Therefore, we think that doubling down and verticalizing on gaming would be strategic for us. What are we looking for when we look at these target companies? Do they have the right quality of customer integrations? Do they have deep data integrations with those customers? If the answer is yes, then we see a great opportunity for Affle's rest of our core platforms and propositions to be upsold and integrated with those existing customers of the target company. The strategy is much more how do we, you know, zoom in with greater focus on a particular vertical, grow into those customer accounts by upselling all of Affle's propositions on CPCU business model basis, and therefore expand the lifetime value of those consumers for those customers, right? Really looking at new user conversions, repeat user conversions using, you know, connected TVs, cross-device conversions, and so on and so forth. These kind of capabilities that Affle's platforms have inherently, we just want to shorten the time to market. If we do this organically, it may take us three years because the gaming customers do deep integrations with these platforms, and the switching cost is higher. For us to gain a stronger footing straight off the bat of a meaningful size into these verticals, inorganic is a very sensible way to do it. Currently the valuations of most companies in this space because of the headwinds of macroeconomic factors are actually quite sensibly priced. We are evaluating a few targets. We have been actually evaluating for the last six months, and we will, you know, we have a very long courtship period in deciding whether to proceed or not. Yeah, I think within this year, we should have at least one such transaction. Yes, it will still be CPCU business-led. It will be verticalized into high-growth verticals where we are bullish globally. Gaming is one of them. It will still be on the demand side because we are basically doubling down and having the same core CPCU segment as the main segment of the company. We are not, let's say diversifying yet because I think we are still small, and we need to get much more market share globally before we look at, let's say, maybe diversifying to other possibilities. At the moment, it's, you know, same CPCU vertical, verticalization as a strategy, gain access to customers so we can upsell and cross-sell our other propositions. That's really the thesis. Understood. Clearly your customers are looking to spend, or looking to advertise more on the gaming side, and that part of the spend is something that. No, no. looking at. Hi. It is not about our customers are looking to spend on the gaming side. It is the gaming customers we are looking to expand our portfolio with. Okay. Understood. Just one final one, sorry. What sort of margin expansion are we looking for going into fiscal 2024? Because we had guided for, you know, getting a required entity, maybe mid-teen sort of a margin. I think the FY 2022 numbers were closer to 7%-8%. Where are we in FY 2023, and where do we think we will be in FY 2024? Okay. you know, over the last three years, in this financial year, they will actually complete three years with us with respect to, let's say, Appnext and Mediasmart. I think we've already brought them to the mid-teens kind of margin level performance, bottom line performance. Jampp is still completing. next month is going to complete second year with us. Jampp is way more focused on developed markets, and therefore me going and leading the developed markets directly and making sure that we're integrating all our use cases and propositions across our platforms and pushing that to developed markets customers with differentiation and aggression is something that is happening now, which is, you know, by the time we complete this financial year, we would have almost reached the end of the third year for Jampp as well. I think this is really the case of lifting the margin profile of the company at least safely north of 20% EBITDA in this financial year across all the quarters. You know, inching it up, like, even if you look at last year's numbers for us, we have seen a margin expansion on EBITDA by about a percentage point. I think going forward as well, our goal would be to see how we can improve it, you know, meaningfully a step at a time. Even the, you know, I want to give you some comfort around any inorganic transaction that we do. I'm no longer playing the playbook of three- years for that. We have learned, we have understood how to do these acquisitions, and we have learned over three- years of integration, and we have now levers to understand. In case we do another inorganic transaction this year, we will ensure that in FY 2024, it's already within year one contributing mid-teens in terms of EBITDA performance. I would not see any significant, let's say, averaging down. From an organic perspective, on a standalone perspective for, you know, a lot of our businesses, our margin profile would be close to 25% EBITDA. Factoring in that Jampp is still to complete three years and we do a new acquisition, we're still in the mid-teens. The average would still come down to, let's say, north of 20% EBITDA, but still margin expansion on a year-on-year basis. We're very carefully calibrating this and making sure that not only our margin profile is showing a clear trend towards margin expansion, but also, as you know, we are very careful with respect to how we are doing on our cash flows, because that's the only way to fund some of these acquisitions and the payments that we're doing. I think, you will find the discipline of bottom line performance, margin expansion to be sensibly paced, and we're not going to do something which suddenly averages our margin performance down. That's not going to happen. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Arun Prasath from Avendus Spark. Please go ahead. Thank you for the opportunity. Anuj, just you spoke about the categories which let you down in this year, namely FinTech and entertainment. Can I request you to also talk about the categories which helped you to sustain the momentum, top three, top four categories which helped you to sustain the momentum during this year? What do you think, the risk in these categories falling off the radar? If it happens, which other category do you think which can come back and replace this so that our momentum as this continues there in the gym market? That's my first question. Interestingly, the FinTech and entertainment impact was in developed markets, the negative impact whereas in emerging markets actually, FinTech did quite well, entertainment did quite well. When I look at it on a sort of overall basis, there was some balancing happening there. You know, that was more emerging markets led. I think in developed markets, FinTech, entertainment was impacted, but we were still resilient in gaming, we were still resilient in FoodTech, we were still resilient in e-commerce. e-commerce, FoodTech, gaming, and even EdTech, I think these four verticals were still resilient for us in developed markets. Whereas in emerging markets, we saw overall across the board growth across all our verticals. You know, that was quite heartening because there were times where, you know, FinTech was, you know, a bit in trouble in some of the quarters. EdTech was in a bit in trouble at the beginning of the financial year, FY 2023. Over the, you know, course of the year, we have seen broad-based growth across all verticals in emerging markets. In developed markets, like I said, FinTech and entertainment, you know, we saw some of the customers shrink or, you know, suddenly have major stops in budgets. I think we could have done better in terms of execution by upselling, cross-selling our other products and services. Because our presence in those markets was still under-calibrated and the leadership was, you know, not as confident of doing the rest of assay businesses in those markets. I think therefore, making those changes, bringing in the conviction and pushing all our products and integrated proposition in developed markets, we will, I think, bounce back quite strongly even in FinTech and entertainment, because these are very large verticals and large addressable markets in developed markets, and our numbers are so small in developed markets that we cannot be, you know, on the back foot. I'm pretty confident that, you know, this financial year we will see a bounce back across verticals in developed markets. In emerging markets, like I said, we already ended the year with a good kind of growth runway in emerging markets, so we should be fine there. Yeah, the focus is very clear. I think keep it verticalized, keep our product propositions differentiated, keep our business model compelling, and, you know, the execution then becomes simple because we are selling something that's compelling and we are selling it in such a verticalized way that those advertisers and those verticals will find it a compelling proposition to sign up with. The rest of it is, you know, platform-based scalable execution. I'm really leading the sales teams with a very strong hustle to make sure that we maximize or make good for any, you know, gaps or headwinds that we saw in FY 2023, so make it good in FY 2024. Yeah. Yeah, understood, Anuj, thanks. My second question is on the gaming. You gave quite a bit of color on the gaming. You also spoke about how in developed markets your peers have much higher revenue coming from the gaming. Those are the peers who also help the gaming developers to develop the game from the scratch. Are we looking to add this kind of a capability through our strategic initiations? Because that is quite a very, very elaborate set of skill additions to the organization. No. No, no. What I was talking about was not gaming publishers. I was talking about people who are running mobile marketing and, you know, ad tech with demand-side platform companies. You know, they're very comparable to what Apple's platforms are capable of doing, except for that they are so deeply focused on gaming, whether it's relationships with the CXOs or the product integrations that they've already done with these gaming customers for years, that the stickiness... If we go to, let's say, win a gaming customer by default, they would say they have too much anchoring on their existing partners to do switching. What we are looking for with inorganic entry point into gaming is to gain access to these gaming customers and integrations of a meaningful size and scale and add it to our portfolio by default, so that we have a highway on which the rest of our platforms can drive in and upsell and cross-sell and therefore create actually organic growth on top of the inorganic acquisition of these customer portfolios. Right? We are looking at these kind of ways to accelerate our market share into gaming, buy our way into it at a good starting point on which we can then expand onto by upselling our own platforms and capabilities there. That's what we're looking for. We are not looking to create a new diversification or going into publication or some other thing. We are saying, we're staying true to our course. This is what we do well. We are a consumer platform. We are a C2C business model-based consumer platform that is doing new user acquisition, repeat conversions, CTV-based conversions, you know, online to offline conversions and connected devices overall. This is where the use cases stay the same. We just want access to those gaming customers that have already done some integrations at data and platform level with the target companies that we are looking at right now. Once we do such a transaction, our goal is to, you know, upsell and cross-sell our core platforms into that, right? Giving a stronger footing and market share into the gaming vertical. Not just waiting for, you know, the long sales cycle that is involved in the gaming onboarding of customers. Anuj, will this result in some saving in. Mr. Arun, may we request that you return to the question queue for follow-up questions as we have other participants. Sure. Sure. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Anmol Garg from DAM Capital. Please go ahead. Yeah, hi. Thanks for the opportunity. I had a couple of questions. Firstly, Amit, you were talking about the margin expansion going ahead in next year. Can we expect the margin expansion to come from operating leverage, or do you also think that you can structurally bring down the data and inventory costs further? Because it has come down from 60% to 60% now. Can we bring it down further, or will it be through employee expense and other expenses based on the operating leverage? Yeah, I'm looking at scaling our business and growing our business with a growth mindset. We will continue to invest in data and inventory costs. We will continue to invest in our operating expenses as well to ensure that we are supporting this growth path, because we are not just looking at one quarter, next quarter, this financial year. We're looking at the decade ahead. There's still seven more years to go till 2030, and our loss to deliver there is based on, you know, what we are looking to achieve for our company long term. We will continue to do the right areas of investment. Having said that, the way the margin expansion is celebrated today, that some of our organic businesses are already at the 25% EBITDA level. Some of the acquired companies have already reached close to 18%-20% EBITDA level. Some of them are still at the single margin contribution. When we look at the blended sort of result on EBITDA, we see about 20% EBITDA, right? When we plan our business for, let's say, FY 2024, we are looking at scaling up revenue, scaling up our margins by going into higher value segments. How do I improve the C2C pricing? How do I make sure that we're selling highly differentiated product propositions with our business model, which is already very unique? With that, you know, gaining deeper access into the market as a differentiator more versus competitors. We're going higher up in the value chain versus, you know, being commoditized. I think defending pricing and so on is important. The operating decision in terms of how much to invest in, you know, gaining deeper quality access to data and inventory and so on and so forth. There are some levers there for us to optimize. I would say that, you know, we're looking at a natural progression where one step at a time the acquired businesses should move closer to the 20% EBITDA level. If we acquire a new business within one year, making sure it is in the 15%-20% EBITDA range, and so on and so forth. Therefore, also giving you a predictable path that, okay, if we were at 20% EBITDA in FY 2023, then we aim for 20%-22% in FY 2024. Those are the kind of, let's say, one step at a time scenario. Are we looking at, you know, dramatically shifting straight away to 25%? The answer is no. There's a clear path to doing that one step at a time over the next few years. Thanks, thanks for the detailed answer. Just, the last one from my side, is that if you can highlight what percentage of our revenue, comes from US and Europe, and within that, are we dealing with, few large clients or there are number of couple of smaller clients over there we, where we, hope to scale up? That's a great question. In terms of our, you know, overall business, India and global emerging markets is already at 81% of our total revenue. The developed markets contribution is about 19% today. It's a small base because the developed markets, the total addressable market is very large. On that small base we have existing customers and partners already where we can go and, you know, upsell and cross-sell better so that we can get more budgets from there, and that is an area of growth for us. We do have a meaningful number of customers. We are very known in these markets, right? I mean, it's not that we are a new player in that sense. I mean, yes, we are perhaps a lot more known in, you know, India and emerging markets globally because we are clearly anchored as an emerging market focused player on Android. Let's say after the 2021 change in iOS, right? Which actually leveled the playing field for the incumbent players, it gave us a good sort of entry point to get into developed markets and talk about our propositions in a differentiated way, both for iOS as well as for Android. I'm seeing a very, very good sort of opportunity for us to, you know, scale up in developed markets. We have a meaningful number of customers in developed markets. I would say at this moment, maybe around 30 to 40 customers contributing meaningfully to, you know, the across verticals. We are looking at growing that number substantially, making it, you know, double, triple from there in terms of where we are going. Yeah, I think there is a healthy base to start from. There's a good market position for us to start from with a differentiated product proposition, good case studies across these developed markets, and then calibrate it up and make sure that, you know, it is coming back to the kind of growth trends that we're looking at so that we can deliver 20%-25% growth in FY 2024 on organic basis. Thanks. Thanks, Anuj, for answering my question. Good luck going ahead. Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Swapnil Potdukhe from JMFL. Please go ahead. Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. My first question is on emerging markets, since we have heard a lot on the different developed market growth rates. I just wanted to understand like the growth rates in these emerging markets. Earlier we used to say the industry is growing at around 25%-30%. Now, for the last two quarters, if I were to look at, you have grown 23%, now 20%. Why are we underperforming the industry growth rate? That is the first question I would like to understand. I think the answer to that is that the last couple of quarters is, you know, are a unique situation where the market is behaving to all kinds of macroeconomic headwinds. You know, sometimes the customers are conservative. Sometimes they're parking budgets for the festive season into the next quarter, the next financial year, and so on and so forth. I think the, that could be perhaps an explanation. The explanation is not that we're actually underperforming. I'm pretty confident that what we are delivering is still at par, at least, if not ahead of what the industry is saying. At least most of our competitors, they are either firing people or, you know, they are cutting down on costs. They're not performing particularly successfully. Whereas we are doing all our appraisals. We have, you know, 50 positions open for hiring at this moment. The company is absolutely growing. I think the conduct of our company is a sensible conduct, where we are not only defending our pricing in tough macroeconomic headwind situations. We are not commoditizing our position in the market. We are not succumbing to, "Hey, please give us budgets, even if the pricing and margin is low." No, we're not doing that. We are choosing who we work with. We are doubling down on our investments in organic growth areas. I don't see any sign of, let's say, weakness in the performance that we have delivered. At least in our mindset, in terms of our confidence as an organization is, you know, like I said in my commentary, we are at a strongest position than ever before in terms of how we are performing, whether it's our margin profile, whether it's our cash flows and growth position, the product, the team. I think we are in a very strong mindset going into FY 2024. I wouldn't see, you know, a defensive or we grow only 20% or 22%. You've got to see it as an overall, you know, year's performance versus just seeing it as a, you know, one quarter here or there. Overall year-wise, 35% growth in the financial year-on-year on CPCU business is a is by any stretch of imagination a very strong growth performance. 37% year-on-year growth in EBITDA, that is a very strong performance. Of course, one or two quarters we have also demonstrated that, yeah, 20% growth in Indian emerging markets, given how the macro factors were and how the clients were shifting budgets from, you know, one quarter to the next quarter. It's not that the budgets have disappeared. It's just people are, you know, sometimes being more careful, and I think we've got to respect that. Has it changed the long-term trends or, you know, what is the calibration of digital advertising growth, or has Apple's products become less competitive? The answer is no. I think we have a very strong position in India and other emerging markets. You know, as I go ahead and maybe hopefully talk about some of the contracts that we are trying to strategically close and align for the long term, you would know that, hey, we are still the partner of choice, not only for the advertisers but for the entire ecosystem. Right. just to extend, slightly extend that point, how do you see growth panning out in FY 2024 for these markets specifically? would we, stay, the 20% growth trajectory continue or, should we look at it at a slightly higher number? Yeah, I think we, whenever we have a backdrop of a year like FY 2023 and the starting point that we have, it is sensible to be conservative and therefore on that basis I say the 20%-25% overall growth for Affle across all our business in FY 2024 organically is a sensible plan that we have already made and we are executing towards. Can we do more than that? Possibly. With inorganic, if we do and complete any transaction this year, obviously the growth would be higher. Our goal would be to sensibly calibrate overall organic plus inorganic north of 35%. Now, how much of that will come from because organic did better or inorganic worked out better? Let's see. I think let's take it a step at a time. In terms of organic growth, we should definitely calibrate 20%-25% given the backdrop of FY 2023. I hope to change the discourse on that for FY 2025 by actually, you know, creating a different backdrop in FY 2024. I think it has to be seen in the context of where we are coming from and where we are headed, and we are respecting that and giving you a, you know, an industry trend as well as, you know, what to expect of Affle in this year. Thank you. Mr. Swapnil, may we request you to return to the question queue for follow-up questions. Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Mr. Roshan Chutkey from ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund. Please go ahead. Yeah. Just a basic question, sir. If ad budgets get cut, say in a particular vertical like entertainment, then CPC budgets should go down, whereas CPCU should actually improve, right? Because you're paying only on converted user in times like this. Is it because, I mean, is that right? If not, are we a marginal player in the developed markets and therefore we are losing out to other ad tech platforms? How should one think about it? I think in developed markets we were under-calibrated, I wouldn't call it a marginal player, but I would say under-calibrated, where one of our platforms was sort of, you know, doing more in developed markets and the others were very busy growing in emerging markets. We had not, let's say, put as much emphasis of direct leadership involvement for developed markets because we are clearly an emerging market-focused company, and we'll continue remaining that way, right? Given that 80% plus of the revenue is in emerging markets. Having said that, in developed markets, when a particular customer reduces budgets or says that they're going to stop marketing for one quarter and recalibrate what happens in next quarter, then some of them might be a knee-jerk reaction, stop everything. There's not a case of rational decision-making. They are probably going into, I don't know, firing people or the whole marketing department is changing. When they recalibrate, they might hold back for a short-term period. That's why we always qualify it when we say that these are short-term impacts which happened in the last few quarters in some of the verticals in developed markets for some of the customers. Because our base was small in those markets, when a, let's say, a few of the customers hold back budgets for a few quarters, you don't have sufficient feet on the ground or sufficient pipeline to make that good from others because the base was small. Therefore we saw an impact. We are absolutely and aggressively solving for it by, you know, broadening our addressable market, by, coming up with strategies of how to win bigger, better customers faster, and broadening, the base across certain key emerging verticals in developed markets. I outlined the, you know, five action points that are getting action as we talk this quarter. I'm directly leading that effort, and I hope to see Q2 to start showing some trends which may then be maximized fully in the most important quarter, which is Q3, and of course in Q4. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Ashwin Mehta from Ambit Capital Private Limited. Please go ahead. Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. Anuj, in terms of our CTV offering, which we are putting more emphasis on, which are the countries that we'll initially focus on, any indications that we can give in terms of initial traction there? Secondly, how does the CPCU rates compare there like to like versus our consumer platform? Ashwin, could you clarify which product are you talking about, the CTV product or are you talking about? Yeah, sorry, the CTV product. The CTV product. Connected TV product. Yeah, yeah. Okay. See on connected TV, most of what is happening is that their linear TV budgets are shifting to connected TV, right? I mean, more and more so. And this is of course a much bigger addressable market in U.S. and Europe, but it is also a very strong thing in emerging markets, including in India as well as other emerging markets around the world there. When we talk about the CTV proposition, most of the times the advertisers are still used to paying for it and, you know, pay for impressions or pay for, you know, the activity or viewership kind of models, right? What we are bringing is a differentiation where we are saying, "Hey, we will charge on the CPC business model," and we have done that for our own CTV products and rolled that out starting from this quarter. Okay? We are going to the advertisers and to the agencies, bringing them a differentiated CP-CTV proposition together with the combination of a CPC business model and being the only differentiated platform that's doing that. Right? I think that gives us a room to play, a room to enter into, you know, winning budgets from new customers with a differentiated proposition. Now, CTV on CPC business model therefore would in, you know, in our calibration be a higher value, you know, higher value, business. I will want to wait for the results to come, so that we can give you more detailed commentary on that. I would expect that our CPC rates because of not only the CTV plus CPC business, but also the iOS SKAN as well as the Apple App Store related propositions that we are rolling out, these are all higher value propositions. Within developed markets, as we recalibrate and go for these propositions, anyways the CPC rate is higher in developed markets. Within developed markets, these are the most premium segments. In terms of understanding Apple's strategy for developed markets, we are not going there and saying, "Hey, we are coming from India, from emerging markets, and you know what? We have a cheaper proposition." We are actually going there and saying we have a more premium proposition which is more compelling and ROI linked. Our goal is to go to the highest segment because we are small, right? If we have only 10 people on the ground, you know, do I want to go and play at the lower end of the segment or the highest end of the segment? Because I am leading it directly, I think we have a right to go and convince our advertisers to treat us as a premium, most premium proposition, and therefore going at CTV, CPCU, iOS and Apple App Store CPCU, these are the propositions we are pushing in the market. I would expect a positive impact on our CPCU rates and our margin profile from these contributions as well. Also what this also means is when you're going for the premium, you don't need an army of people. I don't need 100 people to solve this. I just need 10 smart people who can work with me and I will create, you know, examples of how to turn this around by focusing on the premium segment in certain verticals. Yeah. Fair. Just one follow-up. We've had pretty stable CPCU rates despite the fact that our DM portfolio has seen decline. Would it be fair to assume there have been increases in CPCU rates in the emerging markets, and ideally with better growth in DMs as you get into the next year, plus some of these propositions, the CPCU rates should be higher as you go along? Yes, I think the CPCU rates, we are, like I said, that, you know, when the times gets tough, there are two ways the companies would respond. One way is that, "Hey, we're only getting," let's say, like one of the investors asked, "We're only getting 20%-25% growth," you know? Some people will take the pressure and say, "No, no, I need to show 25%-30% revenue growth. Let's reduce pricing." Affle and my philosophy is very, very clear. We want to be seen as a differentiated platform, a premium platform, and playing in premium segments, no dropping of pricing. If you want to play harder, It's okay if it is 20%-25% revenue growth, but let's make sure that the CPCU and margin expansion is happening and our market position continues to be differentiated. We don't become commoditized. I think that's what you're seeing here as well. Yes, when the headwind came in, we said, "Don't worry about revenue growth. Make sure margin is expanding. Make sure pricing is intact. Go position yourself as a differentiated player." Whereas our competitors are firing people, are dropping the pricing. I think there is a very different strategy at play here, and I'm able to therefore build pride, organizational pride and confidence within our company that we are here for the long term, for sustainable growth, and we're not trying to make any short-term shortcuts to impress anyone in one quarter or the other. I think that builds confidence in the team that, yes, we are a publicly listed company and but we are still making long-term, you know, sustainable growth bets, and we are not getting nervous about any short-term headwinds, you know, because we think we are, we are here for the long term and building the company for this decade and well beyond. There is no reason to, you know, shortchange our pricing or to take pressure on that. Yes, we are improving our CPCU pricing, we're improving our margins, and most importantly, we're improving our conviction and confidence in our organization that our products are superior and our market position is strong. Thank you. Due to time constraint, we are limiting to one question only. Our question is from the line of Onkar Ghugardare from Shree Investments. Please go ahead. Yeah. The initiatives which you have taken for the higher growth in the developed markets and margin expansion, just wanted to know that the benefits of that would be coming from, you said that from Q2 onwards, so the benefits of that would be short-lived for quarters or like they are there for the next couple of years? It will be structural. It will be starting to show because i am taking charge of the team. I'm taking directly reportings of a lot of the management there on a regular basis. I'm pushing it. I'm going into customer meetings and if, you know, so on and so forth, pushing our team to go at the right events. All of that is happening right now within this quarter. With any situation, let's say, you know, one statement to make is have we bottomed out in any, you know, adverse trends that were there in developed markets? The answer is yes. Why have we bottomed out? Because the Chief Executive Officer himself is putting a hand and we're saying this is it. From here we turn around. How do we turn around and what do we see? We start seeing the trends in Q2, and I will report to you with the Q2 results as and when that comes. Of course, we still have the Q1 results in between. Q1 FY 2023, the developed market was at its peak, and then from Q2, Q3, Q4, you know, starting to slide down because of the headwinds that were there. Now we have stopped that trend. We're inverting that trend in Q1 with certain structural changes that we have already outlined for you. In Q2, you start seeing measurable outcomes of that so that we can maximize the biggest quarter of our financially because of seasonality. October, November, December is what we will be gunning for to be back in the driver's seat of, you know, taking it to the upstream that one deserves. I think that's how I would address this. These are not for one or two quarters. We're not doing any short-term mandate fixes. You know, we are working on our product strategy, our partnership strategy, our people organization, and lifting it up the way one should in these times. I'm excited about it and I'm very convinced with all what we're doing. It is structural. It should help us for many years to come. Just a small question. Just wanted to know what would be the CPCU rate or like the structurally for the acquisition you would be doing? It would be less accretive. No, positive. I mean, like I said, that, you know, any actions that we are taking today, whether organic or inorganic, is to go more premium, to go more higher in the value chain, and therefore, and with bottom line sensibility. Whether it's organic or inorganic, I'm very clear about the direction and the promise to the investors that over the next several years we will see higher quality revenue, higher quality margins, and you would see a stronger market position for Affle in terms of its, you know, product positioning both on iOS and Android. Thank you. Due to time constraint, that was the last question of the question and answer session. I would now like to handle the conference to the management of Affle (India) Limited for closing comments. All right. Well, thank you. Well, I want to say that your company is now 18 years old. You know, I started Affle in April 2025, in Singapore. It's been 18 years since I've been at the helm, and I see it as a young adult which has a long way to grow into a great corporate citizen. I hope that, not only do we deliver a great value creation for our shareholders, but, you know, rank very highly on good governance standards for the company. I think with that, please stay tuned, please keep believing, and one step at a time you will see much greater outcomes as we execute this year and beyond. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. On behalf of Dolat Capital, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.