Protean eGov Technologies Limited (544021) Earnings Call Transcript

Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to Protean eGov Technologies Q4 FY '24 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Ms. Pushpa Mani, Vice President, Head of Investor Relations, Protean. Thank you, and over to you, ma'am.

Thanks, Priya. Good evening, everyone. We welcome you all to the Q4 and FY '24 results discussion. Management on call would be represented by Mr. Suresh Sethi, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer; Mr. Jayesh Sule, Wholetime Director and Chief Operating Officer; Mr. Sudeep Bhatia, Chief Financial Officer; and myself Pushpa Mani, Head Investor Relations. Before we begin, I would like to mention that some of the statements in today's discussion would be forwarding in nature, and we believe that the expectations contained in these statements are reasonable. However, these statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that may lead to different results. With this, I would invite Mr. Sethi to give opening remarks. Thank you, and over to you.

Thank you, Pushpa. Good evening, everyone. Many thanks for joining us for our quarter 4 and FY '24 Earnings Call. We are, as always thankful to you for your continued support and interest. Let me begin this call by taking you through a quick overview of our unique business model. Especially for those who may be new to our journey and are joining this call for the first time. Just to give a quick introduction to the company. Protean eGov Technologies Limited. As a company, we have been a pioneer and market leader in building digital public infrastructure. A journey, which has run over last 3 decades for over 28 years. We have been one of the cornerstones of Digital India evolution right from creating population scale e-governance platforms for taxation, social security, to enabling digital identity through foundational DPIs across identity payments and data. Going forward, aligning with India's visionary DPI framework, which is now built on open standards and protocols. Protean continues to be one of the leading contributors towards multi-sector open digital ecosystems that are coming across various sectors of the economy. We are today contributing in the area of e-commerce, in transport and mobility, in agriculture, in education and in health. Our business can broadly be classified under 4 pillars. Right from the inception, our first pillar has been towards building e-governance platforms. That is where our journey began in modernizing India's direct tax infrastructure and building a robust tax information network for the country. We also got the mandate to issue India's first digitally verifiable credentials, what we all know today as the national tax ID, the PAN cards. Subsequently, we developed the central record-keeping infrastructure for the National Pension System and Atal Pension Yojana. We are proud to share that we host the national bank database of over 76 crores PAN records and today enables the entire BFSI sector for providing various citizen-centric services. We have more than 63% share in PAN issuance since inception. And in the social securities business in the pension business, we have a 97% share in NPS and a 100% share in APY, the Atal Pension Yojana. Moving on from building e-governess platforms. Our second pillar focuses on digital identity and provisioning of the same. In this space, we continue to be uniquely positioned as the only company in the country, which is offering all facets of digital identity, covering the 4 key areas ranging from EKYC, e-authentication, which is our Aadhaar-based authentication, e-signature and online PAN validation. We have a diversified customer base and today we provide services to over 1,500 corporates. We are one of the top 5 authentication and KYC service agencies to UIDAI in providing third-party identity services. Currently, these first 2 pillars account for almost 90% of our revenues. Our third pillar is more aligned with the current vision of the country in building open digital ecosystem. We term it as the work we are doing in enabling democratic access to ODE, i.e., open digital ecosystems. Aadhaar and India stack have been a watershed moment for India and have contributed significantly to the design and architecture of our DPIs. This has led to creation of multiple open and interoperable stacks across diverse sectors. We have made a conscious choice to build competence, capacity and IP in open source technologies. We are actively contributing and supporting open digital blocks for creating use cases across sectors like e-commerce, transport and mobility, which we are all familiar, comes under the umbrella of ONDC in health care, in agriculture, and in education and skilling -- education skilling again coming under the umbrella of ONEST, online network -- Open Network for Education and Skill Transformation. Our fourth vertical, which sort of brings our complete business 360 degrees, is powering enterprise digitization. While our first 3 pillars are at a foundational level, where we power various entities, the fourth pillars leads us into enterprise digitization. Over there, we work on 2 levels. We have an application level, and we have an infra level. At the app level, we power enterprises, by extending our service stack of comprehensive APIs to enable end-to-end digital onboarding and data verification capability. This is a comprehensive Red tech stack, which helps financial institutions to reduce risk and time to onboard customers, improve data accuracy and empower them to create seamless digital experiences. We have also got awarded during the course of last year in the account aggregator license by RBI. With the launch of Protean SurakshAA account aggregator, the company is now committed to drive economic empowerment and inclusion by enabling digital lending, onboarding, and various other journeys to enable a Digital India at corporate and consumer level. On the Infra side of our enterprise digitization, we provide cloud and InfoSec services. While we have been at the forefront of establishing DPI as a population scale and managing large central databases, we have extended this competency to seed lines of business in the area of information security advisory and cloud services. Protean Cloud, again, has made-in-India energy-efficient cloud, which is in synergies with the government's [indiscernible] mission and seeks to enable digital transformation and adoption of homegrown technologies in citizen-centric IT-enabled services. While these are the 4 pillars, which define our lines of business and our products and services footprint, it is equally important for us to call out that we are looking at taking the India stack global and there is a clear plan, which we are currently enabling through geographic expansion. We are focused on moving into overseas markets. And over here, we want to extend our experience and expertise in implementing large-scale nationally important and data-intensive projects with a specific focus on tax ID, social security, digital identity and ODEs -- are very relevant for countries, which are at an early stage of building DPIs, and we've had a lot of focused attention, especially in the geographies of African subcontinent in Southeast Asia, which is where we see that the journey in building DPI is very much at an early stage. Coming to our performance in FY '24. We are happy to share that our revenue growth -- revenues grew 19% led by double-digit growth across our 4 business verticals. During the year, the tax services, which is one of our main pillars of revenue grew by 12% year-on-year. During the course of the year, we crossed 5 crores PAN card issuance, which was compared to 4.1 crores last year in FY '23. We are also proud to report that the overall growth in this segment during the year has been significant compared to last year's year-on-year growth in the same quarter there has been a de-growth. But to address that fact, we would like to share that this was primarily owing to the fact that during the same quarter last year, there was a one-off spike in PAN issuance mainly due to government push and certain regulatory deadlines. We expect the PAN issuance to continue to grow at the current level, especially on the back of the path that we have a young demographic content in our country. And we are looking at almost 1.2 crore youth getting added to the workforce every year. Equally important, we do realize that TAM is not a foundational ID as Aadhaar. And therefore, it has not given at the time of birth. And today, more than 35% of India's population still doesn't have a PAN card. So we do see the headroom. We see the growth coming in this particular area. Our second line of business on pension services, there was a 14% growth during the year FY '24 with more than 1.37 crore accounts opened as compared to 1.22 crore in FY '23. As on date, the company has a very diverse customer base. We saw more than 16,000 corporates. And along with that, we are the sole CRA for all central and state governments. Protean is again the first and continues to remain the largest central record keeping agency with more than 97% market share in NPS and 100% in Atal Pension Yojana, the flagship team of the government for the economically weaker sections of the society. Even today, as we see, there is significant headroom for growth in the pension business. India has a very low pension penetration, which is clearly evident from the fact that if we look at the number of EPFO accounts in India, which stands at INR 28 crores, the NPS and APY accounts combined is less than 8%. If we compare with other developed countries, in our country, just around 6% private sector employees are covered under pension. If we compare it to U.S. over there almost 70% private sector employees are covered under pension. So we see a huge headroom for growth over here. Likewise, on the identity business, we are delighted to report a staggering growth of 62%, which is mainly driven by the entire Digital India growth. It is driven by rapid adoption of digital payments, enabling regulatory norms and increasing penetration of digital processing of documents across government and private organization. All these create multiple use cases for the fourth assets of identity I called out, be it e-sign, be it EKYC, online PAN validation, Aadhaar authentication. Because all these services are pressed in the moment you are opening an account, you're doing a digital lending, you are doing a high-value transaction in the capital markets, you're doing any jewelry purchase, you are opening or you're purchasing or registering any property. So all these services are getting pressed into providing and enabling one or more of these use cases. During the year, we have onboarded over 200 business-to-business plan and 1 contract from various state governments to make their processes more digitized. Our new businesses, which largely, if we can segment, comprise 4 verticals They include the open digital ecosystems, the work we are doing on the data stack, cloud and InfoSec and the expansion into international markets. While all these businesses are having early momentum, we especially see that open digital ecosystems are gaining traction and there's significant network adoption, especially in ONDC, which is probably one of the more advanced ODEs as we look at the areas in which we have contributed. In terms of profitability, the company reported a PAT of INR 97 crores, we are down 9% year-on-year. But this is clearly due to our investments in developing new business verticals in line with our strategic goals. Our key investments over the years have been in people and technology. And this is important to call out because the company has pivoted into getting competency built in for open source technology stacks, in centers of excellence on new areas of technology, which means emerging technologies like AI and blockchain, which we are introducing a lot of our contributions in building open digital public infrastructure ecosystems. And last but not the least, the fact that we are moving beyond the BFSI sector and contributing in multiple sectors, we are investing in sector specialists who lend us the expertise to work on these multiple open digital ecosystems. Equally important for us to call is that since we work on open source stacks, these tech stacks are fungible across different DPIs and that gives us the ability to carry the same stack and invest and build multiple ODEs. We believe that these new business lines will be very critical for our business going forward, and we are doing our best to nurture them and help them achieve their full potential. The second reason I would like to call out, which again comes to a dip in our margins is based on the provision that we've created and we spoke about it in the last quarter. This is something we have been managing and putting aside over a period of time. And this is related to a sovereign debt, which we have on the projects we do with the income tax department. While this money, we are very clear is definitely going to be coming back to us. But in cases some of this debt is outstanding for a long period of time and as part of very prudent and conservative accounting practices, we are today starting to maintain provisions on these long outstanding debt. Post taking this provision in this quarter, we have provided for INR 13.5 crores during the quarter. Post taking this provision, the net remaining provision will be around INR 28 crores, which will come through over the next 2 years. And while we expect this money to be recovered completely from the government, we also would like to share with you that part of this provisioning that we are doing or part of the money stable to us also passes through as stable to our vendor partners. And therefore, whatever provisions we are making do not have a full impact because they do have a pass-through element attached to them. Lastly, our balance sheet, again, just to reiterate, continues to remain very strong. We have more than INR 700 crores of cash and cash equivalents, including marketable securities, and as has been the history of the company, we continue to be a debt-free company. To better utilize the cash on books and to maximize the return to our shareholders, we continue to actively seek inorganic growth opportunities and are especially interested in investing in businesses, which bring in cutting-edge technologies and provide us a faster time to market. During the course of the year, the company again boarded into multiple new businesses and products. Specifically, I would like to call out that an open digital ecosystem, there was a strategic expansion into 2 new ODEs. One was in the space of agriculture where we worked on the agri stack, the core agri stack for the nation. And second was in the state of education and skilling under the Open Network for Education and Skill Transformation, ONEST. ONDC, as I mentioned, has shown good traction, and we can definitely see numbers in terms of adoption and network expansion showing very promising growth. During the course of last year, as I already mentioned, we got our account aggregate, a license and we launched that business. Equally important for us on the data tax front, we launched Rise with Protean. It is a comprehensive multifactor API marketplace [indiscernible] that aims to provide over 300-plus APIs across digital onboarding, credit verification. It also supports various DPI related APIs in the space of OMDC, agri, health and ONEST. And last but not least, we also launched an AI-powered CKYC Solution. I'm very pleased to announce that the Board of Directors has recommended a final dividend of 100% on the face value of INR 10 per equity share for FY '24. Going forward, we remain strongly optimistic on the Digital India growth and are committed to pioneering transformative technology that is collaborated, that is equitable and democratizes opportunity as a population scale. We continue to remain one of the very few companies, which are worked and built platforms and digital ecosystems at this scale at a population scale. We will continue to likewise add value to enterprises, consumers and governments through our unique combination of technology and expertise in e-governance. With this, I would like to hand over to Sudeep, our CFO for a detailed discussion on our operational performance. So thank you very much for listening to me, and Sudeep over to you.

Thank you. Thank you so much, sir. Good evening, everyone. And I'm pleased to welcome you all, and thank you again for joining us for the full year results call. Currently, India is witnessing massive digital transformation. The foundation of which lies in building a ubiquitous digital infrastructure. Protean is privileged to be at the forefront of this dynamic ecosystem and continues to be one of the cornerstones of the Digital India evolution, lying the foundational pillars in creating the ecosystem across the sectors. Let me take you through the financial highlights for the year. In financial year '24, our consolidated revenue from operations slowed to around INR 882 crores, growing by 19% year-on-year, led by noteworthy performance across our core business lines with tax services, pension services and identity services registering impressive year-on-year growth of 12%, 14% and 52%, respectively. Additionally, we are seeing early momentum in our new businesses as well. Adjusted EBITDA for the year stood at INR 196 crores, reflecting 11% growth year-on-year with current margin of 20.6% in financial year '24, mainly on account of the continued investments that we have made in the new business verticals. Profit after tax for financial year '24 stands at INR 97 crores in FY '24. And this is after the provisions of around INR 39 crores that we have reported in the books of accounts. The -- I'm happy to state that our balance sheet position continues to remain strong with cash and cash equivalents of more than INR 700 crores. We continue to maintain our debt-free status and are looking to accelerate our internal cost levers at a sustainable rate. Our well-established business model, coupled with strong cash flows, multiple strong businesses that have delivered results over last more than 2 decades, has resulted in a net cash balance of around INR 151 crores at the end of the year. Looking ahead, we continue to strive for growth opportunities and championing the vision of a digitally empowered India with [indiscernible] framework. Our journey has just begun, and we are excited about the endless possibilities that lie ahead. With that, [indiscernible] and discussions from the floor. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from the line of Sumangal Pugalia from Rare Enterprises.

My first question [indiscernible] when we talk about the high base in the last year, can you elaborate on that? Like what can be the normalized sort of PAN issuances and the impact specifically for this quarter due to that?

So largely, if you look at it, the PAN issuance on the average, if you see it over the last few years is around 6 crores to 7 crores new PAN issuances every year. And as I mentioned earlier, PAN not being in a way of saturation identity because you don't generally get a PAN card when a child is born unlike Aadhaar. Today, there is a huge population out there, maybe over 50 crore people in the country who don't have a PAN card. So as people come into either their first employment or they're opening their first bank account, the PAN card becomes a relevant document for issuance. And we are consistently seeing this happening. As I mentioned earlier, while at times, there have been certain initiatives or deadlines like Aadhaar PAN linkage or some other DBT cases happening where number of PAN cards have spiked, but around 7 crore to 8 crore is what we are seeing as a growth factor for PAN card issuance year-on-year.

Okay. Sure. And my second question is on the new initiatives. So while -- I mean, the commentary is good. Quarter-on-quarter also, we've seen revenue actually go down. So can you just talk about some of the actual revenue lines and specifically on ONDC, when right now, what is the revenue structure? And when do you see it getting linked to the GMV of ONDC?

So the revenue structure for us today is basically, I would say, there are 2 tracks to it. One -- at one level, it is -- we are providing the entire digital public infrastructure on which ONDC sits. So this is just like -- to give an example, just like you have UPI being run by NPCI to enable the payments in the country, we today provide the registry and gateway services to enable the ONDC transactions. For these registry and gateway services, as of date, we are directly compensated by ONDC as a market interest -- as a market institution. And this is something which naturally at this stage is done at the ONDC level. This could very well like UPI become a market participant compensated model going down the line. So that is 1 stream of revenue. The other revenue is more on the lines of a SaaS model. I would split that part into 2 sorts of services. One is that you are providing buyer and seller technology. It could be to enable digital commerce for buyers and sellers, to enable open finance, on ONDC, it could be lenders and borrowers to enable transport and mobility on ONDC it could be riders and taxis or transport services. So in all these cases, it's a SaaS model where we provide buying and selling technology. And this is given to corporates in all likelihood. And over here, there is an AMC model, and then there's a SaaS model, which plays with it. The third part is more like extension services. So as you look at various other enabling requirements on an ONDC platform, you have extension services like reconciliation and settlement modules. You have issuance and grievance modules, you have catalog as a service. So all this technology is again something we built and adapters to plug into the ONDC ecosystem. And these, again, are provided to various network participants who want to engage with the ONDC ecosystem, who want to enable payments or completion of payment for a buy and the sell. So that is where we provide our technology, which again was run on a cash model. So this innovated the 2-tier structure of our revenues coming from ONDC. And as I mentioned earlier, some of the ONDC numbers, you would be familiar, which again from ONDC are getting published today. ONDC itself is showing very strong growth in terms of the network, in terms of the growth of the network. Today, we have almost 280,000-plus sellers who are there. And these are the -- this is the ecosystem that has got created. And similarly, the number of transactions in ONDC are growing significantly. So these are the various cases where we are seeing that ONDC adoption and penetration is growing in the country.

Sure. So currently, for the gateway services, we're not getting a percentage of the transaction as of now. You see that in the future, that is some kind of a revenue model that Protean will pursue?

Yes. So that is something, which we expect to happen in the long run because that is largely the way the digital public infrastructure gets compensated because ultimately, the infrastructure is created for a common good and all common good as ultimately made sustainable by the participants who are using that to consume services or get value out of it.

Sure. So last question, maybe I'll come back later on the depreciation for this quarter, there seems to be a quarter-on-quarter rise also. So is there some explanation you can provide for that?

So that is basically from time to time, we do the physical verification of these assets. And -- there are certain assets, which are basically out of their lives. And on that, we have booked this depreciation. This is only a one-off entry.

Next question is from the line of Rohan Mandora from Equirus Securities.

Sir, coming to that the ACL expansion that you gave and also if I refer to the expansion in 3Q. Out of the total write-off that we take around 20% was going to the net impact on Protean. However, if I look at this quarter, almost INR 13.5 crores seems to be a net impact. So I just want to check if there's some change in assumptions here? And what is the incremental net impact that we expect from the INR 28 crores that will be written off over the next few years?

So I just mentioned that when we are taking the reserve, we are doing it at a gross level, right? So that is just one clarification. And as I mentioned earlier, at a gross level, the impact over the next 2 years is going to be in the thereabouts of INR 28 crores. That again is the worst case scenario provided we don't get any payments during the course of this period. And this again comes in because it is outstanding over a certain period of time, which we've taken as a call to say, while it is sovereign debt and very much recoverable, we do realize that provisions should be made. On this gross is what we had indicated that whatever we get paid, a part of it flows through to our vendor partners. So there is anywhere between 50% to 80%, which goes out as a payable. So therefore, there is a payable concept which goes through. So in a worst-case scenario, let's say, there is no recovery and INR 28 crores is a gross, but then the payables would get adjusted at that stage. But which we don't envisage as I mentioned, because we expect this money to come through. And historically also, we've seen that -- earlier on also, we have got our payments as delayed as 7 to 10 years after the due date. So money always comes through. It is only a matter of process and procedure that needs to be followed for that to happen.

And just to mention that as we speak, over the last maybe 1 quarter or thereabout, I mean, I'm just referring to the most recent conversations directly with the government, the seniors in the department themselves are monitoring this, and they want to make sure that any overdues and any of the backlog is cleared on priority.

So essentially, the payables are not getting reduced in this provision that you're getting right now. It's only the receivable that you are adjusting. That would be the correct understanding?

Currently. Yes.

That's right.

Okay. My second question was, if I look at the cash flow statement, there's an increase of around 47.6% in other financial assets year-on-year. So just want to understand what is that? This is under the changes in working capital. So what is this increase referring to?

So these other financial assets, basically, these are some of the investments that we have made. And yes, again, I mean this is -- these are routine items. This is not something that we expect to continue for some of the intangibles.

Okay. So because the underinvestment are not looking at other financial projects is there some lien on these? Is it fixed deposit given on some business purposes? Some further -- that's a big amount [ 47.6% ].

No, we haven't given any liens, no.

Okay. Sir, thirdly, of the total receivables that we have, what would be the amount attributable to business as usual receivables? And what is the -- of the remaining amount, how much provisions are we carrying against the remaining receivables?

Okay. So in total, if we see -- I mean the business as usual receivables are in the range of about INR 130 crores. Majority of that, 95% of that will be -- I mean, about 92% to 95% of that will be within less than 6 months. And of the remaining, of course, there are certain provisions that have been made, the provision -- majority of -- or maybe 99% of the provisions relate to these government dues with respect to the income tax storage and the receivables coming from the income tax department nothing else. In terms of the overall provisions that we are expecting, as we've just mentioned that apart from this remaining INR 28 crores exposure, there is nothing else, I mean, in the entire book.

Got it. Got it. And sir, coming to newer businesses. Sir, on [indiscernible], if you like, [indiscernible] explaining. On the SaaS-based revenue streams because there are already certain network participants who are already present, so have we entered into some relationship with the network [indiscernible] on setting up of a buyer or seller technology or something on the enabling of [indiscernible] services? And when can we see the monetization or revenue streams to come in from that line item? And overall, for FY '25, what kind of revenues do we expect from Cloud ONDC businesses?

Okay. So in terms of engagements with network participants, yes, we are actively working and have enabled multiple buyer and seller apps. As you would have noted, we've also got into some key partnerships with large institutions where we are providing them ONDC technology, if you may in a box or enabling their ecosystem partners, customers. These partnerships have been done with banks. Banks like Citi, HSBC ICICI, Standard Chartered where we are building are not just buyer-seller tech or, in some cases, for them, but we are also providing them provisions to enable their supply chain and their systems onto the ONDC ecosystem. We are likewise working with corporates and foundations. We today have enabled our distribution partners like say, [ Spice Money ] or [ Wangi ] with the buyer-supplier technology because this could be B2B models or B2C models. And we are similarly working with some FPOs. So these revenues are already accruing though naturally since it's a SaaS-based model as adoption grows and more transactions happen, we expect these streams to improve. But these numbers are already flowing into our numbers. So you would see them as part of the numbers already reported. We naturally expect promising growth on ONDC and the various categories that ONDC is today enabling because it's not just digital commerce. There is also open finance, there's transport and mobility. There is similarly B2B ecosystem of supply chain management, which is coming through. So we do see promising growth, which will be led by the network adoption. It would be difficult for me to give you a forward-looking number as a commitment at this stage, but we definitely see growth over here. And if you see the underlying network growth, ONDC as you've seen, has grown significantly. We are almost talking about [indiscernible] transactions now happening in a month. And there's almost a 20% to 30% monthly growth that ONDC is seeing from an orders perspective. So these numbers are critical to bear in mind to say what sort of possible SaaS revenues can come out of this business.

Sure. And on the cloud business, any updates in respect to the new client conversions on the government side, on the financial equity side?

[indiscernible] as a business where I said -- where I definitely said by there's early momentum. Today, we are having customers so we have booked orders, and we have what I would term, not as annuity revenue, but contract revenue, which is coming through. And we have key clients who are already -- so we have around more than double-digit clients at this stage who are availing our services. We are working in a number of sectors, ranging from e-commerce to aggregators to SaaS vendors to manufacturing sector, public sector where we are providing our cloud services. Similarly, equally important for us is that last year also went into getting a lot of critical certifications in place. So we are now [indiscernible] certified cloud. We have PCI DSS certification, SOC2, SOC3 and ISO certifications, which also give us a lot of ability to participate in more mandates as they come out.

Sure. And sir, last question I had. If I look at Slide 7 of the presentation and the proportion of online PAN issuance has improved sharply in the last couple of years. And as I understand the contribution margins that we make in online is better than off-line, but this is not getting reflected in our numbers. So just if you can help me understand like how should one look at this mix change in impacting the profitability?

Right. So basically, yes, the online PAN issuances are definitely increasing and as part of the previous explanation that impact the projections also that we had provided, the overall online opportunity is definitely growing, while the physical issuances are almost staying flattish. So the entire growth that we are observing over the last few quarters is actually coming from online PAN issuances.

And you will anyway see the aggregate in terms of the operating margin. But within the tax business, this definitely has a positive impact. As you rightly said, the margins are better as you do online because there is some cost in the infrastructure and what you are doing does not have the requirement of an assisted model over here. So the margins are better, but naturally, there are various other things which go into the overall operating margins, which we are seeing at an aggregate level. But for this business, this is definitely creating the positive impact.

And just also on your question on this INR 45 crores. So basically, there was -- on the last date, there was money that was received from [indiscernible] also, I mean, from the government. And also there was an FD maturity on that very day in the evening. So that is how -- which is reinvested. So no other reason. This is a one-off as I said.

Next question is from the line of Dhaval Parekh from IIFL.

Sir, in your opening remarks, you highlighted that the investments that you're going to make in your lower businesses can have some bearing on the margins going ahead. So can you quantify what is the amount that you have budgeted for expanding our new businesses and the nature of such investments in FY '25?

So as you can see that while our existing business verticals, which are the core pillars as stated in the commentary as well as the press release. So the 3 businesses are actually growing by, I mean, 19% year-on-year overall top line. But at the same time, you will appreciate that the similar result is not sort of coming in the -- at a profit level. So the core reason over there is essentially the investment that we have made in the new business verticals in order to sort of make sure that they have continuous flow of investment and the capital is going in the technology. And basically, that means that first, you need to hire people and these people then create technologies, these technologies are sold in the marketplace, and that is how the recovery happens. So I mean, these are -- in the -- over the last 18 months or thereabout, there are the significant investments that we have already made. We are hoping that all the expectation is that in the coming 4 quarters, these businesses should start yielding sort of revenues to take care of their investments that are going for the year. But I think eventually, to recover all the investments that we have made, there is -- we expect that it should be 18 to 24-month trajectory for a full payback period.

Okay. So you -- I think we made 10% EBITDA margins in FY '24. So do you expect that to continue or improve going ahead?

Well, I wouldn't like to give a forward-looking guidance, but I would say that I would like to split it into 2 parts. The EBITDA margin on our existing 3 businesses, which deliver more than 95% revenues, is maintained. And whatever you see in terms of the reduction, et cetera, that is largely coming out of the investment that we have made in the new businesses. So you can do, I mean, back-of-the-hand calculation. So we expect that the investments, obviously, will continue to some extent. But at the same time, the recoveries or the revenue lines from the new business verticals, we expect these should grow from here.