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Informist, Friday, Nov. 8, 2024

By Steffy Maria Paul and Sunil Raghu

MUMBAI – Despite some headwinds in the company's study-abroad platform due to tighter restrictions for international students, the demand for talent is recovering, Hitesh Oberoi, managing director and chief executive officer of Info Edge India Ltd. said Friday. After several quarters of soft demand, the performance of the company's recruitment business improved on the back of growth across all segments, he said in a post-earnings call. The recruitment solutions business, the largest revenue-generating segment for the company, reported a revenue of INR 4.95 billion for the quarter, up 5% sequentially. 

Elaborating on the demand environment in the recruitment segment, the company said the campus placement season for the current financial year for graduates began on a positive note compared to last year. While private universities have broadened their offerings, a slight increase in demand for both MBA and computer science programmes was noted. The company added that it was investing in making its content more comprehensive and student-friendly. 

The online classified services company reported a net profit of 858.76 million for the September quarter, down 63% on quarter, missing analysts' estimate of INR 2.43 billion by a wide margin. The company attributed this to INR 2.60 billion of deferred tax outgo for the quarter due to recent changes in long-term capital gain tax rules and a deferred tax charge of INR 3.63 billion relating to previous years accounted under other comprehensive income. The company reported a revenue of INR 6.56 billion, up 2.69% sequentially.

The New Delhi-based company offers services across categories such as recruitment, matrimony, real estate, travel, and education. Talking about its recruitment business, the company said its IT segment grew by 12%, non-IT by 20%, and the recruitment consultant segment by about 10%. The utilisation rates for IT companies have recovered to pre-pandemic levels while those of non-IT markets have continued to do well, Oberoi said and added that the share of hiring by IT customers on its platforms was higher than its non-IT customers, he said. 

Key non-IT sectors such as banking, financial services, and insurance, healthcare, infrastructure, and manufacturing also saw double-digit growth during the quarter, the company said. The company said its Naukri platform, an application which connects jobseekers with recruiters, now hosts around 103 million resumes and has 16 million installations. 

Talking about its Naukri Gulf business, the company said while the contribution of the business to the revenue of the recruitment segment was not large, it expects the business to clock revenues of INR 1 billion this year. The company said that the bulk of its business for Naukri Gulf came from the United Arab Emirates, and its operations in Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi were not large. The company added that currently it had no plans of expanding Naukri Gulf into more countries as it would like to focus on its existing operations. The company was not looking to make acquisitions in the near future for its recruitment business, as it was in the process of scaling up the startups it has already acquired, Oberoi said. 

For its real-estate segment, the company said its broker business was growing faster than its developer business. The company plans to invest further to improve the matchmaking recommendations of its matrimony business, while working on expanding the monetisation opportunities on the platform and actively driving user acquisition. 

Expecting the growth across segments to continue, the company said it expects its billing for Oct-Dec to grow over the current levels of 14%. Talking about the company's marketing spend, Oberoi said the company was being frugal and did not have a big budget for marketing for the December quarter. The company said its headcount on Sept. 30 was 5,820. Currently, Info Edge's AI team consists of 100 data scientists and machine learning engineers and the company will continue to invest aggressively in AI, Oberoi said.

On Friday, shares of Info Edge closed at INR 7,654.60 on the National Stock Exchange, down 3.1%.  End 

Edited by Vidhi Verma

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