Q1-FY24 · Hitesh Oberoi
Companies have overhired, attrition rates have come down and their bench has grown, and it'll take maybe a quarter or two before things start going back to normal.
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Info Edge (India) · tone and specificity signals across the available quarters.
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Q1-FY24 · Sanjeev Bikhchandani
We think this is a good time to invest... If you have a long-term time horizon, we believe this is a good time to invest, but be careful.
Q1-FY24 · Hitesh Oberoi
The real challenge now is to now see how we can monetize these users who have joined the platform over the last few quarters, and that's what we're working on right now.
Q1-FY25 · Hitesh Oberoi
July 2024 JobSpeak report has also been very encouraging, and the JobSpeak Index grew by 12% year-on-year in July, and month-on-month, it grew by 11%. Fingers crossed. Let's see how this plays out over the next couple of months as well.
Q1-FY25 · Hitesh Oberoi
The IT-dependent segment of our recruitment business has been volatile, but it is recovering from the lows, with positive signs emerging in the last two quarters.
Q1-FY25 · Sanjeev Bikhchandani
If you exit in 7-8 years, you won't. You need to be there for a long, long time before you really get the value. So which is why we have a 12+ 2-year fund, because most funds are of shorter duration than that.
Q1-FY26 · Hitesh Oberoi
Till Q3, Q4 last year was very good for us. All domestic economy is doing well. Even IT services companies have started hiring. Growth in almost every segment was in double digits. Now, things slowed down in Q1 because of whatever happened, especially towards the second half of Q1.
Q1-FY26 · Hitesh Oberoi
Normally, it's easier to take price increases when there's a reasonably decent market for hiring. It's harder to push through price increases when demand is soft, right? We'll wait and see how things play out in the next one or two quarters.
Q1-FY26 · Hitesh Oberoi
We are cash-rich. In times when markets are slow, maybe sometimes competition slows down the spend. We can afford to spend. If you spend in a market where others are not spending, it helps you gain share.
Q2-FY24 · Hitesh Oberoi
We don't know when IT is going to recover. As of now, we are not seeing any recovery on the ground. So things are like they were three months ago.
Q2-FY24 · Hitesh Oberoi
We continue to invest very aggressively in our machine learning and AI capabilities across the company. That's not something we want to cut down on.
Q2-FY24 · Hitesh Oberoi
In real estate, the primary competition is actually not the other portals, it's actually players like Facebook and Google, who get a large chunk of the real estate advertising spend.
Q2-FY24 · Hitesh Oberoi
In Jeevansathi, we are actually the number three player. We may be 1/6th the size of the number one player, maybe 1/5th the size of the number two player. We are tiny in the grand scheme of things.
Q2-FY25 · Hitesh Oberoi
We had a tough five or six quarters, and we've grown in double digits maybe after five quarters of low single-digit growth. October was not bad. October JobSpeak looks good despite Diwali being in October this time. We are hoping that this momentum will continue at least for some more time.
Q2-FY25 · Hitesh Oberoi
If top-line continues to grow at 14%-15% per annum, the margins should get better going forward. We are not margin-driven in that sense. We focus on top line. And we, of course, are frugal when it comes to spending.
Q2-FY25 · Hitesh Oberoi
We are seeing a lot of opportunity to grow faster in some of the new things that we are doing. AI is going to almost every new feature which is being developed or every new innovation inside Info Edge now. We have over 500 models across AI and machine learning that are driving new products, features, and enhancements.
Q2-FY26 · Hitesh Oberoi
Clearly, it's not a market where it's not a hot market, and it's not a market where companies are hiring like they used to hire maybe three years ago or two years ago. Our sense of the situation on the ground right now is that we have to fight for all our renewals. We have to fight for upgrades. We have to fight for sales.
Q2-FY26 · Hitesh Oberoi
The real challenge right now is that a lot of our big customers are not hiring as much as they were hiring till some time back, whether it's IT services companies, which is, or whether it's the recruitment firms who hire through us, their business is not as they're not hiring as many people as they were hiring earlier.
Q2-FY26 · Hitesh Oberoi
A lot will depend on, of course, how much we want to keep investing to gain share... We need to get to the 20%-25% level [revenue growth], and we need to stay there for several years. If we are able to do that, then we have high operating leverage in these platform businesses.
Q2-FY26 · Hitesh Oberoi
We are open to consolidation in both matrimony and real estate. We've said that for a while. If the right opportunity arises at the right price for the right kind of company, we'd be more than happy to acquire.
Q3-FY24 · Hitesh Oberoi
We didn't see any recovery in Q3. Q3 was, IT hiring was slow in Q3 as well. What we've been seeing for the last three quarters now is a serious slowdown in IT hiring.
Q3-FY24 · Hitesh Oberoi
If IT companies bounce back, if they start hiring like they used to hire even pre-COVID, I mean, that's very good news for us. And if we are able to grow our IT business by 10%-12%, and if we are able to grow our non-IT business by 14%-15%, we can aspire to grow in double digits.
Q3-FY24 · Sanjeev Bikhchandani
When there is a shortage of money, you have to break even. I think we are seeing that. Enough companies are doing it, and more are doing it than I think I had anticipated 16 months ago when I tweeted that.
Q3-FY25 · Hitesh Oberoi
If IT hiring continues to improve, recruitment firms which sort of work closely with IT companies should also benefit. And as when that starts to happen, then our business from them should also start looking up.
Q3-FY25 · Hitesh Oberoi
We are not very happy with our performance internally on the new home side. We are working on a few things, but we have not seen the kind of success we would have wanted to see.
Q3-FY25 · Sanjeev Bikhchandani
If you have an investment in a company, you possibly have a future. If you exit and take out cash, you've only got cash. And cash has no future other than 6%.
Q3-FY26 · Hitesh Oberoi
India is different... In India, job seekers are not selective. You get inundated, overwhelmed with applications... If these AI agents lead to more spam, more job seeker spam, I think the value of databases like Naukri may actually go up over time.
Q3-FY26 · Hitesh Oberoi
We've emerged as a leader in the Hindi market with a 45% profile share. Our focus remains on building a more dominant position in these markets, which should help drive higher monetization over time.
Q3-FY26 · Hitesh Oberoi
If more premium hiring starts to happen through our platform then even for the same volume, we'll be able to get higher value.
Q4-FY24 · Hitesh Oberoi
FY2024 was a challenging year for the overall recruitment business, largely because of the slowdown in IT hiring, which is approximately 45%-50% of our business, directly and indirectly, if you include the business from recruitment consultants.
Q4-FY24 · Hitesh Oberoi
We are now perhaps at a stage where some of these companies are, you know, the bench utilization rates are back to near pre-COVID levels, and they have started replacing some people who are leaving.
Q4-FY24 · Sanjeev Bikhchandani
The stress test that, you know, Chintan did, and then presented to the board and to Hitesh and me, was that, 'Okay, Chintan, if revenue goes to zero. If marketing expenditure is zero and increments are zero, how long can the company last on the current cash balance?' And the answer he came back with was three years.
Q4-FY25 · Hitesh Oberoi
We are a number three player in the matrimony market. The industry is what it is. It's a three-player market. Until the time it continues to be a three-player market, it's going to be very, very hard for any one player to make high margin or to grow very rapidly.
Q4-FY25 · Hitesh Oberoi
AI continues to surprise us. AI is evolving rapidly. It's like you can have AI in HR, you can have AI in finance, you can have AI in product offerings. It's like that kind of technology. As far as AI hiring startups go, we are not seeing any impact from any AI hiring startup as yet. I'm sure there's a lot of action. I'm sure there are lots of startups getting funded. There's nothing that we are seeing on the horizon as yet which is impacting our business.
Q4-FY25 · Hitesh Oberoi
We have not really thought about consolidation [in Jobhai]. Right now, it looks like it is working. We will at least give it some more time before we start thinking consolidation.