Will be able to retain half the cost savings during pandemic: IndiaMART InterMESH

IndiaMART InterMESH posted a steady quarter. Revenue has gone up but margins start to moderate and are down 320 basis points on quarter on quarter.

“After a long 9 months of ups and downs, finally January, February, and March almost felt like opening up of the economy as well as for settling down of the SMEs. Our collections from operations have grown over 35 percent in the quarter,” Dinesh Agarwal, Founder & CEO of the company told CNBC-TV18.

“We could add 4,000 customers in the quarter,” he said.

On qualified institutional placement (QIP) Agarwal said, “We completed our QIP of about Rs 1,070 crore, and we have done three investments out of that. All of these are basically investments or financial investments in strategic areas only.”

On margins he said, “We were running at 25-30 percent EBITDA margin pre the pandemic time which was increasing every quarter by one or two percent. But because of this pandemic we had to do away with lot of offices, we have not be able to work on our full capacity. We were not able to hire many people as we would have had. We have saved certain costs and half of that cost saving will probably remain and half of that cost saving will come back.”

“Though temporarily our EBITDA margins levels had gone all the way up to 45-50 percent we believe that this should come down anywhere around 35-40 percent in the long run,” he said.