BLS International Services posted a good set of numbers in the first quarter. The company has partnered with e-commerce giant Flipkart to provide last-mile delivery services in semi-urban and rural areas of India. So far they have catered to passport, visas, and personal IDs business from the government.

To talk about the rationale of getting into new business and the opportunities that the company foresees, CNBC-TV18 spoke with Shikhar Aggarwal, Joint Managing Director of the company.

Aggarwal said, “We are working in 66 countries with clients in governments globally in visa consulates and digital services. Within India, we have tied up with different states like Punjab and UP where we are providing citizen services on behalf of those states and UP itself we have opened more than 10,000 offices in the past few months, wherein people have to come to our offices to avail the citizen services.”

“So, a large number of e-commerce players have approached us to provide assisted ecommerce services, which will be like a value added services that we will be offering to. People can come to our centres to book mobile phones or different products that they want to buy and we will get a commission on these products,” he added.

“BLS now has a big region tier II and tier III cities in India, we are serving the rural population across these states. We have a presence, we have our centres people can come to the centres, they can pay the money to us, they can do the cooking and they have the option whether to collect the goods from my centre or we deliver it directly to their houses.”

When asked how much money they would make from this business on an ancillary basis, Aggarwal said, “It depends, right now, we are already getting a good traction we just started recently, this is a value added services wherein we are already getting customers from main government services and are targeting customers for these kinds of services. So it is a very new product for us, we feel that this is where the big growth market will come from buying needs of people in the next few years.”

“We recently also won a new contract with the National Health Authority under Ayushman Bharat, we have tied up with UTI to provide validation verification for the Ayushman Bharat cards so people can come to our centres all across India and avail the services or delivery of Ayushman Bharat card when they are allowed to go to different hospitals and avail benefits up to Rs five lakh.”

On revenue accretion from the new business, he said, “In quarter one FY22, we did a revenue of Rs 182 crore with the EBITDA of Rs 18.8 crore, which was 86% growth compared to quarter and quarter. And this revenue only consisted of a revenues from consulate and citizen service business, while visa service revenue was very minimal in this quarter.”

“Going forward as the demand for visa comes in, as revenge travel comes in. A lot of people are travelling you can see the prices of tickets going up because there is so much pent up demand. So we expect revenue to go up for a company and we can proudly say that, you know, we are not only dependent on the visa business for the revenue that can be seen from the last quarter numbers.”

Moreover, regarding the different new contracts that we have won in Citizen Services and even in visa sourcing services, we won seven new contracts last year and definitely when COVID norms ease up, you will definitely see a big uptake in margins and revenue for the company.

For the full interview, watch video

(Edited by : Bivekananda Biswas)