IndiaMart InterMesh, which listed on the stock exchanges in July, has reported a strong set of earnings in FY20. The stock has rallied over 100 percent from its listing price of Rs 973 and now trades above Rs 2,000. Dinesh Agarwal, founder and MD, said net paying subscriber addition slowed down in the last 2 quarters as against 5000-6000 that it had earlier.

“I an attribute it majorly to the economy as it’s going through a lot of macro pain which is resulting in SMEs to churn out completely because they are closing down their businesses or they are finding it difficult due to cash crunch to spend on advertising and discretionary spent like IndiaMart,” added Agarwal.

Talking about margins, he said, “Given that in the last 2 quarters we have not had good subscriber addition and the economy is also going through pain. So we are having issues with respect to keeping up with net customer addition as well as monetizing the SMEs. We have also increased the manpower in sales and service for this particular purpose.”

“In this quarter both our revenues and cost have increased in similar tandem. So I do not expect high EBITDA margin expansion from hereon. Once the economy stabilizes then we can look at that again,” he added.

Speaking about paid customer addition, Agarwal said, “Our target is to do 5,000 a quarter and we get an average revenue of about Rs 40,000 on an annualized basis.”

On cash front, he said, “Currently we have Rs 780 crore of total cash on our books and a large portion of that has been accumulated over the last 18 months.”

He further said that we have to keep cash to service deferred revenues. "We may look at doling out dividends at the end of the year," said Agarwal.