Listing ratifies investor ecosystem: FirstCry founder

livemint.com:

Edited excerpts: Across our four business segments that are India multichannel, overseas business, Globalbees (brand aggregator) and preschools, it’s a $120 billion opportunity we are chasing. So having such a large market, there will be growth levers, and which we'll talk about separately, I'll just restrict myself to profitability right now. So, on profitability, India multichannel we grew our adjusted Ebitda profitability in FY22, we were at 5.9%, we made it to 6.2% in FY23, and now, FY24, we are at 8.8%.

And we have built a tremendous amount of strengths over the last 13 years, being the largest shopping destination online, with 75%, roughly of our GMV coming from online and 24-25% coming from offline. Our store network will grow by 350 this year, so that will continue to give us operating leverage. Plus, expanding our home brands will be a very significant part of our growth story alongwith curating 37 different third-party brands as well.

Investing in our supply chain moats, and getting operating leverage out from there as well. So, all of this will continue to drive both increasing the gross margin as well as operating leverage to be able to demonstrate what we demonstrated in the past to expand our operating margins going forward. International business is the only one where we are investing because it's a slightly younger business and is front loaded.

That's how you have to play that game, because it's a totally online business as well. I think years like 2021…those years were maybe frothy (in terms of valuations). I mean, in hindsight we can say that.