Info Edge

Timeline

1. 1995Info Edge is founded by Sanjeev Bikhchandani, with a business built on classified advertising rather than on a website.
2. 1997Naukri.com goes live in April, put together with help from Bikhchandani's brother and friends.
3. 1998Jeevansathi.com is launched and the company enters the matrimony market.
4. 2000The dotcom bust forces a change of model, and the company keeps a physical sales force instead of selling online only.Investors including ICICI Ventures stay with the company through the bust.
5. 2003The company turns profitable and has reported a profit in every financial year since.
6. 200599acres.com is launched for property listings.
7. 2006The company lists on the Indian exchanges at an issue price of 320 rupees a share, under the ticker Naukri.
8. 2006NaukriGulf.com is started for the Gulf recruitment market.
9. 2008Shiksha.com is launched to carry education listings and student leads.
10. 2009FirstNaukri.com is started for campus hiring.
11. 2010Info Edge writes its first cheque into Zomato, then called FoodieBay, with 4.7 crore rupees of seed money.
12. 2010Hitesh Oberoi takes charge as chief executive and managing director, freeing Bikhchandani to concentrate on investments.
13. 2013A total of 86 crore rupees has gone into Zomato across four rounds since 2010, and Info Edge is its controlling shareholder.
14. 2014The company raises 750 crore rupees through a qualified institutional placement, much of it earmarked for 99acres.
15. 2015Zomato ceases to be a subsidiary as later funding rounds dilute the stake, although Info Edge stays the largest single shareholder.
16. 2017AmbitionBox, a workplace review and salary site, is brought into the group.
17. 2018For the year ended March 2018 the company reports a profit of 182.37 crore rupees on revenue of 915.49 crore rupees, and writes off or provides for 186 crore rupees of failed investments.
18. 2019Naukri.com acquires the specialist recruitment portals iimjobs.com and hirist.com.
19. 2020Info Edge Ventures is set up and the company opens a 100 crore rupee fund for early stage internet businesses.
20. 2021Zomato lists in July, Info Edge sells 2.32 per cent of its holding in the offer for sale, and the 15.23 per cent it keeps is worth about 15,000 crore rupees.
21. 2021The company acquires Zwayam, an HR software business, and DoSelect, a hiring assessment platform.
22. 2021Policybazaar, an Info Edge investee since the early years, lists on the exchanges in November.
23. 2022Info Edge takes a 76 per cent stake in the dating app Aisle.
24. 2026For the quarter ended March 2026 the company reports total income of 1,365.04 crore rupees and a profit after tax of 565.80 crore rupees.
25. 2026In October the board approves 200 crore rupees of further investment in two wholly owned subsidiaries.

What it does

Info Edge (India) Limited is an Indian internet company that owns a small number of large classified advertising businesses and a portfolio of minority stakes in younger internet companies. Its four best known properties are Naukri.com for jobs, 99acres for property, Jeevansathi for matrimony and Shiksha for education. The company has been listed on the Indian exchanges since 2006 and is one of the very few internet businesses of the first dotcom wave in India that is still independent, profitable and public.^[1]

The operating model is simple to describe. Each portal collects a large audience of people looking for a job, a house, a spouse or a college, and sells access to that audience. Recruiters pay to post vacancies and to search a candidate database, property brokers and developers pay for listings and leads, and colleges pay for student enquiries. The businesses are asset light, with revenue coming from subscriptions and advertising rather than from inventory.^[1][3]

The second half of the company is its investment arm. Info Edge takes minority positions in consumer internet businesses, usually at an early stage, and holds them for years. Zomato, now called Eternal, and Policybazaar, now PB Fintech, are the two that changed the company's balance sheet. The portfolio means that the profit and loss statement mixes a stable subscription business with the mark to market swings of a venture fund, a point that management and analysts have argued about for a decade.^[4][5]

Geography matters to the story. Info Edge is headquartered in Noida in the National Capital Region, with its registered office in Nehru Place in New Delhi, and it grew out of the Delhi advertising and classified environment of the 1990s rather than out of Bengaluru's software services culture.^[1][2]

History

The company was founded in 1995 by Sanjeev Bikhchandani, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad who had worked in advertising and in the consumer products trade before starting on his own. The first version of the business was not a website at all; it reproduced classified advertisements from newspapers and built a database of jobs and employers. Naukri.com went live in April 1997 with help from his brother and a group of friends.^[1]

Jeevansathi followed in 1998 and took the company into matrimony, a market where the advertising spend was large and the customer was willing to pay for a subscription. The dotcom crash of 2000 and 2001 nearly ended the business. Info Edge survived by keeping a physical sales force, visiting recruitment consultants and employers in around twenty cities and selling them on the idea of online hiring, at a time when most of its rivals had no sales presence at all. That decision to stay part sales company and part internet company is what carried it through.^[3]

The company has been profitable since 2003. It launched 99acres in 2005 for property listings, listed on the exchanges in 2006 at an issue price of 320 rupees a share, and added Shiksha in 2008 for education. The 2006 listing was a genuine surprise to the market: Bikhchandani was told repeatedly that his price was too high, and the stock touched 623.80 rupees within about twenty minutes of listing and went on to 1,688 rupees in just over a year, briefly trading at a price to earnings multiple above a hundred.^[3]

From 2010 the company began investing outside its own verticals. The first cheque was 4.7 crore rupees of seed money in Zomato, then a restaurant menu site called FoodieBay. Investments followed in Policybazaar, Meritnation, Mydala, Canvera, BigStylist, Nogle, StudyPlaces and Ninety Nine Labels, and not all of them worked: by the year ended March 2018 the company had written off or provided for 186 crore rupees across its portfolio, and its then chief financial officer argued that the losses on the internet businesses were really investments in intangibles such as technology, brand and traffic that never appear on the balance sheet.^[4]

Zomato's listing in July 2021 reset the arithmetic of the whole company. Info Edge had put in 4.7 crore rupees as seed money in 2010 and had invested a further 327 crore rupees across later rounds. It sold 2.32 per cent of the company in the offer for sale and kept 15.23 per cent, which was worth about 15,000 crore rupees within a day of listing, a return of more than a thousand times on the first cheque.^[5][6]

The last five years have been about turning that luck into a structure. Info Edge Ventures, set up in 2020, now runs separate funds for early stage deals, and the core business has been strengthened with bolt on acquisitions: AmbitionBox in 2017, iimjobs and hirist in 2019, Zwayam and DoSelect in 2021, and a 76 per cent stake in the dating app Aisle in 2022.^[9][10][11][12][13][15]

Naukri and the recruitment business

Naukri.com is the engine of the group. It is the largest job board in India, and for most of the company's history it has produced more than half of its revenue and effectively all of its profit, with the surplus from recruiters paying for every other experiment inside and outside the company. Analysts who have followed the group for years describe the recruitment business as its crown jewel.^[4][5][7]

The business sells three things: job postings, access to a searchable database of candidate profiles, and paid prominence for employers. Its customers are a long tail of small and medium companies, recruitment consultants and head hunters, plus large employers. The long tail is the moat, because it is expensive to win one recruiter at a time and cheap to keep them once their hiring records, saved searches and candidate pipelines live in the product.^[3]

Naukri's growth has always tracked hiring rather than the stock market. In the slowdown of 2013 and 2014 the recruitment business stalled: revenue moved from 83 crore rupees in the first quarter of 2012-13 to 91 crore rupees in the third quarter of 2013-14, and the company admitted that when gross domestic product growth falls, employment growth falls with it. When hiring came back, so did the portal.^[3]

The company has added paid products around the core board: paid resume writing and profile highlighting for candidates, employer branding pages, a campus hiring product in FirstNaukri from 2009, a Gulf edition in NaukriGulf from 2006, and a hiring assessment platform through DoSelect in 2021. AmbitionBox adds employer reviews and salary data, which keeps candidates inside the group's properties while they research a company.^[10][13]

The most valuable recent addition is the mid and senior management segment. iimjobs covers management graduates and hirist covers technology hiring, and both are subscription products with better realisation per recruiter than the general board. Buying them was cheaper than building a second audience from scratch.^[11]

99acres and real estate

99acres.com was launched in 2005 and is the group's second largest business. It ties up with brokers and developers to list properties and sells leads and advertising to them. When the company raised 750 crore rupees through a qualified institutional placement in 2014, a large part of the money was earmarked for building the property business out.^[3]

The real estate portal market was, and still is, a fight over listings and traffic. By 2014 99acres claimed about 600,000 listings against roughly 500,000 for its closest competitor MagicBricks, and worked with about 15,000 brokers and 3,000 developers. Its then chief executive described the prize clearly: real estate advertising in print was a market of about 3,000 crore rupees a year while online was under 250 crore rupees, and the job was to move that share from under ten per cent to thirty or forty per cent.^[3]

The unit followed the Naukri playbook, which is to build a large direct sales force instead of waiting for brokers to come online. By 2014, 99acres had about 800 employees and more than 500 of them were in sales. Competition arrived in the form of Housing.com and CommonFloor with better products, and the market later consolidated. 99acres stayed in the red for years, and it remains the clearest example of the group's willingness to run a loss making portal with cash from recruiters.^[3][4]

The segment is important to the modern investment case for a different reason. Property advertising is cyclical and it is the part of the business most exposed to a housing downturn, so it is the piece analysts watch when recruitment is steady and they want to know what could go wrong.^[2]

Jeevansathi and the matrimony market

Jeevansathi.com was launched in 1998 and competes in a market that India had already organised around community and language. Registration is free and money is made only when two registered users want to contact each other, which makes conversion from free to paid the single number that decides whether the business works.^[1][3]

By 2014 Jeevansathi was the third player behind BharatMatrimony and Shaadi.com, with a conversion rate of about ten per cent. The company's own plan was to push that to twelve or fourteen per cent using predictive analysis on user behaviour, and its chief executive was blunt that the portal would start making money once it did. Rivals argued that a third player could not break into the top two without a sharply differentiated product, and that assessment has largely held.^[3]

Matrimony is strategically useful to the group even so. It brings a large, highly engaged, Indian audience into the same accounts, search and payment systems that serve jobs and property, and it gives the company a defensive position in a category where users stay for months rather than minutes.^[3]

The company later bought into adjacent forms of matching rather than expanding matrimony itself, taking a 76 per cent stake in the dating app Aisle in 2022. That deal extended the group from arranged marriage into dating, a smaller market in India but one with a younger and faster growing user base.^[15]

Shiksha and the education business

Shiksha.com was launched in 2008 to do for colleges what 99acres does for property: collect the listings, capture the enquiries and sell them to institutions. It makes money from listings and from leads passed to colleges and coaching businesses.^[1][3]

The reason the company built it is visible in the advertising data of the time. Education was the second largest advertising category in Indian print after real estate, worth roughly 2,000 crore rupees a year, and almost all of it was offline. Info Edge's chief executive described the plan as simply capturing a share of that existing spend as it moved to the internet.^[3]

Shiksha has never been a large profit centre in its own right. It sits with Jeevansathi and 99acres in the group of domestic portals funded by Naukri, and it is treated as a long term option on Indian education spending rather than a near term earner. Two of the smaller education investments, Meritnation and NoPaperForms, went further: NoPaperForms, which trades as Meritto and sells enrolment software to institutions, filed confidential papers with the markets regulator for an initial public offering, showing that the education portfolio can produce more than a portal.^[4][16]

The education category also produced one of the honest admissions in the company's recent results commentary, when it told analysts that artificial intelligence search had cut the traffic and the billings of Shiksha, the clearest sign yet that the older classified portals are exposed to changes in how people search.^[2]

Investments: Zomato, now Eternal

Info Edge's most famous decision was to send an email to two strangers. In 2010, Bikhchandani wrote to Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah, whose restaurant menu site FoodieBay he had found online, asking whether they needed funding. They met within three hours and agreed on the shape of a deal within two days; Goyal later said they chose Info Edge over other investors because it moved quickly. The first cheque was 1 million dollars, or about 4.7 crore rupees.^[5][6]

The company kept investing. By 2013 it had put in a total of 86 crore rupees across four rounds and had become Zomato's controlling shareholder; by 2015, after six rounds, its total commitment was about 327 crore rupees and its holding was 50.1 per cent, at a time when Zomato was valued at about 660 million dollars and had just bought Urbanspoon in the United States. The 2014 and 2015 rounds also made the group India's most visible example of a listed company using its own cash as a venture fund.^[5][8]

Zomato ceased to be a subsidiary in September 2015 as later funding rounds diluted the holding, and Info Edge took the position that it was better to own a smaller slice of a business run by its founders than a larger slice it controlled. When the company finally listed in July 2021 it became the first Indian consumer internet unicorn on the exchanges. Its shares opened at 115 rupees on the BSE, a premium of nearly 52 per cent to the top of the price band, and the company was valued at about 98,000 crore rupees during the first day of trading.^[1][6]

Info Edge sold about 2.32 per cent, or 49.3 million shares, in the offer for sale and kept a holding of about 15.23 per cent, worth about 15,000 crore rupees within a day of listing. Bikhchandani described it as the ultimate evidence that India should invest more behind its startups and early stage funds. For a company whose own market value was around 1.7 billion dollars in 2015, the Zomato position became larger than the operating business that had funded it.^[5][6]

Investments: Policybazaar and the rest of the portfolio

Policybazaar was the second big winner. Info Edge invested in the insurance comparison site in 2008, before the website had even launched, and held about 23 per cent by 2015 when the company was valued at 100 million dollars. It was still on the register when Policybazaar's parent, PB Fintech, listed in November 2021, and the listing made Info Edge one of the largest winners of that season of new age offerings.^[5][14]

The remaining portfolio is a long list of minority stakes in consumer internet businesses: Meritnation and NoPaperForms in education, Canvera in photography, Mydala in local deals, BigStylist in beauty services, Aisle in dating, and Zomato's one time rival in restaurant discovery. The company has written off several of them, including StudyPlaces, Ninety Nine Labels, Nogle Technologies and BigStylist, and has provided for others.^[4]

What the portfolio gives the group is optionality that a job board alone would not have. It also gives the accounts their most volatile line. Because the holdings are marked to market, the profit of a quarter can swing by hundreds of crores on a single bad month for new age technology shares, which is exactly what happened in the March 2026 quarter when the fall in the shares of Eternal and PB Fintech alone was reported as a valuation hit of more than 8,000 crore rupees on the group's holdings.^[2]

The portfolio has also changed the company's cash flows. Zomato alone returned roughly 300 crore rupees when Info Edge sold part of its stake to Ant Financial in 2018 and then a multiple of that at the listing, which is what allowed the group to keep funding loss making portals without raising fresh equity.^[6]

Info Edge Ventures and the fund business

In 2020 the company formalised what had been an informal habit and set up Info Edge Ventures, an investment arm with its own team and its own mandate. Alongside it, the group opened a 100 crore rupee venture fund to write early stage cheques in consumer internet and technology businesses, on the same logic that had produced Zomato: a listed company sitting on surplus cash from a subscription business can buy a portfolio of options that a pure venture fund would have to raise money to own.^[9]

The structure now runs three vehicles, the Info Edge Venture Fund, Info Edge Capital and Capital 2B, and invests on behalf of both the company and outside limited partners. The funds gave the group a way to keep investing at a scale larger than its own balance sheet, and gave the core business a pipeline of companies whose hiring, real estate and education needs it can serve.^[1]

The company has been careful about conflict of interest, and Bikhchandani has said publicly that he makes no personal angel investments so that Info Edge never competes with its own founder. All the group's investing is done through the company and its funds, which is unusual among Indian entrepreneurs of his generation.^[5]

Info Edge Ventures is also the reason the group keeps appearing in news about artificial intelligence, deep technology and software rather than only in news about job boards. It has become a way for the company to stay close to whatever is being built by the next generation of founders without betting the operating business on it.^[9]

Acquisitions and takeovers

• AmbitionBox (2017): a workplace review and salary comparison site, bought to add employer content to the recruitment business and to keep candidates inside the group while they research a company.^[10]
• iimjobs.com and hirist.com (2019): two specialist recruitment portals covering management and technology hiring respectively, both subscription businesses with higher revenue per recruiter than the general board.^[11]
• Zwayam (2021): an HR technology business whose software helps employers manage applications, bought to move the group from advertising vacancies to running the hiring workflow.^[12]
• DoSelect (2021): a hiring assessment platform, which allows employers to test candidates before an interview.^[13]
• Aisle (2022): a 76 per cent stake in a dating app, extending the group from matrimony into dating.^[15]
• NoPaperForms, which trades as Meritto: an education enrolment software business in which the group invested between 2017 and 2018, and which later filed confidential papers with the markets regulator for a listing of its own.^[1][16]

Revenue and financials

The company reports on a consolidated basis that includes its operating portals and the marked to market value of its investments, which is why its profit line moves more than the business does. For the year ended March 2018, a useful reference point from before the investment gains dominated the accounts, Info Edge reported a profit of 182.37 crore rupees on revenue of 915.49 crore rupees, of which Naukri alone contributed 668 crore rupees of revenue and 366 crore rupees of profit.^[4]

Five quarters of recent numbers tell the current story. For the quarter ended June 2025 total income was 1,004.08 crore rupees with a profit after tax of 295.92 crore rupees. In the September 2025 quarter income was 967.23 crore rupees and profit 316.40 crore rupees. In the December 2025 quarter income was 1,006.95 crore rupees and profit 271.71 crore rupees. In the March 2026 quarter income rose to 1,365.04 crore rupees and profit after tax to 565.80 crore rupees, which was reported as a rise of about 22 per cent in profit over the same quarter a year earlier, with a dividend recommended alongside it. In the June 2026 quarter income was 1,073.01 crore rupees and profit 445.73 crore rupees.^[2]

The shape of those numbers is worth reading carefully. The March quarter is seasonally the strongest because it is when many recruiters renew annual subscriptions, and the June quarter that follows is always weaker. The March 2026 quarter was also flattered by the gains on the investment portfolio before the fall in new age technology shares in the following months, which the company told the market had cost its holdings more than 8,000 crore rupees in value.^[2]

On the cost side, the business remains asset light and cash generative. Employee cost was about 40.8 per cent of operating revenue in the year ended March 2026, interest cost was under one per cent of operating revenue, and the company has paid down no meaningful debt because it has never needed to borrow. A dividend yield of about 0.68 per cent and a price to earnings ratio of about 50 in October 2026 describe a stock the market still prices as a growth company rather than as a job board.^[2]

The most important number for an owner of the shares is not revenue at all. It is the difference between the value of the stakes in Eternal, PB Fintech and the rest of the portfolio and the market value of Info Edge itself. When that gap narrows, as it did in May 2026 when the group took an 8,000 crore rupee valuation hit in a single quarter, the market is reminded that this is a holding company with an excellent operating business attached rather than the other way round.^[2]

Shareholding and ownership

Info Edge is professionally run but promoter controlled. The promoter group held 37.47 per cent of the company in June 2026, down slightly from 37.59 per cent in September 2025, with no shares pledged. There is no single dominant shareholder beyond the founders' group and no history of the promoter block being used as collateral.^[2]

Institutions own most of the rest. Foreign institutional investors held 23.72 per cent in June 2026, down from 30.33 per cent nine months earlier, and domestic institutional investors held 27.17 per cent, up from 21.01 per cent, with mutual funds alone at 19.21 per cent. The shift from foreign to domestic ownership through the period is part of the wider pattern in Indian mid and large cap stocks, and it has coincided with a fall of about 7.5 per cent in the share over the year to October 2026.^[2]

Non promoter shareholders have always owned a majority of the company. That was true in 2014, when Info Edge said non promoter shareholders held over 55 per cent after the 2006 listing, and it is still true now. Bikhchandani's argument at the time was that investors would accept a blended model in which the stable recruitment business funded riskier internet bets, as long as the recruitment business remained predictable.^[5]

The company has never done a large secondary sale of the promoter stake and has not taken significant outside capital into the parent. With the exception of the 2014 qualified institutional placement, the operating business has been funded from its own cash flow, which is why the group could keep funding loss making portals and startup investments at the same time.^[3]

Employees and offices

The company's registered office is on the ground floor of 94 Meghdoot Building in Nehru Place, New Delhi, and its corporate base is in Noida in the National Capital Region. The recruitment business is run out of Noida with sales offices in the large cities, and the property, matrimony and education portals share the same back office and payment systems.^[1][2]

The workforce has always been sales heavy, and that is a deliberate design choice rather than an accident. Naukri grew by putting salespeople in about twenty cities to teach recruitment consultants how to hire online, and 99acres copied the model with about 500 of its 800 employees in sales in 2014. Employee cost was about 40.84 per cent of operating revenue in the year ended March 2026, which is high for a technology company and normal for a company that sells subscriptions one customer at a time.^[2][3]

Outside India, the group has a presence through NaukriGulf, which serves employers in the Gulf countries, and it holds stakes in businesses that operate in several markets, including Zomato, which entered the United States, Australia and Canada before its listing. The parent itself, however, remains overwhelmingly an India business.^[1][5][8]

Headcount is not the number the company asks to be judged on. Its own framing is that the internet businesses are asset light but operating expense heavy, with the money going into people, brand and technology rather than into buildings, which is why it has consistently reported lower capital expenditure and higher employee cost than a traditional media company of the same size.^[4]

Founders and leadership

Sanjeev Bikhchandani founded the company in 1995 and remains its executive vice chairman. He is an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad and worked in advertising and consumer products before starting Info Edge, and he has said that the thought of investing in other companies came to him around 2008, when the core business was generating more cash than it could reinvest in four verticals. He is also unusual among his generation of entrepreneurs for having made no personal angel investments, keeping all the group's investing inside Info Edge to avoid competing with it.^[4][5]

Hitesh Oberoi took over as chief executive and managing director in 2010 so that Bikhchandani could concentrate on external investments, and he has run the operating company since. The split between the builder and the funder is the company's management signature: Bikhchandani finds and funds businesses, Oberoi runs the portals and their sales forces.^[3][5]

The board and the finance function have been central to the way the company explains itself. Its chief financial officer was the person who argued publicly, in the middle of the write offs of the year ended March 2018, that internet businesses should not be judged on profit and loss alone because their investment goes through the expense line rather than the balance sheet. Whatever an analyst thinks of that argument, it has been applied consistently.^[4]

The founder's reputation in the market rests on two things that are hard to separate. Inside the company he built a job board that has been profitable for more than two decades, and outside it he backed Zomato and Policybazaar before almost anyone else. Renuka Ramnath, who ran ICICI Ventures when it invested in Info Edge and stayed through the dotcom bust, has said his strongest quality was building a robust business model and having the confidence to change it when required. ICICI Ventures made more than 28 times its money.^[5]

Competition

In recruitment, Naukri's main competition has always come from two directions: other job boards, principally TimesJobs, and the professional network LinkedIn, which does not sell the same inventory but competes for the recruiter's attention and the candidate's profile. The Indian market also has a large informal hiring economy that no portal has ever captured. Naukri's defence is depth of listings and the database of candidates who have already been contacted by recruiters on the platform.^[1][3]

In property, 99acres fought MagicBricks, Housing.com and CommonFloor, and in the case of the last two it faced better funded products. The market has since become a fight between the listed portals and a large informal network of brokers, with the portals making their money from the developers and brokers who need leads.^[3]

In matrimony, Jeevansathi has been third behind BharatMatrimony and Shaadi.com for years, and the market has proved difficult for a third player to crack without a sharply differentiated product. The company's answer has been to buy adjacencies, taking control of Aisle in dating rather than trying to outspend the two leaders in matrimony.^[3][15]

In education, Shiksha competes with a fragmented field of coaching and college directories and now with search engines that answer questions directly. Artificial intelligence search has already dented its traffic and billings, which is a warning that applies to every classified business the company owns: the value of a portal is partly the value of being the place people go to ask a question, and if a general assistant answers the question better, the listing site loses its reason to be visited.^[2]

Controversies and criticism

The largest single criticism of the company has been that it funds loss making ventures with money earned from a profitable job board. In the year ended March 2018 it wrote off 53 crore rupees across four startups and provided for another 133 crore rupees, mostly on the deals site Mydala, and at the same time reported a quarterly loss for the first time in more than ten quarters. Analysts then and since have argued that apart from 99acres and Zomato, the portfolio contained few successes, and that the company's own shareholders were being asked to act as limited partners in a venture fund they had not chosen.^[4]

Management's answer is that the losses are investments in intangible assets, that the average estimated fair value of the portfolio is far above its cost, and that only 53 crore rupees of a 535 crore rupee investment programme had actually gone bad net of provisions. The counter argument, made by the same analysts, is that public market investors cannot mark up an unlisted portfolio the way a venture fund does, and that the profit reported each quarter depends on how the market prices companies the company does not control.^[4]

The second strand of criticism is cyclical: that the core business is a proxy for white collar hiring and nothing else. The 2013 slowdown proved the point when Naukri's growth stalled for seven quarters, and the same sensitivity means the company's revenue can weaken whenever Indian companies stop hiring, whatever its investments are worth.^[3]

The third is newer and more structural. Artificial intelligence has started to reduce the traffic and the billings of Shiksha, and search engines and chat assistants increasingly answer the questions that classified portals were built to answer. The company has begun putting its own artificial intelligence features into the recruitment products, but the risk that the value of a listings business erodes as search changes is now an explicit theme in its own commentary rather than an outside critique.^[2]

Reading the numbers

Anyone valuing Info Edge has to value two very different things at once. The operating business is a subscription company that converts hiring demand into cash with low capital expenditure and high margins, and it can be compared with other classified businesses. The investment portfolio is a venture fund whose assets are marked to market, and its value moves with the shares of Eternal and PB Fintech as much as with the performance of the underlying portals.^[2][6]

The cleanest way to see the split is the difference between the profit the operating business generates and the profit the group reports. In the quarter ended June 2026 the group reported total income of 1,073.01 crore rupees and a profit after tax of 445.73 crore rupees, a net margin of about 41.5 per cent. No subscription business of that size earns a margin of 41 per cent on its own; the gap is the portfolio, marked to market.^[2]

The second number to watch is the growth of the recruitment business rather than the group total. Naukri has historically contributed more than half of revenue and more than all of the profit, so its billing growth, and the average revenue per recruiter, are better guides to the health of the company than the consolidated top line, which includes marked to market gains and the smaller portals.^[4][5]

The third is the portfolio itself. When Info Edge wrote off 186 crore rupees in the year ended March 2018, investors learned that the group's personal capital was at risk in companies it did not control. When its 15.23 per cent of Zomato turned into 15,000 crore rupees, they learned the other side of the same coin. Both outcomes are possible from the same strategy, and the quarter to quarter profit of the company will keep reflecting whichever is happening.^[4][6]

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