Cyber Media Research and Services Pvt Ltd (CMRSL)
MCap: 42Cr
Website: https://cmrindia.com/
History of Business:
- Business was started in the year 1992.
- IPO in Sept ’22. Raised 7Cr and IPO was subscribed 30 times.
- Promoter:
o Pradeep Gupta: IIT D (Electrical Engineering) and MBA from IIM Calcutta. He is also the co-founder of India Angel Networks.
o Dhaval Gupta: Managing Director
Revenue by Geography: 60% domestic and 40% international.
Revenue by Segment: 95% services; 5% product
BUSINESS & REVENUE MODEL
The company has 4 business segments:
- Publisher
Any website that shows ads needs to fill their inventory with ads/brands which pays the highest. CMRSL has a platform (Auxo Ads) which helps these websites/publishers find the highest bid for their inventory.
Nature of Business :The Company ties up with web channels & publishers to monetize their ad inventory. This is monetized via demand platforms such as Google. Google, and similar demand networks, monetise this inventory from several advertisers and pays on the basis of advertisements served on that inventory. The Company retains its margin and pay the balance to the inventory suppliers. The company is a Google Publishing Partner on GAM360, AdSense and AdX products.
Client Challenges: Publishers have multiple challenges, however the two critical aspects are finding good ad rates and achieving a high fill-rate (percentage of ads filled) for their site is a challenge. In addition to this publisher also find it hard to track their data and optimize ads based on insights.
CMRSL Solution: Auxo Ads platform allows publishers to optimize revenues and manage their traffic more effectively. Multiple demand sources compete for premium inventory and increases the publishers earning ability. Auxo Ads captures large data regarding users and their behaviour that helps publishers understand their user better. The data collected is utilized to build better predictive models to improve monetisation, analysis and targeting.
Customers: Web networks & publishers, including mobile web, app and video publishers such as Ebound Services FZE, Skymet Weather, News Distill, Strit Media, Sweg Enterprises.
Demand Partners: Ad Networks and Demand Side Platforms (DSP) such as Google, Pubmatic, Magnite, Yahoo Ads.
- Advertiser
Any brand which wants does digital marketing needs to tracks the efficacy of their spend and reach the right channels for showing ads. CMRSL’s platform, CMGalaxy, helps these brands keep track of their digital marketing efforts.
Nature of business: CMRSL signs directly with brands for their digital marketing campaigns. These campaigns are performance based and involve campaign management, app installs, advisory services, creative services, social media planning, and social media execution. Billing is services based.
Client Challenges: Advertisers require a wide-array of expertise to manage digital, and often have data sitting in separate marketing channels. Advertisers also have limited expertise in media planning and media buying.
CMRSL Solution: CMGalaxy is a customized market intelligence tool that allows advertisers to map their entire marketing funnel.
It offers a customized dashboard that integrates advertiser data from across multiple marketing channels. This helps build better insights and optimize marketing spends. This fast and clear data flow enables advertisers to be competitive and ensure their marketing budget utilization is done effectively. Our AI/ML engine processes the data to provide better understanding of user behavior and this significantly improves the advertiser’s ability to plan their future marketing campaigns.
In addition to this product, our team also provides services such as CMO advisory, creative strategy, search engine optimization
(SEO), social media management, content marketing, online reputation management (ORM), etc.
Customers: Various Campaigns from companies such as GEMS Business School, Apeejay Education Society, Waterfront Quantum Ventures (Shahnaz Husain), Rusk Media, Laborate Pharamceuticals, Catch Up Technologies, among others.
Vendors: Google, Facebook, other Social media platforms.
“CMGalaxy assists clients in managing performance marketing by integrating with multiple channels, creating a unified marketing intelligence dashboard. Once data is integrated, our CDP solution tracks necessary analytics for full-funnel attribution, facilitating audience analytics with in-depth A/B testing. Based on this analysis, CMGalaxy enables effective campaign optimisation, retargeting, and personalisation.”
- Programmatic : This seems like more of a subset which drives the above 2.
Nature of Business: Advertisers and ad agencies need quality inventory to deliver Digital Marketing campaigns for their clients for which they use multiple supply partners. Programmatic advertising drives performance marketing which drives higher sales for customers. The Company, through its platform CyberAds performs ad match in real-time to enable the right ad to be viewed by relevant audiences.
Client Challenges: Advertisers face multiple challenges in the eco-system including multiple middle-men, ad fraud, access to brand safe inventory, and poor ad responses due to inaccurate targeting. These often result in large erosion of advertising dollars that ultimately reach relevant users.
CMRSL Solution: CyberAds platform provides an automated, AI/ML based programmatic and media buying solutions. Our targeting engine provides brands and agencies end-to-end media buying creating better targeting and ROI across campaigns. CyberAds automated platform leverages deep understanding of user behaviour and cross-device targeting that allows brands to target inventory across multiple publishers to reach users in targeted manner. This allows them reach to new potential customers
at lower costs.
- Data Analytics
Nature of business: CMRSL is a premier research and consulting firm offering customers strategic and tactical insights in the form of market intelligence, market sizing, market ecosystem mapping and go-to-market services. The Company’s research and advisory services cover understanding of new ‘tech-knowledge’ industry domains, maps key sectoral trends, develops definite viewpoints
on emerging markets and provides in-depth consumer insights. Among key initiatives includes building custom data and custom dashboards for clients.
CMRSL Solution: The Company provides its customers with ability to collect, process, visualize, and effectively deliver insights against large data sets. We marry the understanding of data plus technology to be able to provide customized dashboard and data solutions to our customers.
URL: https://cmrindia.com
Customers: ICT Clients/ Agencies such as HP, Logitech, Dell, Xiaomi etc.
Vendors: Project based payouts across established servicing partners.
They also sell market research reports (as shown below):
Margins are in this order: Data Analytics > Publishing > Advertising
Financials:
- Healthy growth in topline and bottom-line since IPO. RoCE is 30%.
24Q4 Concall notes :
- Management guidance is to grow faster than the industry. They expect ~25% CAGR for the near future.
- EBITDA margin in 24Q4 were 12% but there was a positive impact from 2 specific projects in the quarter. Management guidance is to achieve double digit EBITDA margin going forward.
- Continue to invest in technology aggressively to increase margins. The focus is to increase the share of revenue from product vs services.
- Going forward, will be looking to be competitive on pricing to get more topline.
- They have cash on balance sheet. They were on the verge of closing an acquisition but that didn’t work out. However, they have a couple of companies in pipeline which they want to acquire and there should be some update in a month or two.
- They are expanding footprint in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. Team size is 78 people.
What looks interesting:
- Was valued at 50x earnings at the time of IPO and is now available at 10x FY ’24 earnings. The underlying business has only grown in the last 3 years.
- Promoter has a good pedigree (IIT D and IIM Calcutta) and they have increased their shareholding slightly in the last few quarters.
- Management guidance is to grow 20-25% YoY for the next few years.
- Promoter shareholding has slightly gone up in the last 3-4 quarters.
Risks:
- Promoter is involved in other businesses. Eg. The parent entity (Cyber Media (India) Ltd) (CMIL) is also a listed entity where the promoter holds 61%. There is a possibility that some business could be channelled through that entity. This is the business which owns magazines like DataQuest, PCQuest.
Below are the standalone revenue for CMIL.
It appears that 50% of the revenue is generated from “Events income” which does not compete with CMRSL’s revenue stream.
- They operate in a highly competitive environment where pricing pressure can be an issue. Any competitive advantages are not apparent.
- Google is the biggest customer which contributes about 30% of the revenue
- 24Cr of Trade receivables at end of FY ’24, on revenue of 88Cr. They are also taking a considerable credit loss on receivables (1.06Cr of credit loss in FY ’23 on 2.2Cr of PAT)
- The parent company (CMIL) was under stress and had received debt from an ARC which was settled in Sept ‘22. CMIL made significant losses in their international operations.
“The Company (CMIL) closed its US operations in financial year 2019- 20. Consequently, a one-time exceptional loss of nearly $3.5 Mn has been booked in the year. Investors may recall that the Company had unrolled a US strategy and made several investments/acquisitions in the past. Unfortunately, these investments did not bear fruit. We therefore took a decision to exit the US media and media services market.”
I think there is limited downside from the valuation perspective and the fundamentals are improving.
It will be great if someone knows about/has used their products and can give feedback. Also, how susceptible the business is to tech disruption by platforms like Google and Facebook which actually hold the datasets on which the business is built, will be helpful to understand.
Disclosure: Invested with a tracking position