looking at Q3 transcripts I found
"Unknown Analyst
Congratulations for a good set of numbers. Vikram, on the Carvaan part, if you can explain, we are seeing pretty good traction in the sales number this quarter. And as you have been highlighting, the sales have been without any significant marketing expense. So how do you see the sales panning out over the next few quarters given the quarter-on-quarter improvement that we have seen over the past 3 quarters? And also, if you can tell us how has been the online sales for the product since a lot of shift has happened in the buying pattern of people post-COVID? So how has that channel picked up and our strategy for that channel going forward?
Vikram Mehra
So let me try to answer the last part first. Yes, the share of digital sales has gone up for us also substantially. More and more people are buying online. And remember, digital sales – for a company like ours has to be looked in 2 ways. One, what is Saregama selling on digital? We sell through Amazon, we sell through Flipkart. We sell through Paytm. There are 11 different partners of our through which we are selling. And we are also selling from saregama.com.
That numbers I’m completely on top of it. But our small retailer, he’s got a shop maybe in Amritsar. That retailer of mine, I have given it to him right now to sell it right now from a shop, he may also be selling digitally. So if I combine his numbers also to it, which I will not come to know directly, then the sale of digital is very, very high.
Obviously, digital lends us also to lot of creative work because you can do a lot of work on the social media to promote your product, talking to the digital audience without incurring high expenses of TV advertising or newspaper advertising. So a lot of focus from our side is moving on promoting these products digitally and selling them also digitally. You asked me what is the projection we have for Carvaan going forward. See, there’s so much of uncertainty at this juncture sitting in. All I’m going to go back and commit to you is Carvaan will be a breakeven product. I’m not going to project Carvaan is going to be making money in the next 12 – 3 to 6 months, Carvaan will be a breakeven or a very, very marginal profit number.
Are we happy with the 138,000 number? No. We people are used to 250,000, 260,000 per quarter number. We are not at all happy with 138,000 number. But to increase the number, it’s very tempting to start doing marketing campaigns which generate demand, create awareness. We don’t want to do that at this stage."
So basically they have cut down on marketing expenses for a while, which has lead to lesser sales as well as lesser expenses.
