Info Edge's AI products now bring in nearly as much as recruitment billings added

Info Edge, which runs the Naukri jobs site, said recruitment billings, the money employers commit for job listings and access to résumés before it is booked as revenue, grew 13% in the September 2026 quarter from a year earlier. The company also put a figure on its AI products: an annualised run rate of about ₹240 crore, which management defined as last quarter's revenue multiplied by four. Set beside each other, the two numbers change what the 13% says about the jobs business underneath.

The comparison is simple to make. On last year's ₹545 crore of recruitment billings, that growth adds about ₹71 crore. The AI products bring in roughly ₹60 crore a quarter. If none of that revenue had existed a year ago, the rest of recruitment would have grown only about 2%, calculated from the reported figures. Management said some of it was already there a year ago, especially on the jobseeker side, so the rest grew by more than that. The measures also differ: billings are what customers commit and revenue is what gets recognised, and the company used both words for the same run rate.

The products have arrived faster than management's own framing suggested. In May it said that adding a few hundred crore of extra revenue from the new offerings over three years would be a good result. In August it said about a third of recruitment growth came from newer offerings such as AI-Rex and Talent Pulse. The October run rate is not all incremental, but unless much of it was already counted a year ago, it leaves less of the growth to the established job listings and résumé search.

The client groups the company broke out point the same way. Billings from IT, technology and outsourcing employers grew 3% last quarter, and those from global capability centres, the in-house offshore units of multinationals, and from recruitment consultants grew 7% each. Only the remaining sectors, at 18%, grew faster than the total. Management reads the quarter differently: it said the timing of renewals lifted the quarter before and held back this one, put underlying growth at 14% to 15%, and said it sets the sales team's targets on that basis.

Profit has grown on cost control. Consolidated sales rose 12.3% from a year earlier, while costs, measured as sales less operating profit, rose 4.8%. Operating profit therefore grew 26.4%, lifting the operating margin to 39.2%. Part of the gain came from 99acres, the property portal, whose operating loss all but disappeared as it cut marketing spending. In May management said Naukri could hold its margin if sales grew in double digits. On this call it said margins are "not really a focus right now" while it pushes clients to adopt AI-Rex, though it still expects them not to fall as long as sales grow faster than 10%.

Net profit is a poor guide to any of this. Other income made up more than half of pre-tax profit last quarter, so the operating line is where the jobs business shows.

The executive who set those sales targets is leaving. Hitesh Oberoi steps down as managing director and chief executive at the close of business on 2 December, and co-founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani becomes group chief executive the next day. Asked whether he would stay on as chief executive or hold the role until someone new is hired, Bikhchandani said: "So there's no decision taken on hiring more people yet." Management said internal candidates would get the first chance.

That puts the weight on billings for the current quarter, the first to be reported under the new leadership. They will show whether recruitment billings grow near the underlying rate management describes, or nearer the single digits that three of its four client groups showed last quarter.