Zoomcar FY2026 Earnings Call - Contribution Profit Surges 30% as Zoomcar Deliberately Trades Paid Volume for Organic Profitability

Deepankar Jain, CEO, Zoomcar: For the full fiscal year.

Zoomcar is India’s largest peer-to-peer car sharing marketplace. Over 100 cities, more than 10 million registered guests, over 42,000 cars put on the marketplace by hosts who trust us with their most valuable asset after their homes. There are two numbers on this slide I really want you to hold on to. First, 90% brand awareness, and number one in search and brand recall for car rentals in India. In a country of a billion plus people, we are the name that comes to mind. This is a testimony to the brand and business that has been built over a decade and cannot be just bought into. Second, 1 million monthly rental sessions with no performance marketing spends. Let me repeat that because it’s the single most important fact about this business.

1 million people come looking for Zoomcar every month, we’re not paying to put ourselves in front of them. Our organic traffic converts at twice the rate of our paid traffic. 51% of our monthly trips come from repeat users. That’s a strong creating demand coming purely on its own core value proposition on an asset-light technology platform, surrounded by a brand that cannot be replicated easily. This is the core to what Zoomcar is, and a lot of what our Chief Financial Officer will talk about in due course flows from this. Now for the year itself. Fiscal year 2025, 2026 was the year Zoomcar stopped proving that it could be a profitable business and started behaving like one, like a profitable business. Our contribution profit of $5.07 million for the year is our 10th consecutive quarter of positive contribution profit. Ten quarters.

That is not just one good season. That’s a structural characteristic of a business now. Contribution profit per booking went from $9.96-$12.94, up by 30%. Our adjusted EBITDA losses cut by 47% year-over-year. The loss attributable to shareholders came down from $25.6 million-$14.6 million, a 43% improvement. Now, on this slide, some of you would have probably noticed that our bookings have been down by 8% year-over-year, and our revenue has been roughly flat. Let me address this head-on first, because it’s one of the most important things that we will talk about today. This was a choice. We deliberately stopped buying growth. We reduced performance marketing. We cut discounting. We stopped chasing bookings that didn’t pay for themselves. What happened is exactly what we hoped to happen.

We served 8% fewer bookings, generated the same revenue and the same gross booking value and made 19% more contribution profit doing it. We didn’t shrink. We concentrated. We traded volume we were paying for the value we were keeping. The quality signals confirm this. Hosts with high ratings of 4.5+ grew 7% year-on-year. Repeat users held at 51% of the bookings with no meaningful incentives or discounts for more than six quarters running now. People are coming back because the product and the value proposition is good and not because we paid them to come back. That is a healthier company and signs of a healthier company than the one stood a year before you. Why does this matter now? Because we’ve spent the last many quarters fixing the engine.

We are standing now at the start of a runway to take off. India’s self-drive car-sharing market is expanding from almost 18 million users today to over projected 70 million, 65 million users by 2031, a $28.6 billion opportunity. That is not incremental. That is a market being created in real time. The structural conditions are all pointing the same way. India has 0.01 registered cars per household against 1.8 in the U.S. That gap is not going to close through ownership. It is going to close through access. A generation that has grown up with everything on demand does not see a $15,000 depreciating asset in its driveway as a milestone. It sees it as a liability, and thus the need to access is far more important than the ownership of a car.

Over a billion internet users, one of the youngest demographics in the world, with 65% of the population joining the working age by 2031. The digital rails are already laid. Here’s the piece only Zoomcar can put on this slide. Our contribution margins per booking have gone from a negative $2.50 in September 2023 to a positive $12.94 in March 2026, a $15 swing per booking in 30 months. The macro is ready, the infrastructure is ready, and unlike anyone else in the category, our model is already validated. The question is no longer does this work? The question is how fast we can scale it. That’s a capital question. Which brings me to Sachin, who is our Chief Financial Officer, to take you through the financial review in the next slide. Sachin, over to you.

Sachin Sharma, Chief Financial Officer, Zoomcar: Thank you, Deepankar. Good morning, everyone, for taking time out for the earnings call today. Let me take you down through this table. Our bookings for the fiscal year ended March 31st, 2026, ended around 391,000 as against 427,000 bookings in the prior fiscal year, which is down by 8%. As Deepankar already explained, that reflects a deliberate withdrawal from paid acquisition and discount-driven volume. Gross booking value ended the year at $25.27 million, versus a similar number in the prior fiscal year, which is essentially flat. I want you to sit with those two lines together for a moment. We removed 8% of our booking and lost nothing in the gross booking value. The booking we let go were the ones that weren’t worth having. Our average guest trip rating increased from 4.69 to 4.77 out of 5, which is up while we kept on cutting the spends.

That is unusual, and it’s not at all accidental, but rather planned. Our revenue, up by about 1%, ended the year at $9.16 million. Contribution profits rose to $5.07 million, up from $4.25 million, which represents a significant 19% improvement year-over-year. Our contribution profits per booking jumped from $9.96 a year ago to about $12.94 in the current fiscal year, which again, is a 30% improvement. Contribution margins as a percentage of revenue increased from 47% to 55%, which is an 800 basis point expansion. Same revenue, materially more of it is retained as a profit. Our loss from operations further improved by about 35% from $10.4 million during the fiscal year ended March 31st, 2025, to about $6.77 million during the fiscal year ended March 31st, 2026. I’d like to draw your attention to the footnote below, on the slide.

If we exclude about $1.45 million of non-cash costs associated with the RSU issuances to the management employee and the board at large, our loss from operations was about $5.32 million, which represents a significant 49% improvement year-over-year if we compare apples to apples. Our adjusted EBITDA loss was down 47%, from $9.91 million to $5.22 million. Both adjusted EBITDA and contribution margins are non-GAAP measures, and we’ll take you through the reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures at a later stage. We’ll explain to you why that is important to consider when we are trying to understand the business performance at large. Our loss attributable to shareholders also declined significantly from about $25.62 million to about $14.62 million, which is a 43% decline in losses year-over-year. $11 million of loss removed from this business in just one year.

December 2023 was the first quarter we started generating contribution profits. We were losing almost $2.5 per booking prior to that. Contribution margins during the December 2023 quarter were $0.21 million. March 2024, we ended at $0.1 million, which is barely above the line. The trajectory is for everyone to see. $0.46 million to about $1.21 million. Gradually, we ended the previous quarter at about $1.38 million, and the last quarter ended March 31st, 2026, at about $1.35 million in the quarter. 10 consecutive quarters of positive contribution profits, two and a half years through seasonality, through macro noise, through a deliberate marketing pullback. I would note the last four quarters in particular. That’s a business generating consistent, dependable, roughly $1.3 million a quarter of contribution profits and doing it while we were reducing the spends and not burning at all.

Consistency is a form of proof, and this is a business with a floor under it. Here’s where the contribution profit is all landing up. March 2024, our adjusted EBITDA loss was about $4.03 million in a single quarter. 12 months later, March 2025, we ended the quarter at about $2.03 million. In the most recent quarter ended March 31st, 2026, we ended with $1.4 million losses. The trend line is unmistakable, and it has one direction to go. We’ve taken the quarterly burn down by roughly two-thirds from where it was two years ago. For a full year, our adjusted EBITDA loss came in at $5.22 million versus $9.91 million, which represents a 47% reduction. I want to be very clear with you, we are not yet at adjusted EBITDA breakeven, but you can see the slope.

You can see the distance that is yet to be covered. You can see that we’ve closed most of the distance without needing the revenue growth to do it. What this means is when growth does come, it lands us on a far leaner cost base. We’ll take you through our fundraising updates as well, just to provide a perspective. We are actively raising growth capital to fund the next phase of expansion. Deepankar showed you the market opportunity. This is how we go and take it. We have launched a private placement bridge round with a minimum $1 million and up to a $10 million, including over-allotment to be raised. So far, we have raised about $1.8 million in gross proceeds in the ongoing private placement bridge round and aim to raise the rest of the bridge over the next few weeks.

We have launched a warrant exchange tender offer as well, which was aimed to simplify our capital structure, which we believe will make this company more legible and more investable going forward. We’ve engaged an investment banker to support with the up-listing process to a premier national U.S. stock exchange. We are continuing with our debt restructuring to reduce the balance sheet burden and work towards positive net worth and minimum cash burn. Together, when you consider all of these efforts that the management has been putting consistently over the past few quarters, these are four things a company does when it has finished proving its model and is preparing to scale it. A cleaner cap table, a stronger balance sheet, a better listing venue, and a growth capital behind an engine that we now have demonstrated works.

Full detail on all of these can be found in the SEC filings or the 10-K that will be filed later in the day today. I would urge you guys to look into the specifics there. The appendix contains our full GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation. I would walk you through the reconciliations in brief over the next 30 seconds so that you know exactly how we get to the numbers that we have quoted. On the contribution profits, we start with net revenue and adjust the cost of revenue from it to arrive at a gross profit of about $4.73 million, which is up from $3.81 million a year ago. We add back depreciation and amortization, overhead costs, and stock-based compensation carried in the cost of revenue.

We deduct the host incentives and marketing costs, excluding brand marketing, which, if you note, fell from about $742,000 to about $312,000 year-over-year. That’s a 58% reduction in our incentive and performance spend itself. Contribution profits rose from 47% to about 55% and ended at $5.07 million for the fiscal year ended March 31st, 2026. For the adjusted EBITDA, starting from a net loss of about $14.62 million, we add back stock-based compensation of $1.45 million, depreciation and amortization, finance cost of $3.18 million, which is again a significant reduction from $8.6 million finance cost that we recorded in the books a year ago, mainly attributed to our debt restructuring effort that we have carried out. Other net expenses less the gain on troubled debt restructuring.

That gives us an adjusted EBITDA loss of $5.22 million against an adjusted EBITDA loss of $9.91 million a year ago. I would particularly highlight finance cost, which is down $5.4 million year-over-year. As I said previously, that’s the debt restructuring showing up in the cash terms, and there is more of that to come over the next few quarters. With that, I would hand over the mic to Deepankar to summarize the five key wins for our organization during the recently concluded fiscal year ended March 31st, 2026. Over to you, Deepankar.

Deepankar Jain, CEO, Zoomcar: Thank you, Sachin. Let me bring this back to five critical numbers. One, gross booking value. Today at $25.7 million, held flat with no paid marketing. Our repeat user contribution, 51%, unchanged, unbought, and remarkably sticky. We did not give any incentives for them to come back. Contribution per booking, almost $10-$13, or $5.07 million in absolute terms, roughly 55% of the net GAAP revenue. Our adjusted EBITDA, a 47% improvement. Our loss attributable to shareholders, a 43% improvement. What do these five numbers put together, these lines say? They say that this is a company that has learned how to make money on every transaction it processes, that has cut its losses nearly in half, and that has done so without buying a single dollar of growth. Most turnaround stories are about cutting. This one, this story is about discipline.

What’s left standing after the discipline is a marketplace with a category-defining brand, structurally profitable unit economics, and a $28.6 billion market opening opportunity in front of it. We have built the engine. This year we proved it runs consistently quarter-after-quarter, and now we intend to fuel it. Thank you for your continued belief in the company.

Moderator: Thank you, Deepankar and Sachin, and thank you everyone for joining us on the call. With this, we conclude the call. Thank you.