An article on the Mint about ‘What Info Edge’s financials say about the quality of India’s economic recovery?’ made me curious. I wrote a LinkedIn post about it summarising that article (since it was behind the paywall). I am reproducing my LinkedIn post here.

Naukri

💻 Job hiring in the IT sector to remain slow in the next few quarters
💹 Double-digit growth in hiring in sectors like healthcare, hospitality, infrastructure, transport and real estate
🏢 Naukri will expand beyond main cities and will also open physical offices in smaller towns (Weird for an internet company to open offices, but hopefully, that will improve the reach and hopefully, people will get jobs)

99acres

🏠 Real estate sector sustained improvement
📈 Increase in property prices, higher traffic on the platform, rise in brokers, projects and listings

Other
📖 It’s Shiksha business too did well by clocking 16% revenue growth
👫 Jeevansathi continues to make losses, but now those have narrowed.

My 2 cents:

Sectors in which InfoEdge operates (labour market, property market, education and matrimonial) can show some direction about the economy’s progress, although in a limited sense.

The IT sector outlook will depend on the US economy.

Job growth in India is giving mixed signals:
a) “Fresh formal job creation cooled for the second consecutive month to decline to a six-month low in September, signalling a downturn in the labour markets this financial year.” – BS on EPFO data for Sep 2023 quarter.
b) EPFO data shows strong growth in industries like sugar, courier services, iron and steel, hospitals, travel agencies, etc. (BS)
c) First-timers’ share has improved, which shows robustness in the market. (EPFO data, BS)
d) CMIE data shows that unemployment in Sep has decreased. (BS)

The real estate sector enjoying the festive season and probably would continue to remain robust. (FE)

Improvement in real estate can be good news for the economy as the sector, directly and indirectly, employs a lot of people.

What can go wrong in the real estate sector? Increase in interest rates.

🤞

Sources and Further References:

Mint article on InfoEdge (Paywall) – https://tinyurl.com/5n74bbf3

Infoedge results (Screener.in) – https://tinyurl.com/2wump4ke

June 2023 quarter PLFS – https://tinyurl.com/d5ducjm4

Mint article on Jun PLFS survey data (Paywall) – https://tinyurl.com/39nb7nrc

BS article on latest EPFO data – https://tinyurl.com/yy8bc5ce

FE article on real estate – https://tinyurl.com/ypt9udvj