Financials
Figures converted from Indian rupees at historical FX rates — see data/company.json.fx_rates for the rate table. Ratios, margins, and multiples are unitless and unchanged.
Financials — What the Numbers Say
1. Financials in One Page
Nuvama is a high-growth, high-margin Indian wealth franchise riding the post-demerger re-rate. Revenue compounded 39% per year from FY20 ($103M) to FY25 ($487M), operating margin has stabilised in the 52–55% band for seven straight quarters, and trailing-twelve-month profit is $114M on 30.9% ROE. Reported "operating cash flow" is consistently negative — but that is mechanical, not a quality red flag: the lending book (NWFL NBFC), client margin funding, and securities-held-for-trading are absorbed inside CFO, so growth in those activities shows up as a cash outflow even when fee earnings are real. The balance sheet has expanded 5.5x in five years ($689M → $3.32B in assets), funded mainly by debt (borrowings $170M → $1.01B by Sep-2025). Valuation is 28.9x trailing earnings, 7.8x book — premium to most domestic peers but cheaper than the pure mass-affluent comp (Anand Rathi at 76x). The single financial metric that matters most right now is operating margin direction: revenue is plateauing for two quarters and the bull case rests on margins not breaking the 52% floor.
Revenue TTM ($M)
Operating Margin
PAT TTM ($M)
Return on Equity
P/E (TTM)
P/B
EPS TTM ($)
Book Value/Share ($)
How to read this page. Nuvama is three businesses fused on one balance sheet — a fee-driven wealth manager (Nuvama Wealth, Asset Services, Asset Management), an institutional capital-markets desk (Nuvama Institutional Equities + IB), and an NBFC (Nuvama Wealth Finance) that funds margin trading. The fee businesses dominate profit; the NBFC dominates the balance sheet. Standard "FCF / capex" ratios are misleading here. Read margins, ROE, and book-value compounding instead.
2. Revenue, Margins, and Earnings Power
Revenue is total income from fees, brokerage, lending interest, and trading. Operating profit margin (OPM) is the share of revenue retained after operating expenses but before interest, depreciation, and tax — a useful proxy for a financial firm's "core spread + fee" profitability. For Nuvama, the FY20→FY25 path is one of two phases: (i) the FY20→FY22 demerger transition (margins distorted by carve-out, exceptional items, and one-off other income, including a $77M negative line in FY21 and a $84M positive line in FY22 that flipped reported PAT both ways), and (ii) the FY23→FY25 standalone-listed phase, when revenue went from $270M to $487M (+80% in two years) and OPM walked from 40% to 53%.
The FY21 net-income dip is not an operating collapse — the operating line was positive ($61M op profit). It reflects a $77M negative "other income" line (largely transition-period mark-downs around the carve-out from Edelweiss). Likewise, FY22 PAT of $113M was inflated by a $84M positive other-income line. The clean read-through is the operating profit trend, which compounded at 35% per year.
Margin progress is the cleanest evidence of operating leverage. Costs (employee + admin + tech) grew 18% per year versus 39% revenue growth, so the gap dropped to the bottom line. The FY20 64% OPM is misleading — that was pre-demerger when many group costs sat at the parent. Use FY23→TTM (40% → 53%) as the operating signal.
Recent quarterly trajectory
The most important fact on the page: revenue has flat-lined for four quarters at $123–131M and quarterly PAT has been pinned at ~$28M for three straight quarters. After two years of 30%+ YoY growth this is a meaningful inflection. Operating margin is still inside the 52–55% corridor, so the issue is volume, not pricing. The most likely explanation is the broader Indian capital-markets cycle cooling (cash-equity volumes, IPO/QIP pipeline, transactional broking) while the wealth and asset-servicing book continues to grow.
Earnings power has plateaued — revenue and PAT roughly flat for three quarters at ~$125M / ~$28M. The watch metric is OPM holding 52%; a slip to the high 40s alongside flat revenue would challenge the FY26 PE re-rating premise.
3. Cash Flow and Earnings Quality
This is the section investors mis-read most often for Nuvama. Reported operating cash flow has been negative every year for six years — FY20 -$66M, FY21 -$151M, FY22 -$188M, FY23 -$227M, FY24 -$199M, FY25 -$43M — yet PAT has been positive most years and the equity book has compounded. The reconciliation is simple but matters.
For a financial company with a lending book and a trading book, "cash from operations" includes growth in loans receivable and growth in securities held for trading. When NWFL (the NBFC subsidiary) writes a new $100 loan against securities, $100 of CFO leaves; when it borrows $100 to fund that loan, $100 of CFF arrives. The combined effect on real economic earnings is zero (or positive, since the loan earns interest). Reading CFO in isolation as "the company is burning cash" would be wrong.
Each year's negative CFO has been more than offset by financing inflows (debt + small equity), and PAT has remained positive (ex-FY21 transition). The right "earnings quality" diagnostic for this company is not OCF/PAT but:
- Are receivable days falling? Yes — debtor days dropped from 163 (FY20) to 66 (FY25). Receivables are not bloating relative to revenue.
- Is the lending book growing in line with capital, not faster? Borrowings/Equity ratio: 1.19x (FY20), 0.74x (FY22), 2.40x (FY23), 2.33x (FY24), 2.25x (FY25), 2.37x (Sep-25). Stable in the 2.2–2.4x band — not visibly stretching.
- Is reported PAT supported by genuine spread + fee economics, not one-time other income? FY24 and FY25 other-income lines are ~$0.4M and ~$1.6M against operating profits of $188M and $260M — clean. (FY21 and FY22 were not.)
Free cash flow is not the right lens here. For Nuvama, treat reported PAT as the core earnings metric and cross-check it against (a) receivable days, (b) borrowings/equity, and (c) the share of profit coming from "other income". By all three tests, FY24 and FY25 earnings are clean.
4. Balance Sheet and Financial Resilience
Nuvama's balance sheet has done what no income-statement chart can show: it has roughly 5.5x'd in size in five years. Total assets grew from $689M (FY20) to $3.32B (FY25), with another $400M of short-cycle expansion before contracting modestly to $2.73B at Sep-2025 (the "other liabilities" line — client float — moves seasonally with broking and AS activity).
The leverage signal is stable, not stretched. After the step-up to 2.4x at FY23 (when NWFL — the lending arm — scaled), the ratio has held in the 2.25–2.40x corridor. For a lender-plus-broker hybrid this is conservative; pure NBFCs in the same risk class run 4–6x. Interest cost, however, is now meaningful: FY25 interest expense was $96M against operating profit of $260M — a ~37% bite. PBT/Operating-profit ratio was 0.59x in FY25.
Interest coverage (operating profit / interest expense) has stayed in the 2.5–2.7x range. That is adequate, not abundant. A 100bp rise in funding cost on the $1.01B borrowings book at Sep-2025 would absorb roughly $10M of operating profit — about 4% of PAT. The company is not at risk of breaching covenants, but rising rates would mute earnings growth.
The 62.8% promoter-pledge number deserves a sentence: PAG (the promoter) is an Asia-focused private-equity firm; pledging part of its stake to fund acquisition leverage is standard practice in PE-controlled listings. It is a watch item only if the share price falls hard enough to trigger margin top-ups.
5. Returns, Reinvestment, and Capital Allocation
ROE measures profit per rupee of shareholder equity. ROCE measures operating return per rupee of capital employed (equity + debt). These are the most important returns metrics for a financial firm because they tell you whether each new rupee of capital gets put to productive use.
ROCE has rebuilt from 12% (FY23) to 20% (FY25). The trough year was FY23 — the first full year post-demerger, when costs were still being onboarded. The TTM ROE of 30.9% is the best evidence that operating leverage is finally lifting per-share economics.
Capital allocation pattern
Dividend and per-share economics
The defining FY25 capital-allocation move was the 53% payout ratio — Nuvama's first material distribution as a listed entity, signalling that excess capital above NBFC funding needs gets returned. Dividend yield works out to 1.77% at the current price.
The judgement: management is compounding shareholder capital genuinely — book value per share has compounded ~25% per year, ROE is 30%, and the dividend signal is clean. The only flag is that the lending book is a structurally different business from fee-based wealth management, with cyclical credit risk; if NWFL ever takes a credit-cost hit, ROE volatility shows up in PAT.
6. Segment and Unit Economics
Nuvama does not break out fully audited segment financials in its consolidated statements, so the picture has to be assembled from investor-presentation disclosures and management commentary. The shape is well-established in the public record: the wealth-management cluster (Nuvama Wealth + Asset Services + Asset Management) is the majority of profit; capital markets (institutional equities + IB + ECM) drives the swing factor; the NBFC adds spread income and consumes capital.
Mix is approximate — derived from management commentary on segment growth and ARR contribution. Treat as orientation only, not audited disclosure.
The unit-economic point: wealth-management economics are dramatically better than broking economics. Wealth client assets (~$48.7B at Q1-FY26 disclosures) generate annual recurring revenue at roughly 50–80 bps of relationship fees, with very high incremental margins once a relationship manager (RM) is in place. Capital markets revenue is per-trade — high volume in a cycle, low volume out of one. The strategic case for buying Nuvama at a premium multiple rests on the wealth book's growth being structural (rising affluent India) rather than cyclical.
7. Valuation and Market Expectations
Nuvama listed on 26-September-2023, so the valuation history is short — about two-and-a-half years of public data. But within that window the multiple band is informative.
Current Price ($)
P/E (TTM)
P/B
Dividend Yield
Mean Target ($)
Implied Upside
Which multiple to use? For a fee+spread business, P/E and P/B both matter. P/B captures the lending book's capital intensity (the NBFC needs equity to grow); P/E captures the fee book's earning power. EV/EBITDA is not useful here because financial-services interest expense is part of the operating cost of money, not non-operating leverage.
Bear / Base / Bull frame
The current price ($17.27) sits closer to the base than the bear: the market is paying for continued mid-teens earnings growth and stable margins, but is not extrapolating peak FY25 conditions forward. Sell-side consensus mean target of $17.91 implies modest 4% upside — i.e. the stock is roughly fairly priced on consensus assumptions. Reward only emerges if the company beats the OPM-stays-flat assumption.
Valuation is fair, not cheap. At 28.9x earnings and 7.8x book the market is fully pricing 30% ROE and 15–20% earnings growth. There is no margin of safety against a cyclical earnings dip — which is exactly the risk that the recent four-quarter revenue plateau is flagging.
8. Peer Financial Comparison
The five-peer set covers Nuvama's three revenue engines: 360ONE (closest UHNI pure-play), Anand Rathi (mass-affluent wealth), Motilal Oswal Financial Services (diversified — wealth + IB + AMC), JM Financial (capital-markets/IB + lending), and IIFL Capital Services (broking + IB + wealth distribution). All are NSE-listed; financials shown here are converted to USD at period rates.
The peer-gap takeaway. Nuvama prints the highest ROE in the group (30.9% beats everyone except Anand Rathi at 45%, which is a pure asset-light distributor with no balance sheet). On P/E, Nuvama at 28.9x sits at Motilal Oswal (28.4x), well below 360ONE (37.4x) and Anand Rathi (76.5x), and above JM Financial (11.0x — punished for the lending arm and recent governance noise). On P/B, Nuvama at 7.8x is a clear premium to 360ONE (4.6x) and Motilal Oswal (4.1x) — the market is paying that premium for the higher ROE. The premium is mathematically defensible (P/B should scale with ROE), but it is not unconditional: if ROE drifts toward the peer mid-teens because the brokerage cycle weakens, the P/B multiple has more room to compress than expand.
9. What to Watch in the Financials
Bottom line
The financials confirm that Nuvama is a structurally high-return Indian wealth franchise — 30%+ ROE, 53% OPM, expanding book value, clean earnings (after stripping out the FY21–FY22 carve-out noise). The financials contradict the consensus of "uninterrupted growth" — revenue and PAT have plateaued for the past four quarters, exposing the cyclicality that sits inside the institutional-broking and IB lines. Valuation at 28.9x earnings and 7.8x book is fair-to-full, with no margin of safety against a margin slip.
The first financial metric to watch is operating margin. OPM holding 52%+ in Q4 FY26 even with flat revenue would support the franchise-quality reading and the current multiple. OPM compressing to 48% on flat revenue would put the premium-to-peers re-rate at risk.