MPS Ltd Management Discussions

Financial Year 2026

Overview

The value of knowledge has never resided in information alone. It resides in the ability to organize it, verify it, and put it to work, and that ability has never been scarcer or more valuable than it is now. Artificial intelligence has made content almost free to produce and, in the same motion, made trusted knowledge harder to find. That is the gap MPS was built to close, and FY26 was the year our position in it converted into the best results in the companys history.

MPS purpose is unchanged: to help make discovery and learning accessible to all. What changed in FY26 is the evidence. Basic earnings per share reached a record INR 102.11, up by 16.3 percent. Consolidated EBITDA grew to INR 236 crore at a 30.7 percent margin, and return on capital employed was 38.2 percent. These results were delivered while acquiring Unbound Medicine, unifying three corporate learning businesses into a single global brand, and taking our regulatory and restructuring charges cleanly through the profit and loss account. MPS enters FY27 from a position of considerable strategic and financial strength.

AI has made content almost free to produce and trusted knowledge harder to find. That gap is the business MPS is in.

Industry and Market Environment

MPS operates at the intersection of three large, structurally growing markets, each being reshaped by the same force that plays to our strengths: the rising premium on trust as AI floods the world with content.

A Large and Expanding Opportunity

• Education solutions: valued at approximately USD 416 billion in 2025 and projected to reach roughly USD 878 billion by 2031, driven by digital, personalized, and lifelong learning.

• Corporate e-learning: valued at approximately USD 353 billion in 2025 and projected to approach USD 874 billion by 2030, as workforces reskill at pace.

• Research and scholarly services: expanding with global research output, which reached about 3.5 million science and engineering articles in 2024, and with the compliance demands that follow it.

Our Business Model

MPS is an AI-first knowledge company organized around two capabilities: Discover and Learn. Discover is the creation, validation, and dissemination of knowledge; Learn is its delivery, application, and assessment, now reaching the clinician at the point of care. Across both, three assets operate as one engine rather than as separate services: trusted, curated

• Healthcare knowledge management: a fast-growing adjacency MPS entered in FY26 through Unbound Medicine, at the intersection of clinical content and AI.

The Structural Shifts That Favor MPS

Four shifts define the environment, and each one increases demand for exactly what MPS does. Artificial intelligence is moving from generative to agentic, automating editorial, peer-review, production, and learning workflows. Research integrity has become a defining challenge, with more than 14,000 retraction notices issued in 2023 and paper mills industrializing fraud, which places a premium on trusted screening. Open science mandates such as Plan S are reshaping publishing economics and customers across every segment are consolidating spend onto scaled, full-service partners who can reduce vendor complexity. The common thread is verification, which is where MPS sits.

content built relationship by relationship over five decades; a publisher-grade platform that is independent of any single publisher; and an AI capability applied to that content and to the workflows our customers already run. Each asset makes the others more valuable, which is why the model compounds rather than merely adds.

Content sharpens the AI, the AI sharpens the platforms, the platforms deepen the relationships, and the relationships bring more content.

Operational Review by Segment

MPS reports three market-facing segments. In FY26 they told three different stories: Research delivered the recovery, Education delivered the scale, and Corporate Learning delivered the turn.

Segment	Share of FY26 Revenue	FY26 Revenue (INR Cr)	Value Proposition
Research Solutions	60%	463.5	Speed, efficiency, and trust
Education Solutions	27%	208.9	Innovation and agility
Corporate Learning	13%	96.0	Differentiation and global delivery

Research Solutions: Recovery, Quality, and Scale

Research Solutions remained MPS largest segment, with FY26 revenue of INR 463.5 crore. Excluding the contribution from AJE, the underlying business grew by approximately 17 percent, a clean measure of organic strength. Journals had an exceptional commercial year, taking on substantial new business from leading global publishers while building capacity with discipline. Scholarly Books secured a major multi-year commitment for 900 titles. Platforms continued to strengthen long-term customer relationships while successfully migrating publishers onto the HighWire stack. AJE, acquired in FY24, completed its turnaround during the year, protecting profitability through a disciplined cost reset while its pre-acceptance and author-facing services, including the Rubriq AI editing engine, continued to expand. The segment closed the year with strong margin recovery and a fuller pipeline than it began with.

Education Solutions: The Year Scale Arrived

Education Solutions delivered the strongest growth in the portfolio, with revenue rising to INR 208.9 crore, up more than 36 percent, and roughly by 29 percent excluding Unbound. OWL and Education Global recorded a broad-based growth across K-12 and Higher Education, and the Learning Services accessibility business scaled. The defining milestone was the acquisition of Unbound Medicine, completed in February 2026, which contributed INR 11.78 crore in its first 49 days and extended MPS integrated model into healthcare knowledge, a recurring-revenue platform business with high renewal economics and a natural home for the capabilities built in MPS Labs.

Corporate Learning: The Turn

Corporate Learning underwent the most significant transformation of the year, completing a portfolio, organizational, and brand consolidation under the unified Liberate Global identity. FY26 segment revenue was INR 96.0 crore. MPS Interactive Systems led the turnaround, with quarterly EBITDA margins improving to over 29 percent by year end on a stronger order book. Liberate Learning, now wholly owned and operating as our global corporate learning brand, rebuilt its commercial pipeline, and MPS Europa stabilized. The segment returned to growth in the fourth quarter, setting up FY27 on a firmer base.

Three segments, one engine. A capability built for one becomes an advantage for all three.

Financial Review

FY26 was the most profitable year in the companys history. On a consolidated basis, revenue from operations was INR 768.37 crore, EBITDA was INR 235.85 crore, and profit after tax was INR 173.22 crore.

Consolidated Performance

Item (INR crore)	FY 2025-26	FY 2024-25	YoY Change
Revenue from operations	768.37	726.89	+5.71%
EBITDA	235.85	210.90	+11.83%
EBITDA margin	30.7%	29.0%	+170 bps
Profit after tax	173.22	148.91	+16.32%
Basic earnings per share (INR)	102.11	87.79	+16.31%

The headline revenue growth of 5.71 percent understates the operating years performance. We deliberately shrank a lower-quality book of business, and the engine underneath grew in the mid-teens: excluding the AJE and Unbound acquisitions, the rest of the business grew by approximately 13.3 percent. Margin expanded 170 basis points as the cost reset undertaken during the year took hold, with group manpower cost down even as Unbound entered the base and senior hiring continued. Exceptional items netted to a small positive, and the management elected to take the new labor-code provisioning impact and the AJE restructuring cost cleanly through the profit and loss account rather than obscure them.

Key Ratios (Consolidated)

Ratio	FY 2025-26	FY 2024-25
Return on net worth	32.23%	31.74%
Operating profit margin	27.08%	25.24%
Net profit margin	22.54%	20.49%
Debtors turnover (days)	51	52
Current ratio (times)	1.45	1.97

Return on capital employed of 38.2 percent, sustained even after absorbing the full balance-sheet impact of the Unbound acquisition, is the number that best captures the quality of the business. Goodwill rose by INR 132.46 crore to reflect the transaction and foreign-exchange movement on prior acquisitions, and we funded the deal with a modest facility while ending the year in a net cash position with INR 113.75 crore of cash. The movement in the current ratio reflects the deployment of cash into the acquisition rather than any change in the underlying strength of the balance sheet.

Capital Allocation and Shareholder Returns

MPS capital allocation principle has been public and unchanged for eight years: capital must earn its return within twelve months, or it returns to shareholders. Under that rule, the Company has returned more than INR 650 crore since FY19, at a payout ratio among the highest in the industry. In FY26, the opportunity in front of us, led by Unbound and an active pipeline, was larger than the cash in hand, so the management reinvested rather than declare a final dividend. The principle has not changed; the cycle has. Distribution resumes when the deployment cycle closes. We would rather compound shareholder capital than perform generosity with it.

Artificial Intelligence and Innovation

Artificial intelligence is not a feature we bolt onto finished products. It is embedded in the workflows MPS customers already run and applied to trusted content, where accuracy, reliability, and accountability are essential. During FY26, several capabilities moved from pilot to production scale.

• Rubriq, an AI language-editing engine built on a foundation of more than one million expert edits, now acts as a high-speed submission gatekeeper for research authors.

• DigiCorePro, MPS end-to-end publishing platform, and THINK365, a web-native subscription management system, moved to full production deployment.

• Unbound Intelligence Assist, launched after decision support within flagship medical and nursing apps.

• BridgeAI, a scalable multilingual translation engine, and AI-powered, avatar-based assistants extended immersive, generative-AI learning in Corporate Learning.

This strategy is already translating into commercial outcomes, with AI-enabled products contributing a growing share of the revenue and, more importantly, deepening the workflows that our customers rely on us for. MPS advantage is not access to models, which everyone has. It is proprietary content and domain context, which almost no one in our markets has in the same depth.

Value Creation through the Five Capitals

MPS measures value creation through parameters beyond financial performance, developing five forms of capital that together make the business durable.

Financial Capital

• Record basic EPS of INR 102.11 and consolidated EBITDA of INR 236 crore; ROCE of 38.2 percent; a net cash balance sheet that funds its own ambition.

Intellectual Capital

• Proprietary platforms and AI IP, including DigiCorePro, THINK365, MPSTrak, Rubriq, BridgeAI, and Unbound Intelligence Assist, moving from pilot to production.

Human Capital

• A team of more than 3,200 professionals across nine countries, with women representing 38.16% of the global workforce, and ~12% increase in core EBITDA achieved on a broadly stable headcount.

Social and Relationship Capital

• Decades-long customer relationships, and community programs spanning girls education, mental health, inclusive childcare, and higher-education scholarships.

Natural Capital

• An asset-light, digital-first operating model that reduces resource intensity, supported by energy-efficient hosting and paperless workflows.

People and Culture

Our real engine is our people. More than 3,200 colleagues across nine countries run the content, platforms, and AI that customers depend on. MPS culture rests on five pillars: ownership, empowerment, collaboration, transparency, and innovation. It is expressed through the Triple E values of Excellence, Empathy, and

Efficiency. During the year, we deepened leadership communication through quarterly Leadership Connects, ran capability-building programs for high-potential employees, and broadened participation in our employee stock ownership plan, so that the people who create value also share in it.

Commitment Beyond Business

MPS corporate social responsibility rests on the belief that long-term progress is only possible when communities grow alongside the company. In FY26 our programs included the IIMPACT girls education program for out-of-school girls aged six to fourteen; community-based mental health care with the Sambandh Health Foundation in the villages around Gurugram; inclusive care and special education with the Prem Charitable Trust; values-based education with the Vedanta Cultural Foundation; and scholarships supporting young leaders at the Indian School of Business. These are not adjacent to who we are. They are our purpose, applied.

Certifications, Internal Control, and Governance

Trust is our product, and MPS holds itself to formal standards that evidence it, including ISO 9001:2015 for quality management, ISO/IEC 27001:2022 for information security, PCI-DSS, GDPR compliance, and COUNTER 5 compliance. MPS has well-equipped and effective internal control systems in place that match the scale of its sector and the complexity of the market it works in. Internal controls are commensurate with its size and the nature of its operations. These have been designed to provide reasonable assurance with regard to recording and providing reliable financial and operational information, complying with applicable statutes, safeguarding assets from unauthorized use, executing transactions with proper authorization, and ensuring compliance with corporate policies.

The Audit Committee of the Board of the Company undertakes a comprehensive system of risk-based internal audits and periodic assessments to ensure compliance with best practices. The Company has laid down internal financial controls as detailed in the Companies Act, 2013. For the fiscal year 2025-2026, the Company has engaged M/s. PricewaterhouseCoopers Services LLP as the Internal Auditors of the Company to report on the financial controls of the Company and M/s. Walker Chandiok & Co LLP as the Statutory Auditors of the Company to report on the Financial Statements (Standalone & Consolidated) of the Company.

The internal audit team conducts quarterly audits across the Company, which include a review of the operating effectiveness of internal controls. The Audit Committee reviews reports submitted by the management and audit reports submitted by Internal Auditors and Statutory Auditors. Suggestions for improvement are considered, and the Audit Committee follows up on the timely implementation of corrective actions.

Opportunities

MPS operates in markets that together exceed USD 800 billion, and each of them is moving in the companys direction. In Research Solutions, publishing volumes keep rising while research integrity pressures mount, deepening demand for trusted author services, peer review, integrity screening, and platform hosting. In Education Solutions, the shift toward digital, personalized, and accessible learning keeps widening the addressable market across K-12, Higher Education, and ed-tech. The acquisition of Unbound Medicine extends that segment into healthcare knowledge management, a recurring-revenue market with high renewal economics. In Corporate Learning, the consolidation under the Liberate Global brand positions the company to capture growing enterprise and government demand for AIled learning, simulation, and performance support. Across all three markets, customers are consolidating spend onto scaled, full-service partners, which favors a single-window provider. At the same time, the companys AI capabilities, proprietary content assets, and data create opportunities to deliver AI-enabled solutions, monetize trusted content for AI applications, and deepen client relationships. With selective acquisitions and one engine serving all three segments, MPS is well placed to convert these opportunities into sustainable long-term growth.

Threats

While MPS benefits from strategic client loyalty, the potential for insourcing or captive setups by large customers poses a challenge. Our defense is structural rather than contractual, resting on relationships measured in decades, platforms our customers run their daily operations on, and switching costs that make MPS difficult to replace. Market trends also continue to favor consolidation onto scaled, full-service partners rather than fragmentation into captives. Another common concern is that generative AI will commoditize content services and compress pricing. We believe this primarily threatens business models built on undifferentiated content production, unlike MPS. As AI floods the market with content, MPS is positioned where value is increasingly created: content verification, workflow orchestration, and trusted distribution. As a result, commoditized services may face pricing pressure, while MPS proprietary platforms, trusted content, and deeply embedded customer workflows should become more valuable.

Risk Management

MPS operates a structured risk framework overseen by the Board and its committees. The principal risks and our responses are summarized below.

Risk	How We Manage It
Business continuity and disaster	Robust, tested continuity and disaster-recovery arrangements across delivery centers on four continents.
Information security and cyber	Layered security controls, monitoring, and certifications (ISO/IEC 27001, PCI-DSS, GDPR); regular assessment and training.
Artificial intelligence disruption	Investing to lead the shift, embedding proprietary AI in customer workflows rather than being displaced by generic tools.
Currency	A long-standing policy of freezing planning rates in two-year cycles and taking adequate hedging to manage exposure.
Liquidity	A net cash position and disciplined working-capital management provide substantial headroom.
Acquisition and integration	A dedicated integration team and a strict twelve-month return threshold on deployed capital.
Client concentration and insourcing	Deep, multi-decade relationships, embedded platforms, and switching costs that make MPS difficult to replace.
Internal control and compliance	Defined controls, independent internal audit (PwC), and Audit Committee oversight.

Outlook

MPS enters FY27 with unprecedented momentum, and the management team is building thoughtful growth plans that protect margins yet empower revenue growth. We have told the market we will comfortably cross INR 300 crore of EBITDA in FY27, and given the run rate exiting FY26, we regard that as a floor. The single most important strategic priority is the full integration of Unbound Medicine. Behind it sits a visible Education pipeline of more than USD 11 million, along with significant long-term publishing and platform commitments already secured, and the operating discipline established in FY26 becoming the run rate for FY27. Vision 2027, set in 2022, aimed to make us the provider of choice in our markets by pairing discovery and experiential learning with cutting-edge technology on a path toward revenue above INR 1,500 crore. Past the midpoint, that vision no longer reads like a plan but like a description of how MPS already operates.

We build our plans as floors, not ceilings. FY26 proved that the machine works. FY27 is the year we will compound it.

Cautionary Statement

Certain statements in this Annual Report, including in this Management Discussion and Analysis, concerning the Companys objectives, expectations, estimates, projections, and future plans, may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable laws and regulations. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied. Important factors that could affect the Companys operations include economic conditions, demand and pricing in its markets, changes in government regulations, tax regimes, exchange-rate movements, and other incidental factors. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement on the basis of subsequent developments.