The Bombay Store just hit ₹100 crore. The two-year picture tells a different story.

Bombay Swadeshi Stores, the company behind the 120-year-old Bombay Store chain, closed FY26 with revenue above ₹100 crore for the first time. Profit rose 18%. Debt is almost nothing. On the surface, a clean year. Look past the headline number and the trend is a lot more mixed.

What the business actually is

No factory. No manufacturing. The company buys handicrafts, home décor, and gifting items from artisans, marks them up, and sells through 30 leased stores across 13 cities. Gross margin sits around 52%, and that markup is basically the whole business.

Because the model is "buy, stock, sell," inventory carries the balance sheet. The company holds close to ₹22 crore of stock at any time, roughly 160 days worth, since a ₹2 lakh showpiece can sit on a shelf for a year before it finds a buyer. Rent runs about 15% of revenue, the biggest cost line after goods sold. There's also a real export angle: nearly ₹18 crore of foreign exchange earnings, about 18% of revenue, largely from tourists buying at counters in cities like Mumbai and Jaipur.

One more oddity worth flagging: the company carries no bank debt at all. Its only borrowing is an interest-free loan from a promoter director. Total finance cost for the year was ₹23,000.

The year, in numbers

Revenue: ₹100.01 crore, up 12.7%.Profit after tax: ₹10.31 crore, up 18.3%.Operating cash flow: ₹7.07 crore, up roughly ninefold from ₹0.80 crore.Debt to equity: 0.20, down from 0.46.

The cash flow jump is the real story here. Most of it came from a weak FY25 comparison rather than any structural shift, but it let the company pay down ₹4.71 crore of the promoter loan, fund ₹1.45 crore of capex, and still close the year with more cash in hand.

Where the story gets less clean

Store count went from 27 to 30, an 11% jump. Revenue grew 12.7%. Do the simple division and revenue per store barely moved, from ₹3.29 crore to ₹3.33 crore. New stores don't get a full year of sales, so this isn't a perfect comparison, but the company doesn't publish same-store growth either, so there's no clean way to tell whether existing stores are actually improving or whether the top line is just riding new square footage.

Costs are rising faster than sales too. Staff expense climbed 18.5% as headcount grew from 213 to 245, and rent rose almost 13%, both ahead of revenue growth.

There's also a legal overhang worth knowing about. One store, in Pune, is tied up in an eviction dispute with its landlord. The company has ₹5.21 crore locked with the court as a deposit, about 15% of its entire net worth, plus ₹5.5 lakh going out every month in interim compensation while the case runs.

Zoom out to two years and the picture sharpens further. Revenue has grown about 9.7% a year since FY24. Profit has grown roughly 2% a year over the same stretch, mostly because FY25 was genuinely weak before FY26 recovered some of that ground. Net margin was 11.9% in FY24 and sits at 10.3% now.

What the current price implies

Indicative levels on the unlisted market have this stock around ₹470 a share, putting the company's value near ₹232 crore. At that price you're paying about 22.5 times FY26 earnings and 6.5 times book value.

The book value multiple looks much cheaper than it did two years ago, but that's mostly an accounting effect: the company pays no dividend, so every rupee of profit stays on the balance sheet and book value keeps climbing even if the underlying business isn't growing much faster. Earnings, meanwhile, are close to where they were in FY24.

Also worth noting: because the company reports under older accounting standards, its store leases don't show up as liabilities the way they would for a listed peer. That flatters both its debt ratios and its return ratios versus companies you'd normally compare it to.

Bottom line

A no-debt, cash-generating, 120-year-old brand with 52% gross margins is a genuinely attractive setup. But almost 90% of the company sits with three promoters, there's no dividend, no stated plan to list, and a float of only about 5.5 lakh shares to trade. Growth right now looks more like new stores opening than existing stores getting better, and two-year profit growth is nowhere near as strong as the FY26 headline suggests on its own.

This is a bet on FY26 being the start of a real recovery, not a one-year bounce. Worth understanding that distinction before pricing it in.

Based on Bombay Swadeshi Stores Limited's FY26 annual report. For information only, not investment advice. Unlisted shares are illiquid and difficult to exit.