MakeMyTrip Limited

Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Make My Trip earnings call for Q1 FI27. We will just give a minute for everyone to join. Okay, hello everyone, I'm Vipul Garg, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations at MakeMyTrip Limited, and welcome to our Fiscal 2027 First Quarter Earnings webinar. Today's event will be hosted by a company's leadership team, comprising Rajesh Magow, our Co-Founder and Group Chief Executive Officer, Mohit Kabra, our Group Chief Operating Officer, and Deepak Bora, our Group Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, this live event is being recorded by the company and will be made available for replay on our IR website, shortly after the conclusion of today's event. At the end of these prepared remarks, we will also be hosting a Q&A session. Furthermore, certain statements made during today's event may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of safe harbor provision of the US Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are not guarantees of the future performance, are subject to inherent uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. Any forward-looking information relayed during this event speaks only as of this date and the company undertakes no obligation to update the information to reflect change circumstances. Additional information concerning these statements is contained in the risk factors and forward-looking statements section of the company's annual report on Form 20F filed with the SEC on July 27, 2026. Copies of these filings are available from the SEC or from the company's investor relations department. I would like to now turn the call over to Rajesh for his remarks. Over to you, Rajesh.

Thank you, Vipul. Welcome everyone to our first quarter call for fiscal 2027. Before we go into the financial and operating details, I would like to put the quarter in context. This was a quarter in which External events continue to influence where and how customers travel. The quarter began with the continuing impact of the West Asia conflict. In the initial phase, the impact was broad-based, flight operations were disrupted, and customers became more cautious about international travel, particularly on westbound routes. As flight operations gradually resumed, the nature of the challenge also evolved. Higher fuel cost and ATF prices translated into elevated airfares, affecting westbound international travel as well as price-sensitive domestic air demand to an extent. Higher ATF cost also affected the profitability of airlines, leading to short-term capacity cuts. However, as we moved into the peak summer holiday period, we saw seasonality began to support the underlying resilient travel intent for leisure travel, whereas Essential travel and business travel largely continued as uninterrupted except for long-haul westbound business travel. International leisure travel saw some shift from westbound to east and far east destinations and domestic leisure travel was a combination of popular leisure destinations and nearby short-distance getaways by road. Thanks to our comprehensive product offerings, We were well positioned to offer our customers alternative transport and accommodation options for their choice across both established and emerging leisure destinations during the quarter. As a result, we delivered a strong performance during Q1, despite significant macro and geopolitical headwinds, reflecting both the resilience of travel demand and the strength of our diversified platforms. Growth in hotels and packages and ground transport helped offset softness in air ticketing to deliver targeted adjusted margin growth and profitability. Both our bus ticketing and intercity cabs continue to grow at a strong pace driven by sustained supply additions, wider route coverage and the continued expansion of India's highway infrastructure. We continue to curate pilgrimage plus leisure itineraries, short duration holidays and drive down breaks These formats are increasingly becoming popular for customers looking for convenient, affordable and experience-led travel closer to home. The broader conclusion from this quarter is consistent with what we have observed post-COVID. Travel in India is gradually moving from an occasional purchase to becoming a recurring consumption category. Customers are taking more frequent trips across leisure, family visits, pilgrimage, short breaks and extended weekends. We have seen External events impacting the demand sentiment initially, but when macroeconomic or geopolitical environment starts to show some improvement, demand recovers quickly. This quarter was another validation of this behavior among Indian travelers. The long-term structural growth drivers also remain unchanged. Growth in the aspirational middle class, increasing participation from tier 2 and tier 3 cities, expanding physical infrastructure, great digital and the payments ecosystem continue to support the long-term positive outlook of the travel market in India. Let me now give an update on the progress we are making on our AI-first transformation. We view AI as a foundational layer across travel discovery, planning, booking, payments, servicing and loyalty. During the quarter we launched Myra 2.0 the next version of our AI power travel assistant to enable end-to-end conversational booking within the Myra interface possible now. Customers can now search, compare, ask contextual questions, upload documents and complete bookings including agentic payments through a single conversational interface via text chat, voice-only chat or a combination of voice or text chat across eight Indian languages. In the meantime, Customer adoption of Myra being used as assistant in the existing funnel continues to scale well. Myra handled over 8 million conversations during the quarter, including more than 3 million conversations in June alone. Over 45% of usage came from Tier 2 and smaller cities. We believe conversational AI feature will continue to simplify and personalize travel planning, improve customer engagement, and serve as a key long-term differentiator We are also expanding the use of AI and automation across customer support, content creation, supply onboarding, and operational processes. These investments are intended to reduce friction in the customer journey, improve conversion, and enhance organizational productivity. We are already seeing the productivity benefits of AI translate into our operations. AI now generates more than 75% of our code. and our AI powered customer support bot independently resolves over 50% of customer calls, meaningfully improving both engineering velocity and customer service efficiency. During the quarter, we launched AI powered smart filters on the flights and hotels listing page to enhance discovery, enabling users to express preferences in natural language and instantly refine results using natural language instead of relying only on predefined filters. Travelers can now search for highly specific preferences such as micro locations, early check-in, premium room, amenities for hotels or exact baggage allowance, cancellation penalties, seat inclusions, layover preferences, etc. in case of flights, thus making discovery more intuitive and personalized for the customers. Looking ahead, Higher oil prices and weakening of rupee remain important variables to keep overall travel inflation in control. We remain cautious about the near-term environment while staying positive about structural drivers for long-term growth in the sector. We will continue to navigate the near-term challenging environment by tapping into growth opportunities in our non-air ticketing segments while calibrating our marketing investments in line with market conditions. With this, let me now hand over the call to Mohit for business highlights of the quarter.

Thanks Rajesh and hello everyone. As explained by Rajesh, this was a quarter in which the external environment remained challenging, which impacted our outbound and air ticketing businesses. We leveraged the resilient travel sentiment by focusing on domestic travel, thrived on our short-duration holidays, and pilgrimage-led travel, supported by our widespread offering across hotels and ground transport. This helped us deliver strong growth in our hotels and packages business with adjusted margin growth of 21.3% year on year in constant currency terms. This was led by standard hotel booking volumes growing just over 20% or 20.2% year on year despite the weakness on the international demand side. This was coupled with strong growth in our ground transport business. Our bus ticketing business delivered strong adjusted margin growth of 32.4% year-on-year in constant currency, supported by strong volume growth of 23.9%. Similarly, our intercity cabs business grew in the 40s, albeit on a smaller base. This strong performance in an impacted quarter demonstrates the strength of our diversified and comprehensive bookie of travel services, which is helping drive growth much ahead of the industry and also driving increased customer engagement. Our ability to serve multiple accommodation and transport options across price points allows us to ensure that we curate travel experiences customized to the budget options of our customers. As customers book multiple travel segments on our platforms, we also gain a better understanding of their travel preferences and this helps us get better and better at offering more relevant, connected and personalized travel solutions. Let me share some more details on the holidays and packages segment. To drive the growth in hotels, we have significantly scaled up the breadth of stay options we offer in India to improve the coverage across destinations, price points, and travel needs. We now have over 1,01,000 accommodation options available on the platform, covering over 2,070 cities in the country. We continue to innovate and solve for unique requirements of the Indian traveling customer. To better serve families and travelers, we have made it easier to discover multi-bedroom properties along with better understanding of room layouts, which is resulting in higher booking confidence with more relevant room combinations being showcased during the booking process. We also launched probably an industry-first feature around guaranteed early check-in or guaranteed late checkout, a facility which is a paid feature enabling travelers to have assured room access aligned with their travel schedules right at the time of booking. This feature is helping address one of the most common pain points for travelers. This is even more relevant for Indians traveling overseas as the landing or takeoff times for most of our international connections have a significant gap with the usual check-in or check-out times offered by hostels in those destinations. One of the long-standing pain points in the accommodation segment has been inability to optimize hotel reward programs both for travelers as well as for accommodation service providers. As we entered the new fiscal year 2027, we are trying to address this with the launch of OneCircle. OneCircle is a cross-network hotel rewards program. Initially spanning over 30,000 properties across Indian and international destinations, OneCircle will enable travelers to earn and redeem rewards seamlessly across a large network of hotels, homestays, and villas. This will help them access a wider array of properties on a single reward program driving loyalty and repeat of stays across our accommodations ecosystem. Equally importantly for our hotel partners, OneCircle provides access to a broader base of loyal travelers which can help drive both new as well as repeat demand to their properties. We believe this will allow our domestic hotel partners to showcase their properties as well as drive demand particularly from India's fast-growing tier 2 and tier 3 markets. For our international hotel partners, this will be of great relevance in cities which see high travel demand from India. In homestays, we continue to invest and build the category and are enhancing our product proposition to improve customer experience as well as drive the appeal of such properties. We launched our Star Host program to recognize and reward hosts who consistently deliver outstanding guest experiences. Hosts meeting defined quality benchmarks across guest ratings, responsiveness, booking performance, and content quality are rewarded the Star Host badge, which is prominently surfaced across search results, property pages, and host profiles to improve trust and discovery. The Star Host Badge also helps customers export properties from these hosts and book with confidence, particularly in case of new properties. Our holiday packages business continues to scale well, and we are witnessing a shift towards shorter duration in nearby gateways in line with the current market trends. On the outbound side, destinations across Southeast Asia and Far East are driving the growth chart. Leveraging on the opportunity, we scaled up our group tours to over 15 destinations and generated about 90 departures or operated about 90 departures across Vietnam, Singapore, Georgia, Almaty, etc. During the quarter, we continue to build our tours and attractions business by strengthening customer integration, expanding our experiences portfolio, and investing in platform-led differentiation. Our international experiences portfolio now spans and many more, spanning 139 countries with a catalogue of over 250,000 tours and attractions covering sightseeing, tickets, Classes, performances, day trips, food experiences and unique local activities. Building on this portfolio, we have launched domestic experiences as well, spanning across 50 plus Indian cities, offering 3,000 plus products and strengthening our presence in a segment where we see significant growth potential in the future. This will help broaden our addressable market while strengthening our position as a one-stop platform for relevant travel experiences across both domestic and international destinations. A fourth of our tools and activities are currently being bought while the customers are on trip. This highlights the strong relevance being built with the platform for our customers while they're on the ground and looking for last minute things to do. As mentioned, we delivered strong growth in our bus ticketing business driven by robust growth in the private bus inventory in line with the summer holiday demand. During the quarter, we re-initiated our partnership with PhonePe, which is helping us expand our distribution footprint and reach a larger base of high intent digital customers, which bodes well for our new customer acquisition initiatives in the Indian travel market. We introduced several product enhancements to further strengthen the customer proposition. We introduced Comfort Score, a customer-generated rating based on seat and sleep comfort over the previous six months. As the market continues to move towards premium experiences with an increasing shift towards sleeper buses, Comfort Score provides customers with a clear signal of expected seat quality, helping position the bus travel more of a comfort and hospitality-led experience rather than a purely transportation choice. Coming to our bus air ticketing business segment, during the quarter, domestic departures were flat year on year, but international flight departures witnessed a degrowth of 13%. In line with our call-out strategy, we continue to maintain a leading 30% share of the market of the domestic air ticketing industry. We also continue to enhance The product features or offerings in this segment. We recently launched a new addition to our flexibility suite of products called Price Drop Protection, which eases the fare anxiety of the customers and gives them confidence to book early without having to guess if they should wait for a better fare in the future. We also launched Visa Guide on the listing page to help users understand Destination-specific visa policies and processes. During the quarter, after a hiatus of about two years, we reintroduced seamless native flight booking experience on PhonePe, powered by our GoiBeaver brand. This enables PhonePe customers to search, book, and manage flights directly within the PhonePe app. This partnership strengthens our distribution strategy by expanding our reach among high-intent customer base and driving incremental demand beyond our own homegrown channels. Let me now share some color on our non-B2C corporate demand platforms that is MyBiz and Quest2Travel. Both of which saw growth coming in not only from existing accounts, but as well as from acquisitions. Our active SME and MSME corporate customer count on MyBase has grown by almost 19% year-on-year to over 79,000 customers. The count for our large corporates on our Quest2Travel platform has now increased to over 550 accounts. Overall, this was a strong operating quarter despite the challenging external environment and we'll continue to develop our ability to serve The traveling customers across the entire travel ecosystem to capture demand linked with market trends. With this, let me now hand over the call to Deepak for sharing the financial highlights of the quarter.

Thanks Mohit and hello everyone. Before I begin the financial highlights, I want to call out the significant YOY currency movements during the quarter which has impacted our reported numbers. Our functional and operating currency is in INR but we report in USD. As USD and INR significantly depreciated during the quarter compared to same quarter last year, due to this our reported YOY growth numbers look much lower than the actual growth. This is largely due to translation related and has no bearing on the operations of the company. In Q1, there was an impact of around 10% due to currency movement and accordingly our constant currency growth numbers are the best representation of our financial and operating health of a company. Bross booking value for the quarter grew 19.9% YOY in constant currency terms and the IFRS revenue grew 16.1% YOY in constant currency coming at $285.6 million. The quarter performance was supported by strong growth in hotels and packages and bus ticketing business which helped offset the software operating environment in air ticketing. Adjusted operating profit for the quarter was $51.4 million with profitability margins maintained at 1.8% of gross booking. Moving on to our segment results, our air ticketing adjusted margin stood at $98.5 million, registering a growth of 10.8% YOY in constant currency terms. While the volume declined marginally due to macro headwinds, we achieved robust growth in adjusted margin on the back of a strong ancillary attach and better unit economics. For the hotels and packages segment, we recorded strong volume growth of 19.9% YOY with standalone hotels growing faster at 20.2% YOY on the back of strong demand in domestic hotels segment. We benefited from the shift in leisure demand towards domestic travel, including short duration and drive down holidays. Our expanding supply across established and emerging domestic markets allowed us to participate effectively in this shift. International hotel segment growth was impacted this quarter due to the conflict like international air. Hotels and packages gross booking growth was at 19.6% YOY and adjusted margin growth was at 21.3% YOY in constant currency coming at $134.5 million. Ground transport continued to grow at a strong pace during the quarter. Elevated airfare supported increased consideration of more affordable ground transport options, while supply additions, wider route coverage, and the continued development of India's highway infrastructure supported the category's structural growth. Bus ticketing adjusted margin was at $51.8 million for the quarter, registering a strong growth of 32.4% in constant currency terms. Our ancillaries business, which is part of the other segment, is scaling up well, helping us get a larger share of wallet of our customers by building the attach of ancillary services. As a result, adjusted margin from other segment came in at $24.9 million, witnessing a strong growth of 27.2% YOY in constant currency terms. Moving on the expense side, most expenses came in line. Marketing and sales promotion expense for the quarter was 5.4% of gross booking compared to 5.2% in the previous quarter, which is in line with seasonality. At the same time, the initial benefits from our AI-led productivity initiatives are becoming now visible, with efficiencies in personal and general and administrative costs offsetting the higher marketing intensity, and enabling us to maintain our overall profitability margins. The non-cash interest cost on our zero-coupon convertible bonds for the quarter in P&L was $29.3 million and the translation-related foreign currency loss was $5.1 million. Consequently, reported PAT for the quarter was $9.1 million. The adjusted net profit before tax came in at $52.2 million. We have a strong balance sheet and our cash flow generation continues to be robust. We ended the quarter with a cash and cash equivalent balance of $794 million. We also deployed $7.8 million in the buyback program during the quarter. Further to the update in the last earning calls, our wholly owned subsidiary Make My Trip India Limited has confidentially filed a pre-filed draft red herring prospectus on 17th July with SEBI and stock exchanges in relation to the proposed initial public offering and listing of the equity shares of MMT India. Upon completion of the proposed initial public offering, MMT India will continue to be a subsidiary of MakeMyTrip and will be included in MakeMyTrip's consolidated financial statements. The net proceeds received by MakeMyTrip Mauritius from the sale of shares in MMT India will further strengthen the cash position and are expected to be utilized for long-term growth, strategic inorganic initiatives, and repurchases of different classes of securities, including convertible securities by MakeMyTrip. We expect the proposed initial public offering and listing of MMT India to also enhance brand visibility and support our ability to incentivize and promote talent in a competitive technology recruitment landscape. Subject to regulatory approvals, both entities may evaluate alternatives in medium term to enable our respective shareholders to enjoy the benefits of our security at MMT India level that is fungible and listed across India and US capital markets. We are working with our advisors and shall keep sharing periodical updates. With that, I would like to turn the call to Vipul for Q&A.

Thanks, Deepak. Any participant who wishes to ask a question can click on the raise hand option on this screen and we will take questions one by one. We already have a couple of questions. The first question is from the line of Sachin Salgankar of Bank of America. Sachin, you may please ask your question now.

Thanks, Vipul. Congrats, management, for a good set of numbers. I have three questions. First question. Unfortunately, this entire Iran conflict continues. In that context, I want to understand what's happening on the ground from a domestic air supply easing. And again, government has passed a bit of higher fuel prices to consumers. So are we seeing impact on overall travel consumption spend? So basic question out here is obviously the base is favorable. So should we continue to see a constant currency growth of 20% plus? Or are there other factors like a domestic air supply which is impacting this growth?

Maybe I can respond to that, Sachin. As far as the air industry is concerned, at least on the domestic side, see the DGCA data is available on a monthly basis. And it is showing that change in seasonality and you know every time between jazz and say amj jazz being a slightly uh you know slacker season on kind of leisure travel which usually you know kind of sees some amount of compression on the number of you know segments being flown uh it does look like that you know the the overall you know drop in in segments is likely to be So we don't know. I mean, we're just kind of, you know, one month into the quarter. But we'll have to kind of, you know, take it by the week, by the month. However, like we called out in the call, we're kind of focusing on a variety of transport options, you know, just not kind of, you know, banking on and many more. But it is needless to mention that flights continue to be such a large part of the travel category. A little uncertainty or degrowth on flights does have an impact on the overall kind of, you know, growth for the industry. And therefore, it's kind of a little difficult to predict, you know, what kind of growth do we look at, you know, for every quarter. Last quarter had a similar kind of a structure and year-on-year kind of a framework. And we have come almost close to the kind of growth expectation that we had set out for ourselves. And we are hopeful that we'll kind of remain on the trajectory even in the quarters to come. One quarter could be better or worse off. But overall, directionally, that will be the intent to kind of, you know, keep it largely in line with the trajectory. And we continue to focus a lot more on growth from non-flight segments. So I think the focus or narrative at least, you know, in the short term will have to be more around growth from, you know, non-flight segments, which is either holidays, hotels and packages or

Bus ticketing or other transport options Maybe if I can just build a little bit more on what Mohit just said We tried to sort of highlight some of that thematic shift on our call as well See the good news is that It is not necessarily entire, which used to be the case perhaps some time back, that everything is sort of dependent on only air travel. And I think for the last couple of quarters where the disruption has been continuing off and on, we've seen sort of that shift developing into some kind of a pattern with our customers on our platform as well where people are happily making alternative choices if the air travel is expensive then you know internationally expensive then you end up picking up domestic destination or short haul destination where relatively it is cheaper or you just you know take an alternative mode of transport and maybe just go for a nearby and all but not necessarily completely abandoned travel as far as leisure is concerned. And we saw that sort of playing out even in this quarter. That is point number one. Point number two also, I think it's worth mentioning that the While the disruption cycle would disturb the sentiment initially, and we saw in a couple of weeks there was a relief when the MOU was signed and the oil prices dropped significantly and very quickly. We saw the recovery also happening swiftly as well. So, you know, so these are some of the noticeable trends are sort of pointing to the fact that the underlying desire or intent to travel is not necessarily changing. That is a bit of a structural shift that has happened. And that coupled with the fact that we are a comprehensive platform able to service every possible travel service is kind of helping and that to Mohit's point that directionally we continue to keep navigating this short-term headwinds and keep at least from an execution standpoint make sure that we stay on course on whatever is our directional targeted growth that we had shared. The only exception could be now one quarter here and there but in general we should continue to keep driving that.

Thank you, Rajesh. My second question is on the disruptions, what we are seeing, and clearly on the back of it, your inducements are high. So when we think about marketing spend as a percentage of GMV, should we actually now expect slightly higher than the guided range or at the higher end? Or, you know, as Deepak mentioned in his opening remarks, should we see some AI-led benefits which keeps marketing spends under control?

On the marketing side, Sachin, Significant change from what the trending has been over the last few quarters. And there could be small changes coming in from the shift in mix, particularly as the airline mix goes down. As you know, the spending is slightly higher on the higher margin categories. And therefore, this is largely in line with the mix of the business Therefore, as you see, the overall in the bottom line also the 1.8% kind of, you know, continues to be delivered as a percentage of gross bookings in terms of EOP. So largely in line and when it comes to AI, I think the larger focus is more on on driving much better personalization or much better curation of options or discovery for our customers and also kind of impacting the post-sales experiences, not necessarily kind of looking at sharply bringing any specific reduction in the customer action cost through that.

Good, Mohit. Clear. And last question on your India listing. And congrats on filing up a confi, filing so fast. One of the comments what your press release also had was you may evaluate alternatives in medium term to enable shareholders to enjoy fungibility between the two names. Can you give more color in terms of what kind of fungibility are we thinking about and why medium term, what are some of the key events that need to happen for that fungibility to come?

Sure. I think the first important event is for the IPO to go through. and then we kind of, you know, start looking at it post that. Clearly, you know, a few options that are kind of, you know, available. You know, one of the options is to kind of look at a potential kind of an ADR or say there are also options here, an inverting of the structure or a merger of the structure is possible, whether with the NCLT route or with the RBI route. In fact, actually today's, you know, ET articles also carry that the parliamentary committee is also looking at the structure and they would kind of come up with very specific recommendations around this. So like we've been saying in the past, we have been evaluating a variety of such options and also been kind of passing on our recommendations wherever possible. So we'll keep an open eye to it. The whole intent is as we kind of, while India does not have a, We have a dual listing kind of structure currently in place. We want to kind of keep pressing for that or kind of want to get to a structure which is as close to it as possible in line with what the regulatory environment is. So that's what it is. Again, most of these efforts will have to start once the India listing kind of happens and settles down. And then we can start working on some of these parts. It's just that we're kind of keeping an early eye also kind of trying to see if any regulatory kind of changes can help us in this matter.

Got it. Thank you and all the best.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Sachin. The next question is from the line of Manisha Dukia of Goldman Sachs. Manisha, may please ask your question now.

Thank you, Vipul. Hi, team. Good to chat. My first question actually is a follow-on from the previous question's response, Mohit. So when you talk about fungibility, is it safe to say that you would start the process for that fungibility soon after the IPO happens or would there be a few other consideration factors before you will take a call on whether you want to enable fungibility or not? And my second question on the same topic is, From the convertible bond standpoint, which combined is about $1.6 billion that you have at the MakeMyTrip Mauritius level, in the event where you talked about potentially inverting or merger of the structure, what would happen to those convertible bonds?

Yeah, sure, Manish. Like I said, you know, in my previous response, this is something that we can hardly kind of undertake or kind of think about in real terms once the India listing goes through, right? and therefore we need to understand and again what we have done on currently is only a confidential filing there will be an opportunity to do an updated filing or a public filing and therefore there is kind of you know involved in kind of you know taking this process through and like I also mentioned there are kind of you know looking like there are moving parts to this piece and the regulatory kind of environment may not necessarily remain what it is today. So we'll keep an eye open on all possibilities, including the ones that I called out. Now, could there be variables which could kind of impact this? Depending upon the timeline involved, there could be multiple variables which could be impacting this, but the overall objective largely remains the same. The underneath objective remains the same. If we can facilitate our investors to kind of participate between the two listed options in a much more seamless manner, without having to exit from one to get into the other. So that's the broader thought process. With respect to your question on the convertible bonds, even the first round of bonds, which is the 28 kind of maturing bonds, that 200 million, that's kind of reasonably well into the money. So that should not kind of really have any impact as such. But the Second round of bonds which we had issued last year, you know, which is close to about 1.4 billion, that is still not in the money, right? And potential India listing, which also means that for the group as a whole, you know, it would mean a strong addition to the, you know, the cash that we have on the balance sheet, which keeps us very prepared to handle both a redemption or a conversion as might kind of, you know, happen on the on the board issue in the previous year. So I think from that point of view, this listing kind of only helps in remaining even more prepared, although the cash on the balance sheet currently also is reasonably strong at over $800 million. So overall, good situation to be in without the kind of IPO proceeds.

Very clear. Thank you. Maybe just a quick follow on. I mean, again, I'm just trying to push my luck here. In terms of just the fungibility and completely appreciate that the process can only start once the India IPO actually goes through. But from a timeline perspective, is there like a realistic timeline that how long that could take like six months, one year, two years after the IPO? Or it's very hard to call that out given just the number of variables involved?

I think if the regulatory changes that we have proposed come through, It could happen in a very short span, right? That's the least I can say. But we'll have to keep in mind how the regulatory environment is at that point in time. And therefore, like I said, since it's quite a few quarters away, it'll be more relevant to speak of it on a periodical basis as we have more color around it.

No, appreciate that, Kalra Mohit. My second question is on just the EBITDA or operating profit growth process. In dollar terms, it's in the single digit range, not too dissimilar from the revenue growth profile in dollar terms, right? So, like, at least for the quarter, we are not seeing any operating leverage play out. Why should that be the case? I mean, when the business in underlying constant effects basis is growing at 20% in rupee terms, why should costs grow at the same pace and There should be no operating leverage in the business.

that you know the profitability is not necessarily a key challenge for us right now in the current environment where you know the industry growth is muted in fact if you look at it the largest segment which is you know flights is actually seeing a degrowth in the market right almost minus two percent which is almost which has been unprecedented right and while you're riding through such a rough environment one is to kind of try and you know optimize on the profitability the other is to try and make most of the market conditions and actually increase your lead in terms of market share as a market leader as an aggressive kind of you know here in the segment I think our choice is very clear that we want to kind of press on building market share during these turbulent times rather than kind of focus on building profitability we are in a decent playing on the profitability side at about 1.8 percent we'll be happy to kind of you know remain there all gradually increase this. But we want to make the most of this uncertain times in terms of increasing our lead or increasing our market share across segments. And as you know, most of the other domestic OTAs are heavily skewed on the ticketing side. And therefore, this provides us a much better opportunity to kind of invest behind customer acquisition, invest behind growth opportunities or take capabilities in terms of handling such growth. and make the most of it and therefore be kind of, you know, veering towards that rather than trying to drive more operating leverage. This also comes with the fact that we are doing a sizable investment on the AI side to kind of continuously keep building on the tech capabilities to drive future growth.

And there are some new segments as well, Manish. There are new segments as well, like tours and attractions. At any point in time, we will have at least a couple of new segments that we would have invested behind. And it's important to sort of keep investing in for future growth as well. And not necessarily, you know, sort of every penny try to sort of, you know, add to the profitability. Given the overall market condition, because there's significant headroom still across the board on overall sort of many segments being online low penetrated. And therefore, I think it's from our point of view, a very balanced strategy. Wherever we see an opportunity, we end up redeploying it. wherever, you know, when the opportunity, I mean, there will be time and phase where the headroom will keep reducing and then you will see that it is sort of more flowing through the bottom line rather than relatively just, you know, incrementally lower addition to the bottom line right now.

Thanks a lot, Kalra, Rajesh. Thank you and all the best.

Thank you, Manish.

Thank you, Manish. The next question is from the line of Aditya Suresh of Macquarie. Aditya, you may please ask your question now.

Yeah, thank you. So two questions. First is on cash from operations that was down due to some working capital impacts this quarter. Can you just help us understand why that was the case? That's one. Second is your volume trends are strong, right? Like hotels are 20%, buses are 24%, 25%. Can you speak about the market share which you're seeing in volume terms in these categories? Thank you.

Deepak, you can take the first question.

So if you see, you're right, your observation, the working capital deployment has taken up cash. And this is because if you see, we have a corporate business. which we do the B2B corporate business and MyWiz business that has been growing relatively quite fast. Over the last 12 months the growth has been very high and the expansion in the working capital has happened because in line with the growth we have achieved in that business with the normal DSO terms which remains in that business as a multiplier of that, that has expanded the working capital. and some working capital gets expanded because of seasonality in this quarter because you tend to receive advances from customers for bookings for the next quarter. Now, you know, July, August and September is a low seasonality and you receive lesser advances. So it shows up in a lesser, you know, advances from customers. So that has impacted the working capital. But it's a seasonality feature and in line with the growth of our corporate business.

Coming to the second one, Aditya, on the strong growth on the volumetric side, yeah, absolutely. Like we called out, we're trying to drive market share gains across non-flight segments, whether it is hotels, whether it is alternative accommodations, represented in our standalone hotels growth number, which kind of includes both. and similarly on ground transport, whether it is our bus segment or our intercity or outstation cabs business, all are reporting kind of, you know, very strong growth numbers. You know, unfortunately, unlike in the A-ticketing business where DGCA kind of comes out with a market report, the size of the market and the moving market share is a little difficult to kind of, you know, calculate in the accommodation or in the in the ground transport category. But I think I would just say the growth that we've kind of called out over here compared to what we expect the growth in the respective segments to be, which is likely to be more in like, you know, potentially single digit to maybe like double digit overall in the respective segments. Clearly, our market shares would have improved significantly through the quarter as well.

Thank you.

Thanks Aditya. The next question is from the line of Parash Jain of HSBC. Parash, can you please ask your question now?

Hi, thanks Vipul. I have two questions and one of that is partially been answered. First, with respect to Indian subsidiary raising capital, is there any tax implication involved in taking that money out? For repayment of convertibles. I just wanted to understand how that mechanism will work. And secondly, with respect to the different businesses growth, with capacity cut by the Indian Airlines, when you talk about 30% market share, maybe you can share some color in the international business. How much is it with the Indian carriers versus the non-Indian carriers? And are you seeing a shift in market share in those segments?

Thank you.

Mohit, you've gone on mute. Mohit, you've gone on mute.

So, hi Parash, sorry. Maybe I'll start on that and Rajesh or Deepak can add. But when it comes to the filing that we've done now, it's a confidential filing and it'll be difficult for us to share More color right now, in terms of likely addition of funds and at which entity level, etc. But suffice to say, it will be addition for the group as a whole. And therefore, I don't see too much of a concern over there in terms of using it for a variety of requirements, whether it is organic or inorganic growth, or whether it is for You know, repurchase or redemption of the convertible note. So in either of these cases, it should kind of pretty easily be usable, irrespective of how it is raised. So that was the first part. Now, when it comes to good growth, like I said, you know, on the ground transport side, I've already called out the strong growth both in bus ticketing in the 30s and and in kind of, you know, calves market in the 40s. Now, when it comes to the international, you know, air travel, if that was the other part of your question, we kind of work equally well, you know, across airlines, whether it is domestic airlines or whether it is international airlines. Two things which are impacting over there, you know, one, like Rajesh had called out in his part of the earnings script that, you know, initially there was a significant impact coming in from You know, the availability of flights or kind of, you know, the flight scheduling. And secondly, due to the significant increase in crude oil pricing situation overall, the prices or fares in this sector, the international sectors have gone up very significantly. Both of these are kind of, you know, impacting. In fact, if you also would have picked up, you know, some of the Indian carriers are kind of trying to prune down their kind of, you know, services, particularly the wide-bodied kind of, you know, aircraft. So that is also likely to kind of have an impact going forward. So some of these are like, you know, ongoing challenges which we'll have to keep navigating around. But we'll kind of keep, remain focused on driving growth as per kind of, you know, market trends, whether it is on the international side or on the domestic side.

Okay, that's very, very helpful. Thank you and all the best.

Thank you. Thanks, Parash. The next question is from the line of Prateek Kumar of Jefferies. Prateek, you may please ask your question now.

Yeah, thanks, Dean. Thanks for the opportunity. My first question is on your AI initiatives. So you said Myra is handling 8 million conversations and AI is now resolving around 50% of the customer calls. But how do you think is this translating into business outcomes, particularly from conversion, customer acquisition cost, or customer satisfaction? And are these investments eating up certain bips of operating leverage, which you mentioned earlier?

Yeah, Prateek, maybe I can take that, you know, as far as the booking End to end booking is concerned on Myra. I mean, there are two separate cases that you mentioned, right? One is, of course, customer service that we had shared as part of the script as well. And the other one is just the booking conversational interface where now the new version of Myra, which we launched recently, also takes care of end to end discovery till the payments to actually closing the booking in the single interface as well. Now, Myra has two sort of avatars, if you will. One part of which is the heavy use right now and growing actually quite scaling up quite well from consumer adoption standpoint is when customers invoke Myra for taking assistance when they are already in the funnel, which is the current booking interface. That part is sort of helping improve the conversion on the funnel side. So that part is from a consumer adoption standpoint, scaling well, as well as improving conversion. As far as end-to-end booking, which is just a very recent launch, it's early days on that. And that is going to be largely start with Myra and don't really go to the existing funnel and complete the transaction completely on Myra in the same interface, either using text chat or voice, complete voice interaction or voice come text chat. That part is early. So there the traction has started to just about started to come. We will have to see I think one quarter, two quarters down the line, we should be able to give you more color on that. So this one is more on the customer facing side, which is basically helping the consumer experience overall, making it smoother, convenient, personalized, which effectively improves conversion. On the other side, which is the customer service, where our voice bot is handling almost about 50% of the total calls now, frictionless, completely on its own, no human intervention. That is the one which is sort of helping on reducing the outsourcing cost quite significantly. And that's sort of reflecting in our overall SG&A improvement, if you really see. While the business keeps growing, our SG&A and the significant portion of the SG&A is outsourcing cost is not growing at all. In fact, we've had some goodness that has come in there and likely to come in more because we do think this whole 50% can go to about 65-70% without just too much of additional work on the development side. while the balance being the complexity of the use cases might still remain hybrid or you know sort of with human interaction so I think on an overall basis it'll be fair to say that the journey of seeing some of the productivity gains have started to reflect slowly and gradually in the overall performance overall financial performance of the company while on the on the booking interface We will see how it's sort of especially the end-to-end booking scale up along with the consumer adoption over the next few quarters. And once we have more sort of data around it, we will continue to keep sharing with you.

Yeah, the third question was a related question was like these investments also eating into your operating leverage you mentioned earlier in the call.

Actually, not really. Again, if you really see the overall analysis, and I think Deepak was trying to make that point as part of his commentary. We've been able to, you know, of course, there's been investment. And over the last several quarters, we've been able to optimize on two counts. One, using the hybrid of open source and frontier models to optimize the cost per se of the token. Because AI, our focus is, like I was saying as part of my commentary, is the core focus area where we are trying to become absolutely AI first or AI native across the organization. And so we've worked quite a lot on sort of optimizing our cost, just sort of balancing the usage of the models. And on the other side, the productivity gains have started to show. So right now it's sort of whatever is the incremental cost on the AI front is almost offsetting, the gains are almost offsetting the increase in cost. Thank you. I have one other question. Is there any change in booking patterns

or like booking curve change versus pre-conflict levels?

Yeah, pre-Middle East conflict, I would have thought. Yes, Pratik? Yeah, of course. Yeah. So, you know, some behavioral shift that we have noticed, you know, one of them I was again mentioning earlier, this short-term getaways have picked up significantly. because of the fact some part of it is because of the fact that overall air travel cost is becoming expensive so therefore why not look for an alternative because we still want to travel travel out that that behavior is not sort of changing and therefore a lot more you know short-term weekend getaways whether it is just a weekend or a longish kind of weekend when there is Some festival holiday or some other holiday that gets combined with the weekend and drivable distance you know holiday patterns and that we've seen significantly going up using ground transport any modes of ground transport including self-driving you know taking into city cab or taking a luxury bus etc. So that is one pattern that has changed. The second Not specific to this conflict, but post-COVID, the significant sort of new segment that has emerged, even more specifically focusing specifically from Gen Z cohorts, is the traveling in group and the use case could be celebration use case, whether it is birthday or any festival celebration, just getting together and traveling. and the choice of the accommodation will be more homestays than hotel for that particular specific use case. So some of these sort of new segments, particularly post COVID have emerged and they continue to sort of keep growing. And because of which, as we've been sort of highlighting in the past that our homestay supply has also been significantly growing. The market is also growing and we have also been acquiring and growing our homestays sort of overall inventory on our platform.

Thank you, Rajesh. These are my questions.

Thanks, Prateek.

Thanks, Prateek. We are almost out of time. This was our last question. Over to you, Rajesh, for the closing comments.

Thanks, Vipul, and thank you for all the Thank you everyone. We are now at the end of the hour. You may please disconnect the call. Thank you.