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spk00: Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Yatra Online Inc's fiscal third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. My name is Drew, and I'll be the operator on today's call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. There will be a Q&A on today's call. To register a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. At this time, I would like to turn the conference call over to Manish Hemrajani, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
spk01: Thank you, Drew. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Yatra's fiscal third quarter 2024 financial results for the period ended December 31st, 2023. I'm pleased to be joined on the call today by Yatra CEO and co-founder Drew Stringy and CFO Rohan Mittal. The following discussion, including responses to your questions, reflects management views as of today, February 14th, 2024. We don't take any obligation to update or revise the information. Before we begin our formal remarks, let me remind you that certain statements made on today's call may constitute forward-looking statements which are based on management's current expectations and beliefs and are subject to several risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For a description of these risks, please refer to our filings with the SEC and our press release filed earlier this morning. These files are available from the SEC and also on the IR section of our website. With that, let me turn the call over to Dhruv. Dhruv, please go ahead.
spk03: Thank you, Manish, and good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us for our second quarter earnings call. We are proud to report strong December quarter results. The Atlas Air Passenger segment recorded a robust 26% year-over-year growth, nearly tripling the industry benchmark of 9%. This makes it the fourth quarter in a row of share gains for Yatra. In the air travel sector, our strong brand recognition and successful strategies in capturing market share has enabled us to grow both our domestic and international air business. As we move forward, we remain optimistic and committed to leveraging these positive trends to drive further growth and success. We fortified our market leadership in the corporate travel sector by finding 26 new corporate customers in the december quarter with an annual billing potential of inr 2.2 billion which is approximately usd 27 million this underlines the capability and leadership of our corporate travel tax platform i would like to highlight here one specific deal that we signed in the december quarter with aramco asia india a wholly owned subsidiary of the global energy leader aramco yatra's user-friendly platform will facilitate effortless bookings for flights hotels, trains, and other services for Aramco's Asia personnel. This integrated travel solution extends to Aramco's subsidiaries in key Asian and oceanic markets including India, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Australia. This multi-product and multi-region deal highlights the capabilities and strengths of our platform and the ability to handle any level of complexity with our cutting-edge technology. In alignment with our commitment to shareholder returns, I'm also pleased to report the repurchase of approximately 280,000 shares under the share buyback program authorized by our board, and we continue to be active on the buyback front in the current quarter. This move underlines our confidence in Yatra's promising future and our unwavering dedication to maximizing shareholder value. Now let me provide some color on the macro picture. India's economic landscape remains particularly robust, buoyed by a significant public capital expenditure initiative and a strong domestic economy. The Indian economy is poised for consistent growth, with projections now revised upwards, estimating 7% GDP growth in FY24. Travel, as you know, tends to be closely linked to growth in GDP, and over the past decade in the developing economies, you've seen travel growing closer to 1.5 to 2x of GDP growth. Domestic air passenger traffic continued on its scorching growth pace in India and continues to remain the fastest growing air market globally. December 23 saw a total of 13.8 million passengers travel domestically in India, the highest ever monthly passenger traffic number, clearly underscoring the robustness of the Indian aviation sector. Religious travel is one of the biggest segments of tourism in India. Several popular religious centers attract annual tourists in the range of 10 million to 30 million, despite the existing infrastructural bottlenecks. On this front, the government has done significant amount of work to improve the infrastructure, and we expect that this improvement in infrastructure will continue to drive upward growth in traffic numbers to these destinations. A recent Jefferies report highlighted that the Holy City of Ayodhya could see as many as an influx of up to 50 million visitors each year as a result of the newly built temple. As for the report, tourism in India contributed USD 194 billion to FY19 GDP and is expected to grow at an 8% CAGR to USD 443 billion by FY33. Tourism to GDP ratio in India sits at 6.8% of GDP, well below most of the large economies. For example, in comparison, China is at 11.6% of GDP. This points to significant headroom for growth in the Indian travel market. Now let me provide you with some more details of our third quarter. For the quarter ended December 31, 2023, we reported revenues of INR 1.1 billion, which is approximately USD 13.4 million, marking a substantial increase of 23% over the last year. Our adjusted margin from air ticketing rose to INR 1.1 billion, which is USD 13.4 million, a 10.2% year-over-year growth. Furthermore, our adjusted EBITDA saw an improvement of 24% year-over-year, reaching INR 44.5 million, or approximately USD 500,000. Moving on to further details of the quarter, the corporate segment continues to be somewhat impacted with softness and travel expense in the IT-IT year sector, We are confident, however, of the recovery in the near term from our largest contributing sector, especially as AI-related software developments take root globally. In addition, we expect that the new business that we have won over the last few quarters is more than likely to offset the drop that we have seen on account of softmax in the IT-IT sector in the coming quarters. On the hotel front, revenue from our hotels and packages business was INR 449 million, which is approximately USD 5.4 million. In the three months ended December 31st, 2023, this reflected an increase of 17% year over year. The increase in revenue is attributable to a recovery in domestic travel with a higher number of holiday packages sold as a result. From a competitive standpoint, the intensity has remained stable from the last quarter and remains manageable overall. As some of you may recall, we had launched our Yatra Prime membership program in the middle of 2023. We are taking that a step further and as a gratitude to our Indian shareholders, we have offered that subscription free to our shareholders in India, expanding the shareholder base and the base for our Prime customers. With the positive macro backdrop and given the ongoing recovery in corporate and leisure travel and the rise in discretionary spending and now a significantly bolstered balance sheet, we believe we are well poised for the strong FY24 and FY25. Aside from seasonality and some softness that I touched upon earlier in the IT sector, we expect our results to benefit from accelerating growth in both our corporate business and consumer business as we continue to add to a formidable blue chip customer base and leverage the strength of our brand. Given our stronger balance sheet following the IPO, we've already begun to see early signs of improving supplier margins and expect this to gain further momentum in the quarters ahead and have a meaningful positive impact on our operating performance going forward. With that, let me hand it over to Rohan to walk you through the details of the financial performance.
spk02: Rohan? Thank you, Bruce. I will now review our quarter 3 numbers for the quarter ending December 31, 2023. Our gross hooking for the quarter was 18.6 million INR, which is roughly U.S. 224 million, up by 18% YOY, with air up by 22% and the hotels and packages up by 4% YOY. For the December quarter, our total revenue grew by 23% to INR 1.1 billion, which is roughly U.S. 13.4 million on account of sustained travel demand. Adjusted margins were up across air, hotel, package, and other services. With the air ticketing business up by 10% YY to INR 1.1 billion, while the hotel and package business adjusted margin was up by 4% YY to INR 264 million, which is roughly $3.2 million. Adjusted margin from other services was also up by 49% YY. Moving to the expenses, Quarter 3 marketing and sales promotion expenses, including consumer promotion and loyalty program costs, increased by 8% on a YY basis to INR 884 million, which is roughly USD 10.6 million. The marketing increase lacked the overall gross earnings growth of 18%, which shows a strong brand recall of YAPLA. Our personal expenses, excluding share this payment expenses, increased by 8% liwa to INR 279 million, which is roughly USD 3.4 million. Payment gateway costs as a percentage of the total gross bookings remain range-bound, while other expenses increased by about 13% on liwa basis. On an overall basis, adjusted EBITDA stands at INR 44.5 million as compared to 36 million in the quarter ended December 2018. Lastly, As of 31st December 2023, balance of cash and cash equivalents in term deposits on our books was INR a little above INR 5 billion, which is roughly USD 60.78. Our gross debt as of 31st December 2023 was INR 852 million. We've reduced this by almost 51% at a gross level on a quarter-on-quarter basis. With this, we conclude our prepared remarks, and I'd like to hand it over to the moderator for Q&A. Thank you.
spk00: Thank you. We will now start the Q&A portion of today's call. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. Our first question today comes from Scott Beck from HC Wainwright. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
spk04: Hi, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. First one, I may have missed it in the prepared remarks, Drew, but can you comment a little bit on some of those pricing headwinds that you saw in the second quarter and how they impacted the third quarter and maybe what the outlook is for the fourth quarter on those?
spk03: So in terms of pricing headwind, what we've seen is that during the quarter, the overall macro industry has remained fairly robust. But there is an expectation that on the domestic aviation side, we will see, you know, some capacity constraint and capacity being pulled out by one of the largest in India for repair of their flattened Whitney engines. And this withdrawal of capacity in the current quarter is likely to see a slight increase in airfares. We would expect airfares to go up in the mid to high single digits compared to the same quarter last year. So there is a little bit of pricing headwind which is there and we expect this to carry on till about the summer months. And it's only around the July, August timeframe that we see the capacity beginning to come back. into the ecosystem. So for the next two quarters, there is going to be a bit of pricing increase, which we will see, and that may have a slight bit of softening, or that may result in a slight bit of softening in demand.
spk04: Great, that's helpful. And my second, hoping you give us a little bit more of an update or a little more color around international travel and the trends you're seeing there. I mean, it seems like that's been a bit of a laggard versus corporate and leisure travel. just in catching up since COVID?
spk03: Yes. So international travel actually improved quite meaningfully in the last quarter. It was just a little bit ahead of our weighted average growth rate of 26% that we saw. So we've seen strong recovery happening on the international side in the last quarter. And there is more capacity expansion that's happening on the international front We've seen some of the airlines like Air India deploy more capacity on the international routes. We've also seen some of the international airlines bring back a little bit of their capacity into the Indian market on the back of the demand, which is there. So we should continue to see good momentum on international travel. So while in the first half of our fiscal year of last year, international travel lagged behind, in the last quarter, which is the December quarter, international travel has gained momentum and is carrying forward that same momentum into the current quarter.
spk04: Great. That's helpful. And then last one for me. I'm just curious, given the severe dislocation between where the U.S. shares trade and where the local shares are valued, what kind of fungibility, if anything, is there between the shares? Maybe you could help kind of walk us through that a little bit.
spk03: As of today, Scott, there are two separate entities. One is a holding company, the other is the operating company. So on account of that, these two shares today at least are not fungible. But we continue to work with our council to see if there is any way for us to make them fungible. But it's a bit too early to state on that categorically as to what shape would that take. But having said that, I think, like you pointed out, I think there is a large arbitrage opportunity that exists today between the prices of the two indexes. India being the home market is trading at a very different price point compared to where the U.S. is trading. But in terms of fungibility, I think that's all, unfortunately, that I can share at the moment. Yeah.
spk04: I appreciate the added color and congrats on the results, guys.
spk00: Thank you. Just to remind everyone, if you would like to ask a question, please press start followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press start followed by two. We have no further questions in the queue, so I'll hand back over for any closing remarks.
spk01: Thanks, Drew. Thank you, everyone, for joining the call today. And as always, we are available for follow-ups. Thank you.
spk00: That concludes today's Yatra Online Inc. Fiscal Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. You may now disconnect your line.
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