MakeMyTrip Limited (NASDAQ:MMYT) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

MakeMyTrip Limited (NASDAQ:MMYT) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript October 31, 2023

Vipul Garg: Hello, everyone. I’m Vipul Garg, Vice President, Investor Relations at MakeMytrip Limited, and welcome to our fiscal ’24 second quarter earnings webinar. Today’s event will be hosted by company’s leadership team, comprising Deep Kalra, our company’s Founder and Chairman. Joining him is Rajesh Magow, our Co-Founder and Group Chief Executive Officer; and Mohit Kabra, 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 U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

These statements are not guarantees of 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 changed circumstances. Additional information concerning these statements are contained in the Risk Factors and Forward-Looking Statements section of the company’s annual report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC on July 12, 2022. Copies of these filings are available from SEC or from the company’s Investor Relations Department. I would like to now turn the call over to Rajesh. Over to you, Rajesh.

Rajesh Magow: Thank you, Vipul. Welcome, everyone, to our second quarter call of fiscal 2024. We are pleased to report another quarter of strong operating performance, where we maintained strong momentum, both in terms of top line and bottom line growth year-on-year. Gross bookings for the quarter reached $1.8 billion, growing at 23.8% year-on-year in constant currency terms, while our adjusted operating profit, or adjusted EBIT, grew by 87% year-on-year to $28.2 million as compared to $15.5 million in the same quarter last year. We delivered this performance despite a short-term supply contraction, challenged during the quarter and the temporary hit on demand due to unprecedented monsoon rains in some parts of the country. As for the macro outlook, India is expected to be one of the fastest-growing large economies in the future, leading to a gradual increase in GDP per capita and a larger allocation towards discretionary spending, of which travel and experiences will garner a major share.

According to the latest report by McKinsey, India is poised to witness one of the most rapid increases in travel expenditures among the world’s top 10 countries from a travel spending figure of $150 billion in 2019. Travel expenditures are anticipated to reach [$410 million], making India the fourth largest global spender on travel by 2030. On the other hand, according to WTTC, travel and tourism sector contributed 7.6% to the global GDP in 2022. While in India, it accounted for 4.5% of the GDP, reflecting a huge headroom for growth. The contribution of travel and tourism industry to India’s economy is growing steadily, generating substantial revenue and employment opportunities across various sectors, including hospitality, transportation and local businesses.

We expect travel and tourism in India to grow faster than the overall GDP during the next decade, which should act as a tailwind for the overall industry. A large part of this growth will be led by the aviation and accommodation sector. This is corroborated by the fact that all major airlines have placed a record number of orders for new planes and all major hotel chains have announced the addition of new properties, which will help in supply expansion for many years to come. Homestay supply is also growing in the country with people investing in secondary homes to be used as homestays in key leisure destinations in the country. According to government of India forecast, the current 145 million air passengers in India are projected to rise to 425 million by 2025.

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Q&A Session

That’s driving growth for overall travel and tourism sector. While the air industry is facing short-term headwinds on supply due to engine repair issues, supply addition projections looking good, indicating that the supply situation will improve in the coming quarters. We continue to stay excited about future opportunities and aim to further consolidate our position as a leading travel services company in the country on the back of our innovative travel solutions, brand strength and ability to deliver superior value to our customers and our partners. We’ve been working towards building a platform for the future. During the quarter, we introduced a fresh version of our homepage to bring out our new design language and iconography to meet the discovery and buying experience more intuitive and delightful.

I’m also delighted to share that MakeMyTrip is now GDPR compliant, thus making it accessible from regions where GDPR is applicable. This will help us cater to some of the inbound demand, especially from the Indian diaspora. As for business segments now, starting with the air business, while domestic air ticketing had recovered a few quarters back and continues to grow well, this quarter, our international air ticketing business surpassed the pre-pandemic levels for the first time, which is encouraging. All short-haul destinations have either grown beyond or recovered to pre-pandemic levels now, and travel to long-haul destination is also recovering rapidly now. We continue to innovate and add new features to our products to deliver better value to our customers.

During the quarter, we went live with our hold booking initiative, wherein on selected international flights, customers can hold their seats until the end of the day giving them time to decide without worrying about prices and availability. We also launched a quick checkout flow on our existing QuickBook feature, enabling customers to see the payment options on the review page itself to make the booking faster for our frequent flyer customers. We also revamped Goibibo’s flight search results page, baggage and cancellation rules on the itinerary page to aid faster information, assimilation and flight selection helping us improve conversion. Our accommodation business, which includes hotels, homestays and packages, witnessed strong year-on-year growth on the back of increased supply, improved discovery and deeper penetration beyond metros and Tier 1 and Tier 2 towns.

We continue to expand our supply deeper into the country. We now have 77,000 plus properties listed on our platform, covering 2,075 cities across India, further strengthening our supply moat. Along with the supply, we continue to expand our distribution channels as part of our strategy to drive online penetration further. We went live with our hotel product on IRCTC website during the quarter, and the initial response is encouraging. Through IRCTC and our myBiz platform, we are now getting new users from new smaller cities for leisure and business travel. International room nights growth picked up strongly this quarter as well, while the domestic accommodation business continued to perform well. With the introduction of new direct flights, we witnessed travel pick up in new destinations like Tashkent, Almaty and Baku, while other key destinations in the Middle East and Southeast Asia continue to be the popular among Indians.

Learning from valuable stay-related feedback and inputs from our customers, we have enhanced our quality checks to highlight alerts for our customers about properties consistently defaulting on service levels on one hand. And on the other, we work closely with the partner and push them to improve the stay experience. We have observed that most of our partners take the feedback seriously and take corrective actions. Our homestays business continues to grow with increasing coverage of destinations. During the quarter, we expanded our supply across the country, including World Cup venues. During the quarter, we added about 8,000 properties to our homestay inventory, out of which about 1,500 properties were added specifically in World Cup venues.

The contribution of homestays to the overall bookings is steadily increasing, and we believe that this category will drive future growth. Our holiday packages business continues to scale on the back of our expanded offerings. During the quarter, we launched holiday packages with homestays as an accommodation option, which is the first in the industry. We have now started to offer — we’ve now started to also offer charter train packagings, catering to religious tourism demand. Our footprint in the holiday packages business has now expanded to 555 domestic cities versus a peak of 405 cities in the past. On the international package side, we sold holiday packages to 66 countries during Q2, which is the best number achieved so far. Our Bus Ticketing business sustained the growth momentum in Q2 despite a seasonally weak quarter as more and more corporates, especially in the IT sector, are mandating work from office, the traditionally large bus markets in South India are witnessing good recovery.