MakeMyTrip Limited (NASDAQ:MMYT) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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I think our strategy has been very clear that, we have to continuously keep improving our product experience and eventually that sort of helps to get more and more customers and more and more market share, and keep managing your P&L or the unit economics accordingly, basis, whatever might be the dynamics in the marketplace. So — and if you see the history for the last few quarters going into specifically on, let’s say, domestic air market, there might be volatility. There may be specific quarters. You will see some more you competitive action, et cetera. But over a period of time, it sort of still stabilizes because never is — that sort of deep discounting, et cetera, is never stable or never sustainable rather. So, you have to just sort of deal with that on a quarter-to-quarter basis.

But from a long-term standpoint, we haven’t really been shifting or moving or even have plans to shift or move our strategy in the domestic flight market for that matter or any of the products and services that we offer.

Aditya Suresh: Thanks, Rajesh. That’s clear. I guess the second question was me trying to think about incremental EBITDA margins or incremental profit. You did kind of mention that was quite a few growth levers across different products. Now overtime, I think your employee expense has been a fairly large part of the at least as a proportion of revenue. Can you maybe touch on two things? One is, in terms of incrementally, how are you thinking about kind of staff expenses? That’s one. And two is, therefore, do you have any guide in terms of incremental EBITDA margin, let’s say, add $100 million next year, incrementing. I think it should be much more than that. But let’s say, you did add 100. How much of that do you think is EBITDA?

Mohit Kabra: Hi, Aditya, maybe I’ll take that. If you are looking in terms of fixed cost overall and growing kind of people cost in particular, they are kind of now despite, like, almost, three rounds of inflationary increases going through. They are still kind of below the prepayment levels in that manner of sorts and almost getting closer to that. But it’s still kind of slightly behind the same quarter numbers for pre-pandemic. So that way, I think we have kind of done a significant amount of rationalization on the fixed cost. Clearly, it’s not that they’ll remain completely constant. They’ll kind of possibly increase at a lower proportion than the growth in the volumes of the business. And secondly, large part of the increase is going to come in more in terms of inflationary increases because we don’t really kind of planning any significant headcount increases per se in the business in the quarters or years to come.

So, that’s one part of the question that you asked. The other is, what is the margin expansion opportunity? Again, would kind of refrain from getting into shorter term kind of margin gain opportunities. But the longer-term, opportunity, clearly, that we kind of looking at is this is clearly an opportunity to take this business to at least possibly getting to about 1.5 percentage points of adjusted operating margin on a gross booking basis. Now whether that happens in a few quarters or in a couple of years, and clearly, it will it depend on multiple factors. But you can see this kind of, as in terms of the volume change that you see even on a year-on-year basis in terms of fiscal year ’23 versus a fiscal year ’22. And then the corresponding changes that you see playing out through an operating leverage on the bottom-line.

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