MakeMyTrip Ltd (MMYT) 2014 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Welcome to MakeMyTrip's fiscal 2014 first-quarter earnings call.

The Company wishes to remind you that certain statements made on this call are considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Safe Harbor provision of the US Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and by their nature are subject to inherent uncertainties.

Actual results may differ materially.

Any forward-looking information relayed on this call speaks only as of this date, and the Company undertakes no obligation to update the information to reflect change or inconsistencies.

Additional information concerning the statements is contained in the Risk Factors and Forward-looking Statement section of the Company's Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC on June 13, 2013.

Copies of this filing are available from the SEC or from the Company's Investor Relations Department.

And now I would like to introduce the speakers from MakeMyTrip -- Deep Kalra and Rajesh Magow.

Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and welcome to MakeMyTrip's fiscal 2014 first-quarter earnings call.

Before we get to the quarter's results, I would like to share with you an overview of the environment that we are currently operating in.

On the macroeconomic front, India's economic growth has moderated to a level which we believe is far below the country's full potential.

This has also weakened the rupee to dollar exchange rate, while increasing its volatility.

From a supplier standpoint, domestic airline industry continues to fly through some choppy weather, as capacity constraints and a weaker rupee kept airfares higher quarter-on-quarter by about 20% in the reported quarter, which negatively impacted passenger growth potential.

Additionally, in June, the floods disaster that took place in Uttarakhand, a popular region in Northern India, despite the summer heat, has also weighed heavily on the minds of leader founders.

On the other hand, we laud the response and positive actions being taken by the Indian government and the civil aviation sector.

For example, the pending jet areas and Etihad equity partnership shows clear willingness from the government to move towards a liberalized and more market-based economy.

Additionally, we believe that Asia's announcement that they gain domestic services later this year will help stimulate air passenger growth through competitive pricing.

Lastly, we continue to be bullish about mobile, presenting a potentially huge opportunity for us, as there are currently 22 million 3G connections in India and expected to double by the end of fiscal 2014.

Internet usage on mobile has already surpassed their stop access nearly a year ago in India.

That trend should only continue, given the proliferation of [sub-$100] Android-based smartphones from Samsung, Micromax and Carbon, and the drastic fee reductions being offered by telecom companies to stimulate 3G data usage.

We believe we are best positioned in the marketplace to ride this mobile Internet wave, given our presence on all major mobile platforms and our strong brand following.

With that as a backdrop, let me share our recent achievements from the past quarter with you.

In the fiscal first quarter, our market leadership was validated once again by Focus Right, which highlighted our leading share of India's online travel space in their recent report.

In addition, our traffic leadership continues, as per June comScore data with 8.1 million monthly unique visitors, which was more than twice the size of our next closest competitor.

In the same period, our website had over 105 million total page views -- pages viewed, which is more than three times that of the closest competitor.

We believe our unwavering focus on providing our users a superior booking and customer service experience when they use MakeMyTrip has led directly to our success and superior brand recognition.

And now moving to the business performance for the first fiscal quarter.

I'm pleased to report that our total revenue that [served as past] achievement in fiscal Q1 was $26 million, which was in line with our internal estimates in light of the difficult operating conditions.

Let me first provide details of the Hotels & Packages business, after which I will do the same for our Air business.

Hotels & Packages -- I'm glad to share that we continue to make significant progress in our strategy to grow our Hotels & Packages business, as H&P revenue contribution in the reported quarter was over 41% of total revenue less service cost, along with year-on-year transaction growth of 72.2%.

In the quarter, we tactically focused on increasing the sales of higher ranked hotels and holidays.

This, coupled with the severe flooding situation in Uttarakhand, did, however, moderate the quarter-on-quarter growth in transactions.

We believe the decision to move uphill during the quarter improved our customers' travel experience and helped us expand business relationships with select hotels partners, while improving net revenue margin and growth.

Hotels -- in the first quarter, as part of our ongoing philosophy of improving customer service, we further enhanced our hotels booking website by adding higher resolution pictures, on-site videos, refreshed content, and lastly, special prices on several hotels, all of which resonated well with our hotel customers.

Furthermore, our ongoing integration with HotelTravel.com is progressing well across multiple departments.

We continue to expand hotel supply, primarily in Southeast Asia, to over 112,000 total properties available through the HotelTravel.com website.

This includes nearly 10,000 Indian hotel properties directly from MakeMyTrip.com that are now also available for booking for customers in that region.

Our ongoing investments in technology development has also enabled hotel travel systems to offer travel products through a number of high-volume marketing channels, which helped contribute to transactions growth.

We believe Southeast Asia presents a large opportunity for us, and we are well-positioned with this acquisition to leverage the increasing trend of Indians looking to travel overseas for their holidays.

Coming to packages.

In this past high-season travel quarter, our packaged holiday business also registered good demand from customers.

We offered a variety of appealing domestic holiday packages for customers to skip the summer heat.

And based on customer feedback, also offered luxury holiday packages, which included four and five-star accommodations.

As for our outbound holiday business, packages business, we continue to experience good demand for travel to Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, and European destinations during the summer holidays, despite a weakening rupee exchange rate.

In fact, similar to domestic holidays, we offered premium quality packages, which were very well-received as customers recognized the inherent good value in these packages.

Lastly, I'm excited to mention the news we released two weeks ago that we have signed a three-year exclusive partnership with Air India.

We will be working with Air India to power their online holidays as they leverage our market-leading supply of domestic and international hotels to offer a wide range of packages for their customers.

We're excited that India's national carrier chose to work exclusively with MakeMyTrip, and we believe the partnership will be mutually beneficial.

Moving on to our Air business.

We grew total Air transactions by 15.5% year-on-year, despite a relatively flat domestic air market, and continue to lead the online B2C air market with domestic share of over 12%, as per the government's DGCA data.

We believe focus on superior customer experience has allowed MakeMyTrip to maintain growth and market share without diluting mix revenue margin for the quarter.

For example, when India's aviation regulator granted airlines the opportunity to unbundle airfares, we quickly adapted our booking engine to allow bookings of ancillary services like meals and baggage checks.

Furthermore, we made significant further improvement in our Air Ticketing search logic.

Now we are providing even more targeted and highly relevant search results for improved customer decision-making, reduced website latency, and increased customer delight.

In the quarter, we made great progress on our next-generation user interface and software infrastructure technology.

We stayed true to our promise of delivering a superior customer experience by rolling out a new homepage, which can now be seen by a majority of our visitors.

The reaction from our customers to date has been very positive, as it has helped them more easily discover travel products, some of which were harder to find on our old website.

Furthermore, the new site has an improved layout, which allows us to promote holiday and hotel deals in a more optimal manner.

With this sure targeting capabilities, we can customize our visitor's experience and incorporate local languages into online promotions.

Lastly, it is tablet-friendly and responsive.

For example, it automatically adjusts screen resolution to ensure uniform user experience across various form factors.

We are confident that our investments will continue to elevate customer's search and shopping experience to a new level altogether.

Coming to mobile.

While ongoing enhancements of user's experience on the desktop remains a focus, we are increasingly dedicating more resources to our mobile development team, so they can build apps that help customers research books and shop travel products through their smartphones and tablets.

To date, we have made great progress on the mobile channel, as we logged more than 1.4 million MakeMyTrip app downloads combined across all mobile platforms.

Our apps have been featured as a must-have local app.

And in the most recent quarter, we were ranked as The Top Free Travel App in Apple's India App Store.

While we believe we are just at the very beginning of mobile Internet usage in India, we are encouraged by mobile conversion rates in our online hotels business, which has contributed to more than 10% of all online hotel bookings in the quarter.

Going forward, we will be investing to further enhance the mobile experience, and we will also look to add more of our travel products, making it even easier for our customers to search and book travel while on the move.

Now let me hand the call over to Rajesh.

Thanks, Deep, and hello, everyone.

The team at MakeMyTrip remains bullish of our long-term business prospects, even as India continues to face headwinds in continued economic growth, while developing the rupee to dollar exchange rate, capacity constraints in the domestic airline industry, and lower year-on-year airline commitments.

In the face of this -- these difficult operating conditions, we continue to focus on growing our airline packages business and further strengthen our leadership in the OTA market in India.

As we have mentioned, it is our relentless -- a relentless focus on delivering a superior end-to-end customer experience that has built MakeMyTrip as the brand of choice for online travel in India.

As we have said earlier, fiscal 2014 will remain an investment year for MakeMyTrip, as we focus on widening our lead in the marketplace, and drive the online adoption of hotels and holiday bookings in India.

Furthermore, we continue to invest in HotelTravel.com, to scale up its online hotels business in Southeast Asia.

While this decision will impact our ability to achieve adjusted operating profits in this portfolio, we believe these near-term investments will only make our business and brand stronger and more sustainable in the long-term.

In the fiscal first quarter, on constant currency basis, we grew gross bookings by 26.5% year-on-year to over $335 million, while revenue less service cost grew -- rose to over $26 million, representing an increase of over 11% year-on-year.

We recorded a $2 million adjusted operating loss, as we continue to make investments in the key areas of technology and marketing, while rationalizing other expenses during the quarter.

As we have been sharing all along, our strategy is to expand our Hotels & Packages business and improve our net revenue mix.

As you can see in our results, we are well along our way towards achieving this goal.

In the fiscal first quarter, more than 45% of our total net revenue was derived from our non-Air businesses.

Net revenue for H&P grew by nearly 55.3% on a constant currency basis, while transactions were up 72.2% year-on-year.

In addition, we have improved our net revenue margins in H&P to 12.9%, while increasing our business relationships with key hotel partners to earn favorable economics, enhance our market markup capabilities, and reduce reliance on discounts in order to gain share.

Now moving to our Air business.

We saw transactions growth return this quarter, and recorded 15.5% year-on-year increase in our total Air transactions, which was far greater than the 1.2% growth seen in the domestic air market during the same time period.

We believe that the continuous enhancements to our customer's shopping and booking experience has allowed us to keep gaining B2C share from both our online and offline competitors.

Our net -- our Air net margin was also better than Q4 last fiscal at 5.7%.

On a year-over-year basis, our revenue less service costs declined modestly, as we continued to face a difficult comparison with last year's same quarter, when the full-service carriers had not reduced their upfront base commissions for their travel agents.

However, if you look at our gross bookings, you will see we achieved about 19.9% year-on-year growth in constant currency terms, highlighting our ability to grow despite the ongoing capacity challenges in the industry.

For the peak travel quarter, we incurred adjusted operating losses of $2 million.

As planned, we continue to invest in the right areas of technology and marketing, while we witnessed some benefit for cost rationalization, steps that we are taking in the past in other operating expenses.

For the remaining quarters of fiscal 2014, we plan on maintaining similar levels of spending expenses, with more emphasis on marketing, as we continue to grab share in the marketplace, and invest to enhance our customers' experience and drive online booking adoption.

We believe, with our strong balance sheet, we are very well-positioned to continue to invest for growth while weathering the current operating challenges.

Lastly, on our revenue guidance, in light of the macro headwinds shared by this, we would like to maintain our full-year fiscal 2014 net revenue guidance with 15% to 20% constant currency growth, but [adjust the dollar] guidance to $95 million [to] $200 million, slowly to account for discount [less an] impact of the rupee to dollar exchange rate at 58.79.

While we continue to face external headwind, which are not really in our control, we are pleased with our growth and market share -- the market share progress -- and are optimistic about what lies ahead.

Now I would like to turn the call back over to Deep for his closing comments.

Thanks, Rajesh.

Lastly, before we get into Q&A, I would like to take this opportunity to share some organizational changes in our leadership team approved by the Board yesterday, that will set the stage for the next phase of growth for MakeMyTrip.

Over the last few years, the Company has been growing organically, and we are positioned in the new markets and geographies.

In order to provide the required focus on each of the key strategic growth areas for the Company, we have been working on growing and augmenting our senior leadership structure over the past few years.

We have invested strongly in our leadership team.

And as a result, the Company has senior executives who are now ready to take on larger roles.

Going forward, I would like to give more personal focus on our international businesses, strategies, certain specific projects, and overall execution excellence.

At the same time, our core business needs continued focus on execution, along with product and service enhancements.

In order to enable the above, I am delighted to announce the very well-deserved promotion of my colleagues, Rajesh Magow, to CEO, India, from his current role as CFO and COO; and Mohit Kabra, to CFO, from his current role as Senior Vice President, Finance.

As Chairman and Group CEO, I will continue to lead the Group strategy, drive M&A, and ensure a common vision of delivering the best experience for customers across different lines of businesses and geographies.

I am confident that the changes will further help achieve our Company's long-term vision here of Indian and recently acquired [XC's] in Southeast Asia.

I congratulate Rajesh and Mohit on their achievements and promotions.

And with that, would like to open the floor for Q&A.

(Operator Instructions).

Lloyd Walmsley, Deutsche Bank.

Wondering if you guys can comment on the net revenue margins?

They seem to be pretty strong in both segments, with Air actually ticking up slightly.

So wondering what we should be expecting there going forward?

And then a couple others, if I may.

The H&P segment seems to be showing significant transaction growth, but it seems like that's coming in at lower prices.

Wondering if that's just faster growth in standalone hotels versus packages?

If you could comment there.

And then, lastly, on the balance sheet, just curious if you can talk about the working capital outflow in the quarter, as well as the cash flow from financing inflow, and what's moving those line items?

Thanks.

Sure.

So, let me just start with the net revenue margin first.

So, as you would have noticed, total in packages, our margin improved from 12.5% to 12.9%.

So I'm starting with Hotels & Packages first, then I'll come to Air after that.

So, you know, in this quarter, what we are focused was -- and it was a big -- kind of hard to move -- in terms of just focusing on not necessarily the entire 10,000 now or 10,000-plus hotels that we have.

Because it was high season, we focused on just growing volumes for outside those hotels.

And that has just grown volumes in those hotels, and which has [not yet got] incremental margin from those hotels.

So it was a partial move.

The idea was to just provide more throughput to those hotels.

You know, as we get into the demand from the marketplace and get better margins from that, as we go along, you know, we will continue to kind of just quarter-by-quarter think of different strategies to attract the hotel market.

As we keep growing our transactions, that, as you mentioned, the transaction growth was very low [this] year-on-year about 22%.

So that was the reason why Hotels & Packages margin improved.

Now in terms of long-term outlook, we continue to maintain that this margin will incrementally improve, and we should probably analyze more from a full-year perspective, the incremental improvement that has happened on the margin front.

And so we, from a long-term perspective, as we have been highlighting, probably has potential to go up to 15%, but you know, and be very slow in incremental movement year-on-year.

So that's as far Hotels & Packages is concerned.

As far as Air margin is concerned, so we were talking about our estimated range of between 5%, 5.5%; last quarter, we were at 5.3%.

This quarter, we did better than, you know, the range that we have been estimating.

But I won't take this as it has happened in this particular quarter, only because of some special deals that we were able to get from other airlines.

But I won't contemplate as more sustainable margin going forward.

In some quarters, we can get some -- this kind of a windfall.

I think we -- our best estimate at this point in time from a long-term sustainable margin is -- continues to be between 5% and 5.5%.

So I think that is how we should think about it, you know, in that range, and not necessarily kind of focus on the Air margin from a long-term perspective.

So now coming to your second question on H&P transactions growth.

Yes, you're right, you know, it's coming.

Our standalone hotels have been growing faster for sure.

In fact, standalone hotels grew about 100% year-on-year.

And that does have some bearing on the overall transaction value.

But, you know, transaction value needs to be seen for the segment, per se, and you know, comparable to, I guess, the last year's same season.

And that's how we should look at it.

But you know, given the product mix is changing from a relatively higher growth area, which is the online standalone hotels, given the headroom that is available out there, our transaction -- overall transaction value for H&P will be relatively low, as we have seen in the previous years and previous quarters -- you know, keeping seasonality in mind, of course.

So that -- as far as the Hotels & Packages transaction growth is concerned.

As far as balance sheet question, for your balance sheet question, the movements on the cash flow front is concerned, so we've had -- you know, the total of overall cash flow momentum you would see, including the term deposits, is roughly about $10 million.

And the [pickup] of that was about $5 million into working capital.

And we also had a translation difference of the balances of airline in India, because of the rupee depreciation, to the tune of about $3 million.

And you know -- $1 million -- $1.2 million was the capital expenditure.

So these or two or three big items where the cash flow moment happened.

I guess that's -- that was it, right?

That was your last question, right?

Yes, I think that's helpful.

Congrats on the promotion.

Thanks.

Thanks so much.

Thank you.

Chad Bartley, Pacific Crest.

One question.

So I understand the adjusted operating income will be negative this fiscal year, but I was hoping you could share your perspective on fiscal 2015, and your thoughts on how you're going to balance, and continuing to invest for growth versus potentially returning the profitability, and what that might look like?

I said for -- at this point in time, you know, I would like to just say that, right now, we are just kind of looking at -- and definitely the focus is on growth, and we have our estimate for the next few quarters and the complete -- and this full fiscal year.

We will definitely want to see how the macro improves in the next few quarters.

And then, you know, in the following quarters, kind of just get to the -- then estimating how would it look like in the next year.

I would not like to comment at this point in time for our -- what is going to be our strategy, largely because we have to just keep watching the macro environment.

As we mentioned on our call, a lot of macro headwinds that are there.

In the difficult times, we have performed well in this quarter, but we have -- we are -- you know, we continue to watch and expect some improvements happening, especially in the Civil Aviation sector, with supply constraints going probably later this year with Air Asia coming in, et cetera.

So just to answer your question, at this point in time, I would kind of reserve my comment on, you know, how would it look like in the next year.

But this year, what we have talked about and kind of just given a soft guidance on that, that, in fact, we are clear as far as our current estimates are concerned.

And just -- let's just wait for another quarter or two for us to be able to just -- able to, you know, give a better informed, better educated kind of estimate for the next year.

Okay, thank you.

(Operator Instructions).

At this time, we have no more questions.

Well, thank you, everybody, for joining in our call.

We look forward to speaking with you all in the next quarter's call.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference.

This concludes the presentation.

You may now disconnect, and have a great day.