MakeMyTrip Ltd (MMYT) 2020 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the MakeMyTrip Limited Fiscal 2020 Q1 Earnings Call.

(Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference call may be recorded.

I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference.

Mr. Jonathan Huang, you may begin.

Thank you.

And greetings and welcome to MakeMyTrip Limited Fiscal 2020 First Quarter Earnings Call.

I would like to remind everyone that certain statements made on today's call are considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provision of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to inherent uncertainties and 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 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 23, 2019.

Copies of these filings are available from the SEC or from the company's Investor Relations department.

Today, we're joined by Deep Kalra, MakeMyTrip's Founder, Chairman and Group CEO; Rajesh Magow, Co-Founder and CEO of India; and Mohit Kabra, MakeMyTrip's Group CFO.

Now let me turn the call over to Deep to begin today's discussion.

Thank you, John, and welcome, everyone, to our fiscal 2020 first quarter earnings call.

As we complete the first fiscal quarter of 2020, I'd like to share that we continue to believe in the long-term growth opportunities available to us in India's large and attractive travel markets.

India's rising internet penetration, fast-improving digital and payment's ecosystem, coupled with a very young population is continuing to change consumers buying behavior towards convenient online platform, a trend that is expected to only go in one direction.

Our optimism for this growth opportunity is further underscored by a recent Goldman Sachs' analyst report, which has forecasted that total online air travel bookings, excluding rail, will reach $33 billion by fiscal 2025.

During the first fiscal quarter of 2020, we did witness temporary softness in the domestic travel market, driven by a supply crunch caused by the shutdown of Jet Airways, a general slowdown in consumer spending, leading up to the May general election and a tightening of consumer credit.

However, during this tough operating environment, we have been able to deliver results in line with our plan.

By using this opportunity to further strengthen our competitive mode and accelerate online growth in underpenetrated outbound travel segments, which include international air ticketing and international hotels.

We've also been successful in further narrowing our operating losses year-over-year, driven by a continuous scaling up of business and improving marketing and promotional spend efficiencies.

As I shared last quarter, owning to the shutdown of Jet Airways, we expected domestic travel growth to be impacted in the first half of fiscal 2020 but anticipate a rebound in demand in the second half of the year.

When the lost fleet capacity is expected to be largely restored, or other carriers in the domestic air market.

During the quarter, we were encouraged to treat other airlines, quickly replacing some of the lost capacity and averaged a contraction in quarterly year-on-year growth for the industry.

Historically, the Indian domestic aviation industry have taken a couple of years to regain its high-growth rate from the shutdown of a large carrier like Kingfisher Airlines.

However, with most airlines being in expansion mode, we believe the domestic aviation industry should begin to normalize by the second half of this fiscal year.

In the meantime, as demonstrated in Q1, we will continue to make investments in our technology, products, supply and brand to achieve continued robust long-term growth with a focus on outbound travel.

We will also continue to make investments in new growth opportunities within our domestic hotels' and accommodations' market to increase our share of consumers that prefer alternative accommodations and expand our client base within the corporate travel market.

Now I'd like to share some of our achievements during the first quarter of fiscal 2020.

In Q1, our team continued to promote and nurture our brands in order to target and drive awareness to new and existing online users.

As a result of our comprehensive marketing strategy, we've been able to grow our transacting user base to 42 million like to date customers by the end of Q1, an increase of over 26% year-on-year.

In Q1, we engaged with several international tourism boards, including Indonesia, Singapore, Australia and Dubai to drive greater awareness of outbound travel of its consumers.

Additionally, during India's highly popular cricket season, we partnered with 2 IPL teams: the Kolkata Knight Riders and Royal Challengers Bangalore, along with Bollywood stars to help generate excitement and traction for online bookings among young Indians.

We also leveraged social media to connect with the younger net users in the country to drive greater awareness of our alternative accommodation offerings.

During Q1, our team also leveraged our multiple loyalty programs to drive greater stickiness to our platform.

We now have nearly 11 million MMT Black enrollee and 106,000 Double Black members who are rewarding us with greater repeat rates and higher number of transactions and general users of our platform.

In Q1, we extended our MMT Black program to corporate consumers who are enrolled under the myBiz program, further incentivizing SME users to enroll in the self-service corporate program and increasing our cross-sell opportunities.

Similarly, for brand Goibibo, our goRewards program has crossed over 2 million registered users, are being rewarded by actively making our platform better.

This program has been very popular with our Goibibo fan base.

It has more than 1/3 of daily active users -- are contributing with reviews and content.

During this last year, we had launched activities and experiences for the domestic market in order to increase the frequency of our app usage.

I'm pleased to announce that we have also expanded our offerings and activities in international destinations to cater to our broad base of outbound travelers.

As we progress through the fiscal year, we plan on enhancing the shopping experience within this vertical to help users to find and book an activity experience, which will drive even greater stickiness and more frequent engagement with our brands and apps.

Lastly, I'd like to give you a quick update on our corporate travel strategy, where we are leveraging online self-serve technology to empower and address the needs of business travelers from small organizations to large corporates.

Our myBiz program, which is seamlessly integrated with our B2C mobile app is already addressing the underserved needs of over 7,500 small and medium enterprises.

Furthermore, our recent acquisition of Quest2Travel is aimed at meeting the demands of large corporates with an online end-to-end, enterprise-grade corporate travel solution.

During Q1, as part of the pilot launch of this platform, our team has successfully signed up several large and well-recognized corporates within India.

With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Rajesh.

Thanks, Deep, and hello, everyone.

I would like to begin by highlighting our various initiatives coming into fiscal year 2020, as we continue on our efforts to become the travel super arc for Indian travelers.

We now have comprehensive travel offerings prominently offered on our platforms like rail, inter-city cabs, airport transfers, activities and experiences, ancillary products like visa and travel insurance, besides our main product offerings of hotels and accommodations, air and bus.

We've also added additional useful travel information services, like flight and train status to our redesigned app home screen, and we expect to introduce more relevant and useful features going forward this year.

This should help us increase the stickiness on our platform.

In the past few months, we've also been making investments to grow under-penetrated travel segments like helpline, flights and hotel.

These segments, along with domestic accommodations' market and bus are likely to be future growth drivers for us, as they are largely booked offline today.

Our focused investments and efforts have been helping us continue to expand our already strong market leadership position, even as the overall domestic travel industry is experiencing a temporary slowdown in growth.

Now I would like to share some quick highlights from our Q1 financial results, and Mohit can share additional color on our results later.

For Q1 of fiscal year 2020, the MakeMyTrip Group achieved gross bookings of nearly $1.7 billion, representing a constant currency growth of over 24%.

Our Q1 adjusted revenue grew by 21% on a constant currency basis to $198.5 million.

From a supply standpoint, we further expanded the choice and selection for customers to over 63,000 properties, bookable within India, which now includes 16,500 alternative accommodations.

During Q1, our ramped up efforts on alternative accommodation has resulted in strong new users growth for customers who prefer guesthouses, apartments and villas, which widens our customer reach.

As for our outbound hotel growth strategy, we now have directly contracted over 8,000 international properties, which amounts -- which accounts for the majority of all international hotels booked in key destination by our customers.

Furthermore, room night growth from this segment has also been fairly robust.

Now I would like to share highlights from our on-going product enhancement efforts, inspired from customer insights and driven by tech innovations to deliver a best-in-class customer experience.

As an example, our hotels and alternative accommodations content today has been largely improved on all platforms powered by user-generated and curated contents, including videos and more accurate representation of location and amenities.

As shared on our last earnings call, we have been very encouraged by the growing amount of user-generated contents on our platform.

During the quarter, we upgraded the MakeMyTrip UGC collection form to be more customer friendly and provided incentives to further drive collections.

I'm also pleased to share that more than 1/3 of Goibibo users are providing us with content, including ratings, reviews and pictures, which is quite an achievement since most domestic travelers are not known to share feedback post travel.

These ongoing efforts only serve to drive greater attention on our platform and make the shopping experience even better for future users.

Additionally, we may made the experience for suppliers even better by streamlining and simplifying the on-boarding process of new partners.

Our mobile supply facing app has been upgraded to help partners check their properties, establish risk, allocate inventory and manage bookings easier.

Lastly, we have rolled out a heat map to empower suppliers to make informed pricing decisions based on real-time demand queues.

As for our flights product, we have an improved and friendlier user flow for purchase of ancillary products like advanced seat selection, we have also improved on customer messaging regarding visa requirements, mandatory web check-in requirements and included other add-on ancillary products like meal and extra baggage, et cetera, all helping to improve customer conversions and satisfaction.

Our work on automation in post sale, leveraging machine learning and AI, also continued to gain traction.

During Q1, on our in-house CRM system was launched across all our call centers.

And today, 95% of our agents are using this system to resolve customer request with much greater satisfaction.

Our post-sale chatbot, Myra has also greatly improved its national language processing skills and is able to understand user-type advances with 89% accuracy.

It can also give intent options with a mechanism in place to reconfirm if the system is not very confident of its own predictions.

Similarly, for Gia, we have been working hard to leverage the latest advancements in AI and natural language processing as well as to provide a better post-sales experience.

A great example of Gia in action is in the way main change requests are handled for flight customers.

Prior to Gia, users had to spend a significant amount of time to get this seemingly simple task done.

Now through Gia, the request can be done in a matter of seconds.

I'm pleased to share that the number of users coming directly to Gia has gone from being nearly 0% to 25% of all customers who have a post-booking support need.

Furthermore, as Travel continues to expand across India.

We also wanted to leverage the nation-wide digital payment push, enabled by the government's UPI framework and gain greater access to a wider audience.

We continue to expand on our already comprehensive payment options, which now include equal monthly installment plans, or EMIs, enabled by third-party financial institutions.

We have also rolled out multiple options, including pay closer to servicing, where we will automatically debit customers' payment cards automatically later.

Lastly, I would like to share some details on our bus business, led by the redBus brand.

During Q1, redBus continue to achieve robust growth despite the general slowdown during peak travel months of April and May driven by ongoing shift from off-line to online bus bookings.

During the quarter, bus operators also launched 900 more new destinations than the same period a year ago, which helps to widened our potential, addressable audience.

In Q1, our team continued to lever the ongoing digitization efforts by various local governments and successfully integrated the Telangana State Road Transport Corporations onto our platform to distribute their inventory.

On the product side, we've also introduced a redBus open ticket, which allows passenger to travel in any class of service for a given day, which helps to accelerate the shift towards online on short-duration routes.

Today, Indian metropolitan cities are facing the burden of increasing urbanization and paralyzing vehicular traffic, especially in cities like Bangalore.

In order to help this congestion and drive greater carpooling, I'm pleased to announce that redBus has done a pilot launch of a car-pooling app called rPool.

This new application is aimed at addressing the daily commute needs of working professionals by encouraging pooling of rides to help the street traffic congestion and the pollution over time.

Now let me hand it over to Mohit, who will share more details of the quarter.

Thanks, Rajesh.

Hello, everyone.

I'd like to report a 21% year-on-year constant currency growth in adjusted revenue, along with reduction of losses from $32.8 million in Q1 of last fiscal year to $29.2 million in Q1 of this fiscal year, despite the short-term operating challenges highlighted by Deep and Rajesh.

21% growth in adjusted revenue was largely with the volume growth as blended net revenue margins have moderated slightly from 12% in Q1 of last year to 11.7% in this reported quarter.

With that, let me share financial highlights by business segments, beginning the air ticketing business.

Our year-on-year segment growth of 15.7% was largely driven by international air ticketing segments growth of over 41%, which also helped to register a 22.2% year-on-year constant currency growth in air ticketing adjusted revenues.

In the Hotel and packages business, the 12.1% adjusted revenue growth was driven by about 12% growth in total segment room night stayed and reflects the current slowdown in the domestic travel market.

Excluding our holiday packages product, room night stayed for stand-alone hotel bookings grew by about 14% year-on-year.

As mentioned by Rajesh earlier, our international Hotels business grew quite robustly during the quarter.

However, given the very early stages of this business segment, this contribution will take some time to become a meaningful driver of the overall H&P unit growth.

Our bus ticketing business has continued to grow strongly during the quarter as well.

Tickets business grew by roughly 41% with nearly 21 million bus tickets traveled during previous quarters.

The business also generated over $21.3 million, and adjusted revenue during the quarter grew 37% year-on-year in constant currency terms.

Adjusted revenue from other revenue stood at about $10.7 million.

Majority of this was driven by facilitation fees for travel insurance and ancillary revenue from our travel alliances and affiliate partnerships.

I'd now like to share some details on our operating leverage, which was driven by the improving scale of our business and with even more efficient marketing and promotional spend.

In the quarter, our total marketing and promotional expenses were $103.8 million, which stood at about 9.5% of our gross bookings compared to 10.5% in the previous year's similar quarter.

As a result, our adjusted operating losses stand at a negative of 1.7% of gross bookings compared to a negative of 2.3% of gross bookings in the same quarter last year.

With this, I'd like to thank you for joining this call and open up the call for Q&A.

Operator, please.

(Operator Instructions) And now our first question comes from Sachin Salgaonkar with Bank of America.

I have 3 questions.

First question is on [decating] margin.

Mohit, on a Q-o-Q basis, it's come down.

How should we look at it?

I know directionally, you guys have indicated that a margin could go down.

So is this a new normal, and going forward, we should see a sort of steady level or slight decline from these levels?

Yes, I think, Q-on-Q, it was expected to be little bit down, as I shared.

And from a -- I think there's a little bit of seasonality in terms of booked versus travel, et cetera.

And also the fact that post Jet going down, some amount of segment fee used to come in from full-service carriers like Jet, also kind of goes away.

So there is expected to be at least compression in the overall margins as we continue.

And probably, this trend could largely be kind of a speculated for the year.

Okay.

Got it.

My second question is on the marketing and sales promotion.

So is there any one-off in this quarter?

And I understand the seasonality factor again in Q1, but how should we look air spending in this quarter and the overall outlook going forward?

So in terms of overall marketing spend, there's not really one-off.

It's just that you would typically find that pretty much every year, Q1, the brand marketing spend is little high.

For the last few years, we've been leveraging the IPL franchise significantly.

It's become extremely popular, and the brand recall -- and it tends to be extremely high.

So therefore, there are brand spend, specifically, kind of incurred in the quarter 1, which also has a lasting effect to the quarter -- to the year.

So you can could see, on year-on-year basis, I think the trending would largely continue to be on similar lines by the quarter like it has been in the past couple of years.

And so directionally, it should continue to be more like a 10% of GMV or sort of go down here, right?

Actually, kind of -- of course, the target is that we kind of take it down further.

It's kind of moved down to about 9.5 percentage of gross booking in the first quarter.

We would definitely want to kind of take it below the 9% level in the coming quarter, in longer term, probably closer to 8%, 8.5%.

Okay.

Got it.

So okay.

And lastly, I do understand Jet impact, and you guys have said that first half is slow and things improve.

On the ground, generally, if we're seeing some of the other consumer sectors, like auto, et cetera, we are seeing a bit of an impact and overall consumptions have slow down.

So big picture, any thoughts on how should we look at it, do you still expect a recovery going into second half, as in how the Jet impact more or less goes below or this consumer sentiment has a risk of disappointing a bit?

Yes.

No, I think it's a fair question, Sachin.

This is Deep.

I think we have seen that in Travel, market has been fairly resilient because the outbound market is quite indicative of the fact that people continue to travel.

I think what's happening is a lot of people are just switching or deferring large durable expenditures, whether it's automobile orders now, representing in some way, but tending to spend a lot more on themselves, especially the youth.

We have seen eating out, going out and traveling, being something which is still growing.

So we do believe that, from a secular basis, these remain strong.

We have some headwinds right now, which are short term, like I called out, in nature.

We think the second half of the year should bounce back.

And if we just look at some of the other travel habits, particularly on the international side, we feel quite enthused that there is a lot right now, which has yet to come in this segment.

And our next question comes from Manish Adukia.

First question, just again on the hotel growth, which saw a slowdown in this particular quarter.

Now from a growth standpoint, definitely, the consumer sentiment, in general, has been weak.

But if you were to try to bifurcate this growth slowdown between the Jet impact plus, in general, consumer slowdown, how would you classify this slowdown in these 2 buckets?

What has led to how much?

And again, in terms of recovery, you called out second half of this fiscal year, it should start improving.

In the past, you've grown at north-of-20% kind of a growth?

Is that the kind of growth that you expect that should read in this segment by second half of this fiscal year?

Or is that still some time away?

So let's maybe talk about the recovery piece first.

Let me give you some more color on this as we see it right now.

I mean all things considered obviously as of now.

One of the reasons that, as you also mentioned, was Jet going down, right?

And the implication of that was that there was a supply crunch.

And then the supply crunch happens on the flying side, then this has to go up.

So that was the main reason.

So why do we think that the second half the growth should come back is that the supply is going to come back, given the fact that we definitely we know, and we've been actually really pleasantly surprised by the progress in the last quarter in terms of how the other airlines have been able to just quickly, kind of see the opportunity and ramping up the supply led by IndiGo and SpiceJet.

And it would be quite evident from the results that we would have seen or will see for IndiGo and SpiceJet and due to an extent from Vistara as well.

So as the supply comes back, so there will be a natural correction on the growth that will happen.

And as the flying growth comes back, then naturally, the hotel and accommodation growth is likely to -- at least part of it is likely to come back as well.

I guess the other part, which is a little bit open at this point in time, which is about the overall consumer spend sentiment.

As it was mentioned earlier, I think, at least, the way we see it while there would be definitely some kind of a slowdown on the discretionary spend, but at the same time, we do see definitely consumer behavior changing in terms of spending on themselves a lot more than ever before.

So I guess we stayed optimistic and positive that from travel segment's standpoint, combination of these 2 factors, improving in the second half of this fiscal, we should definitely see, relatively speaking, to the first half of the fiscal, better growth trends.

Now in terms of your first question, to be honest, very hard to quantify that and split it, right?

I mean how much is it because of Jet and how much of is it because of the overall consumer sentiment?

I think we should just look at it as a combination of the 2, and we have not, to be honest, looked at it by splitting between the 2, because we do have certain segments, which have been actually growing at a very healthy growth rate as well.

And that has been for us outbound segment, and large part of that is driven by the off-line to online momentum.

But it is also a function of people kind of aspiring to kind of travel overseas as well.

So I won't kind of get into just breaking the -- or quantifying the actual numbers because of these 2 reasons.

And we should just take it like more as an overall number, overall numbers.

And the reason, there's a combination of the 2.

Sure.

That's very helpful.

A couple of just quick questions for Mohit.

I think one, just in terms of the cash balance or the net cash balance in the quarter.

I just noticed that it saw a sharp sequential decline.

Am I looking at it correctly, is there anything there.

And just second question in terms of the breakeven target.

I mean just again, let us know as to when do you think from an EBITDA or adjusted EBIT standpoint, when do we think we should get to breakeven?

Should it still be sometime in the middle of -- end of fiscal '20, early fiscal '21, how are you thinking about that?

Yes, Manish.

No, on the cash position -- so apart from the operating cash flow, we see first of all $24 million, $25 million.

This quarter, we've also reported in a certain investment in the -- in a corporate travel space called Quest2Travel.

So there's been some deployment on the investing side as well.

So the overall cash position now is, therefore, factoring in the spend made in the corporate travel business and some other investment as well.

So it's a combination of the 2.

I understand.

Sure, and just on a breakeven...

On the longer term, I think, I was just -- like we've been saying, I think what we're kind of targeting is clearly more like our year-on-year improvement.

Pretty much trying to kind of do that every quarter.

And if you see it trending for the last probably 5 or 6 quarters or 7 quarters, you would see that, even year-on-year, the operating losses that kind narrowed by the quarter.

That's a -- that is what we'll kind of be targeting.

Now kind of that will takes us to operating breakeven in the next year or sometime later this year, difficult to call that out.

It's also dependent on so many market factors like there was a little bit of slowdown that has kind of -- that, perhaps, wasn't budgeted earlier, but kind of got -- kind of detaining to play in the first half of this year.

So I think we'll get a better hang of it, maybe by the second half of the year, when we expect growth to bounce back a little bit.

So clearly we'll be able to share more color by then.

(Operator Instructions) And our next question comes from Parag Gupta with Morgan Stanley.

So I just wanted to check on 2 things.

One is, first to get the easy one out here, other operating expenses seem to have gone up quite a bit this quarter relative to the previous quarter.

So what is this on account of?

I know that this probably includes payment gateway charges and other OpEx.

So if you could just give us some sense on that?

And the second is, you've been making investments in outbound, both air, hotels and in local experiences.

Could you just give us some sense of what are those kind of investments that you're making in?

Are those increasing the similar levels as previous year or are they accelerating?

Sure, Parag.

Maybe I'm going to take the first one to begin with.

On the other operating expenses, largely, more like, incremental expenses coming in on account of, what I would say, the annual merit increase or the annual, kind of, inflationary increase that comes across, whether on people cost, and some part of it, this is call center related.

Kind of it's accounted in the SG&A cost as well.

So there is some portion of it that is coming as part of that in SG&A, but otherwise, largely the payment is because -- which have increased or in line with the increase in the gross bookings as well.

So you see almost like a 24% increase in gross bookings, and that gets reflected pretty much in terms of the payments because -- which as a percentage of gross bookings, those largely remain same.

So we are more like absolute dollar is going up because a large part of it kind of remains variable.

So that's where we are on this one.

I thought the other question was more on in terms of investments on outbound, et cetera.

Outbound and local events and activities, yes.

Yes.

Sure.

Yes.

I just wanted to understand, what are those investments?

Are those accelerating versus what you've been doing?

Or are they more or less in line with what you've been doing in the last few quarters?

Yes, yes, Parag.

This is Rajesh.

So let me take this.

I would say largely in line.

I wouldn't say that the investments we have accelerated in a big way.

What I meant was that the last few months, we've been actually been investing behind.

And when we invest behind any new segment, it's actually 360 degree, which includes a lot of the work that goes into product enhancement, a lot of the work that goes into supply side, in creating awareness in the marketplace, shipping those products out and building the technology and so on.

So for the outbound segment, we've been -- actually, for a few quarters, we've been kind of in the build phase.

And slowly and gradually, we've been just gaining the momentum now.

As far as activities and experiences are concerned, for the last couple of quarters, we did a soft launch.

We had to build some investment -- we have to do some investment to build the technology platform, which is essentially, I think, few people, our engineers getting together and product folks getting together and kind of building the product.

Again, it's not necessarily, significantly different from a normal course of business.

So I won't -- overall, I wouldn't say that there is any serious acceleration on that front.

It's just that over the years -- over the quarters, rather, it has been an ongoing area of investment, which is kind of bearing fruits now.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

That now ends our Q&A portion of today's conference.

I will now turn the call back over to Jonathan Huang for any closing remarks.

I'd like to thank everybody for joining our call this morning.

We certainly look forward to speaking with each and every one of you shortly, soon.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for attending today's conference.

This does conclude the program, and you may all disconnect.

Everyone have a great day.