MakeMyTrip Ltd (MMYT) 0 Q0 法說會逐字稿

Welcome to the MakeMyTrip fiscal 2013 fourth-quarter and full-year 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 changed circumstances.

Additional information concerning these statements is 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 June 25, 2012.

Copies of this file 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, gentlemen.

Yes.

This is Deep and Rajesh.

Hey, Deep, you can go ahead with the call.

Thank you and welcome to MakeMyTrip's fiscal 2013 fourth-quarter and full-year conference call.

Let me begin by providing a summary of our past year's and quarter's achievements.

Rajesh will then give you a detailed financial review, followed by a Q&A session.

In fiscal 2013, MakeMyTrip achieved nearly $1.2 billion in total gross bookings, representing an increase of 32.3% year-on-year in constant-currency terms.

Furthermore, we succeeded in improving our product mix, as approximately 35% of total annual net revenue was generated from non-air businesses, which is a significant increase on less than 25% in the previous fiscal year.

In the fourth quarter, we reported over $311 million in total gross bookings, representing an increase of 34.1% year-on-year in constant-currency terms.

We achieved revenue less selling costs of $21.8 million, and incurred a loss of $0.17 on an adjusted diluted earnings basis, as we pursued our stated strategy to gain substantial market share by continuing to invest in changing our revenue mix towards more hotels and packages.

Throughout the year, we have been highlighting three strategic initiatives for our Company.

First, we are improving our business mix towards higher net revenue margin business lines.

Second, we are proactively investing to gain further market share.

Lastly, we are focusing on automation and developing new technologies.

I am happy to report that we have made very good progress on all these fronts.

To elaborate, on the first point we succeeded in improving our business mix towards higher net revenue margin business lines, as more than 31% of total annual net revenue was generated from hotels and packages, a substantial improvement from 21% in the previous fiscal year.

We accomplished this by broadening supply relationships, offering superior customer experience, and making strategic acquisitions.

Given the transaction growth momentum experienced in H&P, we are confident of our ability to further shift the net revenue mix in favor of H&P over time, as we continue to bring the nascent hotel market in India online and scale up HotelTravel.com in Southeast Asia.

In Q4, our H&P transactions rose by 97.1% year-on-year and propelled our annual growth rate to 65.6% year-on-year for fiscal 2013.

This was driven by the traction in our domestic online hotel transactions, which increased by over 100% in the quarter.

We have gained this rapid growth thanks to continued efforts on deepening our business with key hoteliers, improving online content, and further enhancing users' desktop and mobile experience.

For example, in April we launched Last Minute Hotel Deals, which offers customers savings and deeply discounted rates of same-night check-in at participating hotels.

We are excited that with this new win-win feature we will help customers save money and hoteliers improve occupancy rates by proactively managing their perishable inventory.

Now let's move on to HotelTravel.com.

As we had announced at the time of the acquisition, our plan was to scale up the online hotels business by cross-sharing their 90,000-plus online hotels with MakeMyTrip.com.

The goal is to offer our India-based customers the widest selection in overseas hotels, with a heavy focus on outbound travel to Southeast Asia.

I am delighted to share that the integration is going well, and we are confident that the acquisition will solidify our lead in the online hotel and packages market in India, while also improving our net revenue mix.

As the hotels business continues to flourish online, we remain focused on creating and selling attractive holiday packages to our customers with an emphasis on driving increased bookings online.

In the past quarter we managed to grow transactions in our holidays business by over 60% year-on-year, and by over 73% for the full fiscal year.

We also managed to improve net revenue margins for the quarter through better demand forecasting, smarter supply contracting, and targeted marketing to all our key destinations.

Additionally, we continue to provide richer media content and make more holidays available on MakeMyTrip.com, which is helping to drive very robust online bookings.

Not only are we making more key destinations available online, we are also offering customers the ability to pick and choose from a variety of packages and flight-plus-hotel options.

We believe this flexibility will further empower them to book through MakeMyTrip.com.

Over time we are confident that this segment of the market will shift online as our team continues to innovate, driving the inevitable change in buying behavior.

Now let me comment on the second strategic initiative on gaining market share in India despite the state of the air market.

As the industry continues to grapple with higher year-on-year air fares, domestic air passenger traffic declined by 2% in the quarter.

Despite these ongoing challenges, we achieved 13% year-on-year growth in executing transactions in Q4.

We believe ongoing enhancements of customers' online shopping experience, including improved search results, addition of new airline content, and a refreshed pricing calendar, has helped us maintain a healthy, approximately 12% domestic air market share, as per DGCA in the month of March.

For the full year, we grew our total air ticketing business by over 2% even though the domestic air market declined 5%, as we gained share from our online and off-line competitors.

Strategic marketing spend is a key part of growing market share in India, and we continued our trend of innovative marketing this quarter.

In April, we ran a joint marketing campaign with the Sunrisers Hyderabad, one of the cricket teams of the Indian Premier League, to promote our online hotel offering.

Being the team's principal sponsor, MakeMyTrip has its logo prominently displayed on the front of each bail [sheltie].

The campaign was supported with TV commercials that ran nationwide in April featuring Indian and international cricket stars discussing the benefits of booking hotels online with MakeMyTrip.

We believe this joint promotion will accelerate the transition from off-line to online hotel bookings in India and provide high exposure for the MakeMyTrip brand to more than 100 million ICL spectators worldwide.

Lastly, let me comment on our continued investment in new technology this quarter.

According to a recent Newsweek study, India has an estimated 40 million smartphones in use.

We are firm believers that mobile will become an integral part of how our customers shop for our products and services in the future.

As you know, MakeMyTrip is available across all major smartphone platforms including Android, BlackBerry, and iOS.

Today our customers can book domestic flights, hotels, buses, and research available holiday packages all through their smart devices.

Since launching our mobile strategy, more than 1 million MakeMyTrip apps have been downloaded, and mobile now represents more than 10% of our total monthly unique visitors.

More importantly, nearly 10% of all stand-alone hotels, including nearly one-third of Last Minute Hotel Deals, are being booked by mobile devices today.

Going forward, we will look to increase the available travel offerings while continuously enhancing the mobile user's experience with MakeMyTrip.

Now I would like to hand the call over to Rajesh.

Thanks, Deep, and hello, everyone.

As Deep mentioned earlier, this year has been quite a challenge due to tough macroeconomic conditions, a shrinking air market, and earlier than anticipated changes in travel agents' compensation.

In light of all these headwinds, we still achieved nearly $1.2 billion in total gross bookings for the full fiscal year.

We also achieved $88.2 million in total annual net revenue, representing close to 12% year-on-year growth in constant-currency terms.

These ongoing challenges compelled us to sharpen our focus on expanding the hotel and packages business and on improving our net revenue mix.

Our net revenue in H&P grew by 146.1% in constant currency for the quarter, and 65.7% for the full year; and we improved net revenue margin year-on-year in the quarter.

In Q4, our H&P net revenue margin was 12.3%, an improvement from 11.1% in Q3.

This was achieved by earning higher margin through increased bookings volumes with select hotel partners as well as reduced reliance on the promotions that were introduced in Q3 to drive online bookings, as online hotels gained traction in this quarter.

Now for our air ticketing business, we maintained our net revenue margins steady and achieved 13% quarterly transactions growth year-on-year despite the overall air market decline in the quarter.

As mentioned on our last earnings call, we do not expect to see expansion in the air net revenue margins from current levels for the foreseeable future.

In the quarter and the full year, we reported adjusted operating losses as a result of the lower year-on-year net margin decline in our air ticketing business and the investments we continue to make to accelerate our revenue mix towards hotels and packages, including the acquisition of the HotelTravel.com.

Definitely we are in the process of adjusting our overall operating cost structure to reflect lower air net revenue stemming from earlier than anticipated commission reduction, which took place halfway through the fiscal year.

In the past quarter, we reallocated resources to our hotels and packages business and renewed the Company-wide focus on front- and back-end automation.

However, as Deep mentioned earlier, we continue to invest in focused marketing efforts to drive brand and hotel product awareness.

In the coming fiscal year, we will begin to see the benefits of our various strategic investments and cost-optimizing initiatives.

However, we are cautious about our ability to generate adjusted operating profits in the new fiscal year, given the uncertainty in the domestic air market and our ongoing investment in the online hotels business.

Nonetheless, the strength of our balance sheet enables us to make the right investments to ensure that our leadership in India's online travel market will be sustainable.

Lastly, while recent FDI actions in the airline industry and the announced entry of foreign low-cost carriers into India is positive news for (inaudible) India, we have to remain cautious on the growth in our air business until there is better visibility.

On a positive note, we are encouraged by the traction we are seeing in the underpenetrated online hotels and holidays business, and excited about the scalability of HotelTravel.com for travel to Southeast Asia, which should help sustain high growth rates in the H&P business in the fiscal year.

With that context in mind, we are initiating our full-year fiscal 2014 net revenue guidance with 15% to 20% constant-currency growth, which is equal to $101 million to $106 million at the planned exchange rate of INR54.4 to $1.00.

Operator, we can now begin the Q&A session.

(Operator Instructions) Lloyd Walmsley, Deutsche Bank.

Thanks, guys.

Wondering if you can just give us any color on what you think air margins will do for the rest of -- or I guess, going forward do you expect them to continue trending down this year?

And a second question if I may, if you could give us organic growth in the H&P segment in terms of transactions and bookings, excluding acquisitions; and then an outlook on where you see the H&P segment as a percent of the revenue mix for this fiscal year.

Thanks.

As air ticketing business margin, net revenue margin is concerned, as of now what we estimate for the current year is going to be in the range of between 5% to 5.5%.

And the quarter 5.3%; last quarter was also 5.3%.

Until the time that any other new development comes to light we expect that it should stay between 5% to 5.5% in the current year.

That is what our current estimate is.

And as far as the product mix for H&P or the contribution from H&P business is concerned, in this year our total non-air business contributed, as we mentioned, about 35% of the total net revenue.

Going forward, we expect really this mix to improve in the current year to probably about 45% toward coming in H&P.

Thanks.

Then any color on growth ex acquisitions on the H&P side?

You know, the way we are looking at the overall H&P growth, if you will, it is consolidated.

We are actually not really splitting between organic and inorganic, because the HotelTravel.com acquisition is very integral part of our international hotel strategy, including the hotel bookings for the Indian consumers.

So the way we are looking at it is more an integrated and a consolidated approach, not necessarily independently driving that and also tracking that separately.

So I would recommend we should look at overall H&P (inaudible) growth and not necessarily splitting the MakeMyTrip and HotelTravel.com separately.

I would imagine that is because you are taking a lot of the inventory and intermixing them.

Are you seeing a lot of uptake, I guess, in your core customers on that new inventory?

Does it seem to be helping you in terms of bookings on that basis?

Yes.

We have a lot of inventory like we had highlighted earlier and in this call, in the script also we mentioned over 90,000 hotels that has been integrated that has come from HotelTravel.com.

And we have also done cross-integration of exposing our inventory of 10,000 hotels to the HotelTravel.com site as well.

We have seen a traction.

Like Deep was mentioning earlier on, on the call, that the integration is in progress and we are moving ahead on track on that, have seen some traction already.

Early days, but we are very confident that as we continue to just keep making investments and complete the integration on all fronts we would definitely see our overall online hotels business growing, which will be a combination of domestic business as well as international business.

Thanks, guys.

(Operator Instructions) Manish Hemrajani, Oppenheimer.

Yes, thanks for taking my call.

Good growth on the hotel side of the business.

Can you tell us some of the initiatives there which is helping you grow at such a rapid pace in hotels?

And also what's the contribution of HotelTravel.com in the quarter?

Is that business growing at or below the Corporate average for hotels?

Yes.

Hi, Manish, this is Deep.

Manish, as I have mentioned already on the call -- but I'd love to give more color on this.

I think the growth which we are really seeing on both domestic hotel uptake as well as international standalone hotel uptake is really a function of two or three things that are coming into play together.

We have been working very hard on the supply side.

We have got 10,000 hotels in India.

It is not really a question of getting these guys onboard, but it is really doing more and more work with them.

I think it is fair to say that we work fairly closely with probably about 60% of these hotels, and there does seem to be some kind of [pretor] in place as well.

So while we are not doing a lot of business with all 10,000, we are definitely getting coverage to about two-thirds on a regular basis.

I think it is take some time to educate the small hotelier, the independent, of the benefits of putting their inventory online with us, of updating the extranet regularly.

The folks who have direct connects obviously they have last-minute inventory; but the real challenge has been with the independents.

I think that the work that we have done on this over the last 12 to 18 months is really paying off.

Our market managers have been spending a lot of time with them.

We have prepared educational tutorials in a kit.

Then when we get new hotels we signed up online, we make an extra effort to get them to see our business that comes through our channels.

And that I think this is working well on the supply side.

Further, we are going back to these hoteliers on a regular basis with MIS, with some detail on how that hotel is doing within their own comp set.

And that is something which hoteliers I think are finding very valuable, to see what is happening in their market, how the ARPUs have moved, how they are doing in terms of occupancy versus a comparable set.

That is something which we are automating now and are reaching out to the hoteliers with on a regular basis.

On the front-end side, a lot of work has been done on the features for our hotels.

We mentioned Last Minute Hotel Deals, which was an altogether new offering, which allows customers to check in on the last day itself and get deep discounts, currently actually ranging from a minimum of 30% upwards.

This is available not only on the website, desktop website but also on all the mobile dot.coms.

We are seeing a lot of traction here.

About 1,500 hotels participating currently on this program, and the idea is to actually get them to see incremental business coming out of this and not in any way cannibalizing any [offset] on the business.

So this is only for genuine last-minute travelers, and there are various ways and metrics we are employing to make sure that this is intended -- serves the purpose that it is intended for.

All the other features have been around the [conference] site.

Much more [brand] and richer content.

We are now seeing videos coming in for several key destinations and hotels.

A lot more reviews both from our own customers as well as TripAdvisor reviews, which is helping customers make up their minds.

The mapping has become much easier, so we are seeing a lot of that uptick.

And thirdly, I think what we call the promo calendar, which is really connecting the dots between when customers want to purchase, on the basis of we have now history for several years in terms of what their advance purchase cycles are for different destinations.

And going out and working with those hoteliers in a closer manner, and also doing a lot of proactive marketing both to our own customer base through targeted e-mailing as well as promoting the right kind of hotels on the site.

And also reaching out through other channels, online and off-line.

As we mentioned, we have done something with cricket which is obviously the biggest game in India and does seem to occupy a lot of people's mind share as well as eyeballs.

And we are seeing good results coming out of that as well.

So I think a variety of factors, but online and a lot more focus of course going on.

On the mobile side, too, the offering has got enhanced.

And we find of Last Minute 33% or more of the deals are actually coming on the mobile.

Which seems logical, but is a perfect fit because people are typically on a mobile when they extend this trip or can't get back on the same day and need to stay back, etc.

And now that is working very well.

Coming to your second question on the split, as Rajesh just mentioned, we are looking at both HotelTravel and MakeMyTrip hotel business together.

We are not really splitting that out right now for the reasons of cross-pollination.

We are using shared inventory for both, and therefore we are not.

But I think it is fair to say that the majority of that business is our organic business coming out of MakeMyTrip.

If I could just add to what Deep said, Manish, in this quarter that we reported almost all, a majority or almost all of the growth is coming off the -- as far H&P [transition] growth it is in turn coming from the organic business this year, which will be reflected in the guidance.

We see some more contribution, significant or material contribution coming in from other travel.

But so far, pretty much everything is coming from the organic business.

Is the growth rate in HotelTravel similar or below your corporate average for hotels?

It is actually too early to say.

Like we said, right now we are just trying to make sure that the integration on all fronts is complete, the buy-side, product side, marketing side, all the initiatives, right now are all work in progress.

So maybe quarter will be a fair -- I think you'd probably expect that to come back on probably a quarter or two quarters down the line.

Okay.

Given that a large portion of your hotel business is still off-line, can you help us understand the dynamics between the cost side, especially SG&A and revenue growth?

In other words, as the hotel business continues to grow, should we expect to see costs go up in conjunction?

Or how much leverage is there in the off-line hotel business?

Yes, so, that is a fair question.

Actually, hotel and holidays, which is -- a large part of the holidays business is off-line.

Actually almost all the hotel business is all online.

And the mix changing in favor of -- I mean, the growth rate is higher relative to growth, although holidays is growing at a very good rate as well.

But online hotels growth is definitely faster and higher.

So from a leverage standpoint, more and more we change the overall H&P mix in favor of online hotels, we will get the cost advantage.

And definitely, because online hotels [can] be a sales channel and [growth] rate expense, which could also be a committed and online sale where you would not need more people to support the -- or drive the sale or support the business.

So as we are moving into that direction clearly, we are seeing a lot of traction on the online hotels side.

And the whole -- this strategic model of hotel and travel, HotelTravel.com, in terms of just in [ongoing] more international or [to] side of the mix is also in that direction.

So, overall we are moving into that direction even for holidays.

Of late we have seen a lower fraction are coming in on the -- from the customer side to definitely [lead generators] on the Internet, which we call them back and then convert them.

This clearly means that they are already on the website, and there are some of the packages they are actually booking online as well.

So we are working really, making some significant investments to improve the customer experience on the website even for the holiday side, also making investment to enhance the content on the holiday side.

And clearly making all the investments to -- directionally from a strategic standpoint are to move as much as we can move online.

And as we improve, like I said, as we improve the online contribution of the total H&P business, we will start getting more and more leverage on the cost side.

Okay, got it.

Then on the slide, passenger air traffic was down for the quarter, but we saw air traffic turn positive for the month of March, up 5% year-over-year.

First time, I believe, since May of last year that we saw positive growth.

When do you expect to start consistent year-over-year growth in passenger traffic as we anniversary out the [picture] impact?

We expect it probably would start coming back overall probably in the month of July.

I don't know if you saw April numbers; April numbers are again a little over 2% down year-on-year.

So March could well be aberration.

So we will have to wait and watch for the growth to come back for at least two or three months (inaudible) to decide or conclude that the overall year-on-year demand is coming back, as sales more get rationalized, more planes come in, and the supply improves.

Current estimates, very rough current estimate is that probably could start happening in the month of July.

Last one for me.

Coming to your guidance, $101 million to $106 million for next year looks a little bit conservative here, especially given the growth rate that you're seeing on the hotel side of the business.

What are you assuming in terms of growth rate for air for next year?

We're not splitting, Manish, the growth in terms of just going out, because it is very hard to estimate went now.

We want to be absolutely cautious about it, that we fall into (inaudible) in the script as well.

Like I said, even April numbers on the overall market growth is not encouraging at all, and we don't see any improvement in the net revenue margin on the air side as well.

So we are just treading very cautiously out there, not necessarily anticipating any growth in the air business.

And therefore, whatever growth is coming is coming from more H&P business; and given the fact that H&P contribution at this point in time is about -- or rather non-air business contribution is about 35%, as we get into the current fiscal we have baked all these factors in to come out with the overall revenue growth range of 15% to 20% to start with.

As we go down and as we see macro improving like we have done in the last fiscal as well, we will be -- we will continue to watch the situation and obviously see the performance on the ground, and come back every quarter with [related subject] on that.

Okay.

Thank you.

That's all for me.

Chad Bartley, Pacific Crest.

Hi, thank you.

The H&P net revenue margin improved sequentially, which was good to see after the decline in December.

Can you talk about how you think about that, how you will manage that this fiscal year, and if we could potentially see any more volatility?

Or should that hold fairly steady?

So, you know, yes, definitely in this quarter, we came back on H&P margin to about 12%.

And like we had highlighted last call as well, that it was not necessarily -- the decline was not necessarily from the supply side.

So there was no real change in the contracting terms or the pricing that we were getting from the supply side.

It was more special offers, some discount offers, or the dilution of margin that we did to drive the transaction growth and which we withdrew in this quarter; and margin came back.

And if you see the full year, this is all 12% as against last year, full year was about 11.9%.

So a slight improvement over that.

Going forward, we believe that we -- barring some -- between the quarters if there is anything different that we need to do, like we did in Q3 last year, which we can only know when we are dealing with the market in that particular quarter.

But overall, directionally on a full-year basis, we do see some improvement, incremental improvement, in the coming year as well.

So whether that improvement is 0.25% or 0.5% -- in the beginning of the year we estimated that it could be between 0.25% to 0.5%, but as we go into the year and following quarters, we will keep updating with (inaudible).

But definitely on a full-year basis, we do estimate at this point in time some incremental improvement.

Okay.

That's very helpful.

Last question is, in terms of your efforts to optimize expenses, control expenses, will that help you or cause you to swing back to breakeven or positive in terms of your operating margin and EBITDA this fiscal year?

That is what I was just trying to actually articulate in the script as well, that given the overall market condition at this point in time and the revenue growth rate that we have given out as part of our guidance, we want to -- and the fact that we are investing into this, growing the H&P [part] division to the overall business, and the underpenetrated online hotel market, the online holidays market, is clearly significant headroom out there.

But it also calls for investment at the same time.

So we went to be cautious on the profitability for this year and do not want to estimate at this point in time that we would be able to make profit in this year, at least at this point in time as the current estimates stand at this point in time.

And we will go with that assumption at this point in time.

But we will see all the costs of [value] automation, all the cost optimization method that we took recently.

We want to see the impact of that in the following quarters.

And if the overall macro situation improves, we get some surprises from the marketplace from the revenue growth perspective, then we would want to probably come back and revise that, [given] our comfort and estimate around that.

But at this point in time we do not think that we, given the overall macro situation and the reasons that I just called out, that we would end up making profit this year.

All right.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate it.

This ends today's question-and-answer session.

I would like to hand the call back over to Deep Kalra and Rajesh Magow for any closing remarks.

If there are no other questions, then I think we will conclude the call.

Jonathan, would you like to comment?

Yes.

Thank you, everybody, for listening to our fiscal fourth-quarter and full-year conference call.

We look forward to speaking with you again next quarter.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference.

This concludes the presentation.

You may now disconnect and have a wonderful day.