Yatra Online Inc (YTRA) 2026 Q3 法說會逐字稿

(Operator Instructions)

Hello everyone and welcome to Yatra's fiscal third quarter 2026 financial results call the period ended December 31, 2025.

Today's call is hosted by Yatra's Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, Dhruv Shringi and CEO, Siddhartha Gupta. (Event Instructions)

With that, let me turn the call over to the Yatra's, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, Druv Shringi. Dhruv, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, good morning, everyone (inaudible - microphone inaccessible)

Let me start by you first on the event that happened during the quarter and how it has impacted the industry and then our CEOs are the of the operational performance and the performance in great detail.

The 3rd quarter, which is typically strong

(inaudible - microphone inaccessible)

I Recovered in the second half of the month and we've seen more factors continue to rise in the month of January and thereon.

During the period was the divergence between domestic and international travel trends. When domestic travel experienced short-term headwinds in December, international travel remained strong, with healthy year on year and sequential growth. This reinforces that outbound and long-haul travel is in a structural upcycle benefiting organized travel platforms like Yatra, with strong corporate and international travel franchises.

Also, the recent union budget sends a clear message and positive signal about the government's long-term commitment to the travel and tourism sector by positioning tourism as a strategic growth engine linked to the employment generation, foreign exchange earnings, and regional development. The policy framework shifts from episodic support to building a more structural and sustainable ecosystem for travel and hospitality in the country.

Key areas that is the rationalization of tax collection at source on overseas to a to a uniform 2% rate lower and boom (inaudible - microphone inaccessible) segments.

In addition, increased emphasis on domestic connectivity through infrastructure investments including high-speed rail corridors, waterways, and regional access initiatives to enhance hospitality capabilities through a National Institute of Hospitality and large-scale programs (inaudible) tourism sector.

There is a growing demand for Indian organizations to help digitize travel procurement while using AI-driven platforms that offer end to end automation, self-booking tools, and integrate expense management, prioritizing compliance and cost savings. AI and predictive analytics platforms procurement by forecasting beyond optimizing costs, imposing policies, and in real time.

AI enabled self-working tools can perform real-time compliance checks, slide risks like disruption or analysis, and personalized it with safety insights.

The AI checks some reacting to (inaudible) administrative friction and enabling productivity in procurement, data through its (inaudible) working platform supported by AI bot and we can the lead in (inaudible) driving this industry dynamics.

Moving on more specifically to business for the quarter, [BBC] business has elected earlier by us, the dollar is now still ignoring profit. Additionally, our corporate and mine. (inaudible - microphone inaccessible) About our performance in the quarter.

It is supported by our continued focus on scaling the corporate travel business. The steady growth in corporate bookings, along with the increasing contributions from higher margin hotels and my segments, positions us well for sustained margin expansion and improved profitability over the long-term.

With this, let me now introduce you to Mr. Siddhartha Gupta, who recently joined us as our new CEO. Siddharth brings him a wealth of experience across the B2B industry and in his last role was the President of [Mer] Consulting in India and was also heading the [SAS-based] talent acquisition.

Globally Prior to this, Siddharth has also held leadership roles in large tech and companies like SAP and HP. With that, let me hand you over to Siddharth. Sid, over to you.

Thank you so much, Dhruv, operator. I hope I'm, loud and, clear on the line.

Thank you so much, Dhruv, for giving a preamble on our quarter performance and industry trends. A very good morning to everyone on the call. Adding to Dhruv's comments, despite an industry-wide disruption in the airline sector during the quarter, Yatra continued to deliver in its air ticketing business, supported by seasonally strong B2C travel demand.

Gross bookings in the air ticketing increased 22% year on year. Supported by 14% growth in air passenger, which far exceeds the industry growth of about 1%, take rates also improved from 6.2% to 7.1% on account of the quarter being more B2C focused.

In the hotels and packages segment, overall performance during the quarter remained healthy. However, we did see some temporary impact in the mice and the corporate events sub segment, with a few bookings getting deferred due to flight disruptions.

Just to remind our listeners, it was a disruption in the IndiGo Airlines schedule in India. This resulted in a modest one-time impact on the quarter, part of which we expect to roll over in quarter four, supported by the continued strength in underlying corporate travel demand.

Gross bookings in the segment grew 20% year on year, excluding the impact of deferment of the mice business. Hotels would have grown over 30% on a stand-alone basis, supported by strong growth in our corporate business and in our affiliate business.

While gross take rates moderately, moderated slightly from 12.2% to 11.7% year on year on account of change in business mix, gross margins improve further from 9.7% to 10.2% year on year, reflecting prudent discounting in B2C and better marginalization from suppliers for corporate hotels.

Our B2B to B2C mix was approximately 60 to 40 for the quarter versus the nine-month average of 65 to 35 in favour of B2B.

Our corporate travel business continues its strong momentum. We onboarded 40 new corporate clients in this quarter, collectively adding an annual billing potential of, INR2.2 billion.

As mentioned earlier, the disruption happened during the highly productive first two weeks of December when corporate travel usually peaks before holidays. We saw deferment of mice travel into Q4 and subsequently a few of the groups moved to Q1 of the next financial year as a direct result of uncertainty in the travel during that period.

This disruption not only adversely impacted our operating performance but also led to incremental working capital deployment where advances had already been paid to vendors for mice groups.

These impacts were largely limited to the month of December, and the business is back on track in the corporate business. There's more to chair. The early response to our expense management solution has been very encouraging, and we've onboarded eight customers now on our expense management platform.

Early traction proofs that Yatra understands the pulse of what our corporate customers need. This solution has not only become a door opener to get new accounts but also gives us a huge upsell potential in our existing accounts.

Few thoughts on what you can expect from the quarters ahead. Our consumer-focused line of business has returned to growth path while improving margins. This was a result of sharp execution coupled with successfully tapping into partnerships and affiliates for demand generation.

In the near future, you should hear more on organic demand generation projects making impact. Helping us further improve margins in this line of business, our corporate value proposition still has a huge headroom for growth, online penetration is around 23% and we have laid a strong foundation for chasing this potential.

We've sharpened our go to market by establishing separate teams to chase large and small and medium enterprises. Demand generation is amplified by a new inside sales team now which has started augmenting the efforts of the team on the ground. Early signals are very promising.

Beyond new customer acquisition. Our farming team have won multi-year renewals from some of our largest customers this quarter, proving that corporates want trusted partners who can deliver value to them. Needless to say that our success is closely tied to the speed at which we can deliver tech innovation. Our early investments in adding talent to our product and tech team have started showing results. You can expect us to further add GAAP between us and what's available in the market.

Hope that gives you a flavour of where we're headed. At this moment I would have paused and handed over to Anuj Sethi, who's our CFO, to brief you on the financial performance for the quarter on the review. He is, got caught up in a medical emergency. Hence, I'll take you through the financial performance as well, and then me and Dhruv will take the questions together.

On the financial performance for the third quarter of financial year '26, on a consolidated basis, our revenue from operations grew 10% year on year to INR2,577 million or approximately $29 million driven by steady demand across our key segments with robust growth from air ticketing business. In terms of segmental performance, our air ticketing passenger volume grew 13% year on year to INR1,491,000. However, gross bookings grew 22% year on year to INR16,931 million or $188 million and air adjusted margins rose 40% year on year to INR1,195 million or $130 million with adjusted margin percentage improving from 6.2% to 7.1% under hotels and packages segment.

Hotel room nights grew by 22% year on year to INR508,000. Gross bookings increased 20% year on year to INR4,306 million or close to $47 million with adjusted margins expanded 15% year on year to INR502 million or $6 million on the liquidity fund, cash and cash equivalent and term deposits stood at INR2,042 million or $23 million as of December 31, 2025. Gross debt has marginally increased from INR546 million as of March 31, 2025, to INR583 million or $6 million as of December 31, 2025. With this, I would like to hand back to the moderator and open up for question-and-answer sessions. Thank you.

(Operator Instructions)

Scott Buck, HC Wainwright.

Hello guys, thanks for taking my questions. First, I'm curious, the revenue growth deceleration in the quarter, is any of that structural, or you're viewing that all as, just kind of the ebbs and flow of managing some of the macro challenges that are out there?

Hi Scott, good morning to you. This is largely seasonal in nature. Quarter three, if you would recall, is one of the lowest quarters for business travel given the holidays that we have for Christmas, New Year's, and for Diwali, Dussehra which both happen in this quarter.

So, effectively you lose one month out of the three in holidays, and then it got compounded this year with the flight disruptions that happened during the first two weeks of December. So, it's not a structural shift, it's just a one-off given, the disruption that happened in the industry.

Okay, that's fair, Second, I just want to ask about the MICE business. Are you seeing some of the macro challenges out there whether it's tariffs or anything else having an impact on that business. I know there were some headwinds in the quarter.

No, we haven't really seen any impact of that, especially things like tariffs and all. We do in fact expect that given that there is a new trade deal which is in place between India and the EU and India and the US, we will see business travel scale up even further when it comes to travel between both Europe and the US, but we're not really seeing any headwinds per say on account of these.

Sid if you want to add something extra on that.

Yeah, so, this MICE as a segment has grown and has tremendous potential for us to grow into. This was a very fragmented market about three to four years back, and now over the last two years, Yatra has become one of the top three players operating in this space in India, and the Indian economy is one of the fastest growing economies, so there are multiple industries where corporates are traveling not only outside India but within India as well.

And hence there is a huge headroom for growth. What we've seen is that this entire segment is getting more formalized. So, instead of very small players operating these events for corporates now, the corporates prefer doing business with large vendors like ourselves. So, I think there's a huge potential, and we don't see any disruption in this space at all.

Great, that's helpful colour and then last one from me guys, you continue to do a really nice job adding new corporate partners, on the travel side. I'm curious how many of those, kind of obvious or low hanging fruit opportunities are still out there and at some point you need to change or pivot the way you're, pitching some of these customers to continue to bring on that, corporate travel business.

I think at this time we have got a lot of headroom in this. Our initial mapping had suggested close to about 13,000 organizations that we could target as part of this. We are still just in excess of about 1,000, so I think there is a lot of bedroom for growth for us in this sector. I think, Siddharth coming on board will also sharpen our focus on how we go to market. And maybe Siddharth can elaborate a bit more around how he's gone ahead in the short period of time in augmenting the sales team and putting in some new things in place which will help us drive further growth so that.

Yeah, so to add, I concur with, Dhruv completely. We have barely, scratched the surface. There is a huge headroom for growth because the offline corporate travel, still is the majority market and, the value proposition of Yatra from, providing an online, corporate travel platform which caters for all, uniqueness of every corporate customer, has a huge headroom for growth to give you a parallel, in my days at SAP or Hewlett Packard. Corporate India itself has more than 30,000 companies which are, potential customers to Yatra.

We just about crossed 1,300 right now, so there's a huge headroom for growth for us from a go to market standpoint. We have, commenced a very, ambitious and aggressive go to market sharpening exercise at Yatra.

We have divided our go to market into three pillars. One is, so we've separated these teams out. One, is the elite sales team which looks at only large enterprises and tries to get us more, inroads into, large corporates where travel, spends are very high. Then we've got a separate team which is looking at small and medium enterprises which operates through, digitally creating demand and then, through an inside sale.

Landing it into our [kitty] and the third bit is we are already one of the larger players in India from a large enterprise automation so we have a very large existing account base so we have a team called [keyy] Account Managers and it's headed by a very senior leader here in India and the mandate there is, to upsell and grow our existing relationships where we're introducing newer solutions like expense management. And other solutions and especially international hotels and travel so that we are able to upsell into our existing customer set as well.

So, overall, we're sharpening the go to market, running a very strong cadence on a weekly basis to ensure that pipes remain healthy and conversions remain healthy as well. So, you should see momentum pick up from here and we expect our strategy of leaning more towards B2E to grow yatra, be very successfully executed over the next three to four quarters.

Great, that's very helpful colour, guys. Well, I appreciate the time thank you.

Thank you so much.

(Operator Instructions)

We have no further questions, so I'll hand back to the management team for any final remarks.

Thank you, operator.

Dhruv, would you like to--

Thank you everyone who joined the call today? And, as always, we remain committed to driving shareholder value and being able to address any questions that you might have. Siddharth and I are always available. Please feel free to reach out to us through our IR firm ICR, and they can direct you to us. We look forward to engaging with you and continuing to deliver on the strong results that we have done for the last few quarters. Thank you for your time today.

Thank you so much.

Ladies and gentlemen. Today's call is now concluded. We'd like to thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.