Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Taj Lands End. I'm Rutika Ghatge from Security. I will take few minutes to brief you about the safety procedures and guidelines. We are at the ballroom, which is at banquet level. Please note, for this venue we have eight fire exits, four on your right and four on your left. The hotel is well equipped with fire safety installations placed all over the property. There's no mock drill been planned for today. In case an emergency has been raised, kindly consider it to be an original one. The staff assisting you is well trained to face all the emergency situations. In the unlikely event of an emergency, please follow the instructions of staff assisting you as they will lead you towards a safer assembly area.
In case of requirements of doctor's assistance, please bring the same to the notice of staff assisting you, as doctor would be available on call. We assure you of highest standards of safety and wish you a pleasant evening ahead. Thank you. Thank you, sir.
Thank you.
Okay. Let's hope this is working. It's not. It's the clicker. We have another one. No, it worked. Okay. T he movie that you all saw is a good depiction of the strength of both the company and its individual brands. I think one thing which we did intuitively or knowingly or in a planned way is that we kept working on our brandscape, we kept working on our core values. We tried to stand up to every challenge to realize that when the pandemic started getting over just before the third wave came and even after the third wave we looked stronger than ever before. I need some help with this clicker is not working, so I'll try to manage till it comes. This slide is a good testimony to the RevPAR development.
After the first wave, we all went to almost zero level together. After the first wave, after the second wave, and after the third wave, we were able to outperform in terms of recovery coming out. That really has to have a direct correlation with the brand or all the brands that we have in our system. Thank you. Let's hope this works better. As the movie also showed, we have 100 hotels signed in the last five years. Of this 100, another interesting thing is 40 of them are Ginger. That's a focus we created, and we made a change and a shift because we do believe after Taj, Ginger has a huge potential to scale up, at least on the Indian subcontinent, as has happened in any other Western country of the world.
We have around 25 in Taj. We'll obviously continue with strengthening of our backbone, which was the Taj, remains the Taj, and for foreseeable future will be the Taj. Very important is our portfolio mix. We have always in the last five years since we announced Aspiration 2022, endeavored to have the right balance in the management contract, which means the fee-based business versus the owned and leased business. As for HVS and also as for the facts that we have, IHCL had the strongest signings both in number of hotels and number of rooms in the last two years. It's a trend that I do not expect to change this year either. In fact, some of you would remember we said we'll open a hotel a month, and actually we ended up opening 13 hotels last year.
Our guidance for this year is around 18 hotels. It could be 16, it could be 20. It all depends on some of the factors which we are confronted with in this dynamic market, and also the volatility that we are confronted with. Very important, the pipeline by brand. The pipeline by brand in terms of number of hotels is again with Ginger higher. If we did it by number of rooms, it would not be the same, and also by contract type. So if you really look at it, majority, almost 3/4 of our pipeline is on a fee-based business. Now coming to this slide, the most important thing is of the owned and leased, 92% is Ginger.
I've explained that in previous market days in investor calls that the reason for that is that asset-light growth model for Ginger does not work. T he revenue level in this segment is much lower, and 7% or 8% of fees would require a very large scale. If Ginger is positioned or targeted to do, depending on the market, depending on the city, depending on the micro location, anything between 35% to 65% margin, then we are better off paying, 20% to 30% revenue share and keeping the remaining 20% to 30% instead of going for an asset-light growth.
That's why we see that this number looks a bit distorted, but for me an operating lease for a Ginger is as good as a hybrid between asset light and asset heavy can get. Very important among the new signings that we have had, we've covered 25+ new destinations in India. This is extremely important in light of the campaigns that are going to take place that is also desired by the government and various bodies about Dekho Apna Desh, and I think we provide the right platform of Dekho Apna Desh than anyone else because we are in 100+ locations. This has been made possible because of the 25 new destinations. We cover India today in 100+ locations when we look at hotels only.
Should we add our home stay business to it, we would get close to anywhere between 115 to 120 locations going forward, with almost a portfolio of 225+ hotels in India. Of the number of 215+ hotels in India. That 235+ that we have in the total portfolio, 20 are outside of India, of which two are under development, the rest is under operation. Within India, we have 215+, which makes us a very, very strong player again, on our home front. This chart has been taken from Horwath, showing the strength of our brand in terms of number of hotels in the pipeline, and that makes us definitely a leading player on our own home front.
With that, we have also added. It's not just hotels. We added what we call reimagining our strong brands, which we already had, and also creating the new brands. When I talk about reimagining new brands, internally we say Ginger is only a three and a half to four-year-old brand. The name is 20 years old. We kept the name because the name was good, and we stimulated the progress by changing the design, the look and feel, the positioning, and the value proposition, and that is what has translated into accelerated growth for this brand. Same thing with TajSATS. TajSATS is. I have a board member of TajSATS sitting in this room. We have tried to also focus on non-aviation business in TajSATS.
We have a very good partner with SATS from Singapore, and they have great systems, and this has helped us gain 50% plus market share of all meals that are served in India. Unfortunately for our industry and airlines and tourism, we were confronted with a lockdown, but this journey with TajSATS just before lockdown and as we are coming out of it, is looking very, very promising. We changed the logos. We called it Culinary Art in Motion and started adding new businesses. Same thing on reimagination of Chambers as the private membership club. Anybody who has seen the Chambers in Delhi, the reimagined Chambers is possibly the best private membership club in South Asia. We have added Chambers in London. We have always communicated that we'll add Chambers in Bangalore, followed by New York, and those plans are very much there.
Nothing has been taken off. When we go to new businesses, we launched our home delivery business with Qmin. We launched amã as homestay business. To become that largest hospitality ecosystem, we created these brands and utilized the crisis, and were able to draw upon our existing kitchens, our existing chefs, our existing infrastructure to manage these businesses. The same is the story on homestay. We don't go and make a homestay in the middle of somewhere. We are doing homestays, which is close and in a driving distance to an existing hotel, so that the hotel infrastructure, the hotel general manager, with the help of a caretaker of the bungalow, can take care of that business. This is what is creating in these very small businesses, because every beginning is small, 50%, 60%, 70% flow through to EBITDA.
That is important because those of you who have read our press release might be wondering where this 800 basis point further increase is going to come from when historically the company on an average has traded at around 15%-16% EBITDA margin. Seven Rivers. These are some of the brands. Why they are there on this presentation is these are brands not owned by us. I'll show you a couple of them more. Seven Rivers is a brand of AB InBev. That's Anheuser-Busch InBev. T he ones who do Stella and Budweiser and Leffe, is a microbrewery. We opened it in the middle of the pandemic in Taj MG Road, and it was and is a runaway success, and I'll show you that, we are opening more and want to scale up, this business.
This is how it would look like in Goa. That's the second Seven Rivers, with a beer garden, like you have in the Germanic areas, of Europe. Followed by an Indian concept, four of these restaurants under the same name. We have not finalized on the name. As I present today, hopefully within the next week, 10 days, we would have finalized the name and how it is going to look like, on paper. Will be launched, with the first one in Taj Palace, followed by Taj Lands End, Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai and Taj West End in Bengaluru. Only thing I can say today, it's going to be food which comes from the northwestern part of the Grand Trunk Road. That's what the food would be like.
Another example of Paper Moon. Paper Moon is a very small, mid-class family restaurant business which exists for almost 50 years now, started in Milano, is in a few hotels in the Middle East, also in Southeast Asia. We have taken on the rights to Paper Moon for India. The first one is being launched in Fort Aguada. All these launches that I'm talking about, they are between 90-120 days from now. This is not something I'm showing which will happen in two years, three years, four years, but within the next 90-120 days, all of these brands would have been launched. Just a glimpse on how the Italian dining in a brasserie style would look like in a beautiful setting of Taj Fort Aguada. Soulinaire, our event management concept.
This is not a brand that you will hear so much about. It's really a service proposition. Really like when we have events like this today, what you see in the background, including the mics and the sound system, it's provided by a third party. What you see in terms of flowers is also coming mostly from outside. When the wedding cards are printed, they're not printed in the hotel. There is a separate company providing that kind of service. Similarly, we have launched this one-stop proposition, which will help people get food from any of the 400 Taj branded restaurants or other branded restaurants from our own company across India. It will be the one-stop shop to do the events, mostly in properties that we either own, control, or manage.
The very first contract that this is going to work upon is us having secured, and the formal contracts is to be signed of the, let's say as an example, the Sushma Swaraj Bhavan near Taj Palace in Delhi for all the major events. It would not be the hotel going out, it'll be the specific dedicated team. That way we become efficient. That's very important for all of those who analyze companies, who analyze hotel businesses to know that you don't always have to build in a hotel a very large kitchen. What we have is what we have. We don't have to build that entire infrastructure. You could have a team outside of the hotel which can draw upon the resources of the hotel or elsewhere, or from other hotels from other cities and help do such events.
That makes your building efficient, that makes your CapEx efficient, and that helps in generating premium return on investment. Industry-leading value creation. I think since first of January, as per our team, till 13th April, we provided a 21% return. This includes the rights issue and the dividend. With that, I think is the right time to chime in on the future of the Indian hospitality industry, as a lot is being talked about in the papers and other places in the last few months. A lot of people tell me, you know, "Oh, you have to pay a lot of money." But I always tell a year is 365 days and 52 weeks, so a few months are a good thing to have, but it's not yet. Abhi the year baki hai, right.
There is a lot of months left in the year. We hope it goes on, especially coming from where we are coming. I think it would be nice. Where we are coming from is a situation of resilience. It is a matter that we all were confronted with, which led us to innovation and which led us to community service. Resilience because what do you do when your revenues almost hit zero? How do you stay resilient? How do you stay above water? How do you keep the business going and have a growing concern? How do you help and boost the recovery when your international borders are shut? Most of the recovery that we have seen, almost 90+% , I would even say 95%, is all domestic-led. We are still missing that international.
Even if the international traffic opened towards end of March, is still very little time. People are still reluctant to travel. I think some of the movement we are seeing, but the normal level is yet to come. When it comes to innovation, yes, you know, how can we use all the learnings of the last two years because some of those are here to stay. How can we capitalize on consumer trends that are happening? For example, my favorite example has always been in the last several months, driving to a destination. How many of us were driving without a driver? How many of us went in families with elderly parents, in-laws together and venturing out for a drive for five, six hours? This is a new consumer trend which the industry has tried to capitalize on.
At the same time, without having revenue, without having profits, this is more like an industry slide. I feel very proud that the entire industry, in whatever means each one of them had, indulged in community service, helped provide meals, to the migrant workers, to the frontline workers, hosted the bed nights they could, and that made the pandemic, not easy, but it did help to say that this in-industry contributed significantly, during the pandemic. Moving on, the trends which are shaping, I would just not go through each of them, but really there are six, seven, eight trends that are the key. Number one, travel was, is, and is here to stay. Anybody who thinks now travel will become less because there was COVID is actually mistaken. It will only become higher.
Whatever is missed in two years will be recovered very fast and more will come. The travel is a fundamental human need, and that is not going away. I think the number of people we have in the hall here today is three times more than last year, July, when we did the capital market day. The number of people wearing mask is none because that's the reality of life, right? Everything comes in cycles, goes in cycles, and things do change and evolve. Number two trend is that focus will be on experiences and well-being in whatever form, whether you do it in the form of yoga, you do it in the form of spas, you do it in form of other leisure travel or just enjoying beach or mountain holidays or hiking.
A part of your business travel, which when gets extended into leisure, which we call bleisure, will have to have those components because when so many of our people lost lives, whether they were our guests, whether associates, et cetera, we realized the importance of having a stronger immunity. Also, as one of my colleagues from the travel trade called it on the television, "Kal ho na ho" factor. You know, let's enjoy now. Let's not keep spending or saving money and spend it later kind of thing. The third important trend that is definitely going to stay is the use of tech and digitization. I'm not saying that, you know, Microsoft Teams or Zoom is going to replace events like this. Today, we are in a hybrid mode.
We have both, you know, phygital event, but I think that will go back to normal. Digitization is just going to accelerate, and it is going to change our businesses, our business models, with the help of AI, if I may say so. This is a trend that is definitely going to be there. Very important realization that we have, and we are at the beginning of it, is trips internationally are getting less. You know, pre-pandemic, I have my family living in Europe. I would just sometimes go away just for a weekend or three days. The whole challenges around quarantine, around vaccination, around, you know, traveling from one country to the other was so complicated. If you go, you might as well go for two weeks. I never did that.
Even while I was previously living abroad, I would come to India for three or four days and, you know, visit my mother and go away. That has changed because it's just not possible. Now, even if it has become possible because the borders have opened up, the cost of the ticket is so prohibitive that nobody's going to travel. If you took that as a cost on a per-day basis, it will never work out. I think trips will get longer. The number of nights in the hotels will still remain the same, and there will be more people traveling on the domestic front. I think one of the beneficiaries of pandemic in each country is domestic tourism, that every country and the people of that country realized, actually, we do have very nice destinations within our own country too.
I think that part is changing. I think one more important factor, premium and luxury and the ability to charge will be higher. People will pay a premium. People will be willing to pay more if they feel safe, they feel secure, they get an experience that they were not getting before. A little bit of the same is not going to get you higher prices. I think in all, there are some more trends too, but these are the travel trends which I think are very critical. Actually, it's sometimes very strange to see the kind of rates that are being charged when Roland Garros is on, when Wimbledon is on. We, in our industry, have not seen these kind of rates ever before, whether it's Paris or it's London or it's New York.
For the events when the city is sold out, the rates are almost going through the roof, especially in the luxury segment. Also the rates will be assisted by increase in occupancy. One of the trends that we have, and this is a slide also from Horwath HTL, is that when you get into a crisis, the occupancy goes down first and the rates follow. When you're coming out of the crisis, the occupancy levels come back earlier and then the rate follows. Now, here we have a double whammy. What is happening is that the supply is constrained as hardly any hotel activity was happening in the two years of COVID. Limited supply, unless already under construction hotels, is expected to come to market over the next three, four, five years.
Whereas the demand will keep rising because of increase in population, because of more people traveling, because things getting to more normal. Occupancy level will increase. I think when the occupancy levels increase, the rates will eventually follow, and we are already seeing that trend. This slide is a very interesting one which part of it I have already said what we know. We know that travel is here to stay. We know that travel is resilient. We know trusted brands are always preferred. We know that brands achieve higher market penetration. What we think we know is that now more and more people with business and leisure are combining those trips. What we think that we know is slowly global travel is beginning to recover, not at the same level as it was pre-COVID, but it's slowly getting there. It's coming from zero.
When international borders are shut, it is zero, except for the OCI cardholders or PIO cardholders. I think that we all know. We all know that we can also communicate virtually. We think we know that. What we don't know is very important, the role of geopolitical tensions. We don't know the role inflation is going to play. We don't know, if inflation with the increase in interest rates is going to dampen growth. It's a lot of factors that we don't know, and how the evolving business models and technologies are going to play out, how much investment CapEx would be needed. We don't know that. Why we don't know? Because nobody knows what kind of technology is coming your way. W e all talk about 5G, that's fine.
We all talk about AI, that's fine. How much of the investment would be needed in an industry which does not benefit from a large cycle? You know, the cyclicality in hospitality business is strong, and the cycle is usually short compared to others. There is certain limitations on how much you can spend. We don't know these factors. Keeping all this in mind, we thought, what should be the strategy we unveil now? We did Aspiration 2022. We achieved 80% of our goals in 50% of the time. COVID came. We said, "Forget the aspiration. Put it, you know, in a folder or in a bag." Now we need a reset. We did the reset. Now we are coming out, what shall we do now?
That's when we said, and came up as a team together with our board, we had three different choices. We said, "We'll call it not aspiration, not ambition, not vision, not a route or a roadmap. Let's call it Ahvaan 2025, which is a call to action." It's also an invitation to a higher cause. It's like a 360-degree value proposition which fits in very well with our core values, with our ethos, and helps us become a much stronger company, by 2025 than we are today. Where we are today is stronger than where we were in 2017 or 2018.
Of course, we have one of the strongest hotel brand in the world, the strongest brand in the nation across sectors, but how do you become, as an organization, a much stronger player which can rise to the occasion and to a higher cause? That's the kind of guidance we are giving. We said from 17% we'll go to 25% when we last time announced Aspiration 2022. Now we are saying we'll go from 25% to 33%. That's another 800 basis points increase. It's practically doubling the EBITDA margin that we have achieved historically. And a part of it, if you looked at the last two quarters result, if we average that, we are already at 27.5% with not even having 100% of the revenue.
If we took the Q3 revenue and Q4, we did not achieve 100% of 2019 to 2020, and we got to an average of 27.5, so there is no reason why we should not get to 30 with 100, 110, 120, 130% of the revenue. We will strive to get 35% margin from new businesses. Any new business that we add should get to north of 35% margin. We'll continue to stay focused on 50/50 balanced portfolio between owned and leased hotels is as important, including the hotel we are in. This hotel is very important. We are not going to ever sell it. This is a crown jewel. We're going to keep it.
The Taj Mahal Palace in Colaba, or the Taj Mansingh or the Taj Mahal, as we call it, in Delhi, or the Taj Palace or the Fort Aguada or the Holiday Village, these are, you know, just an asset class which is so good that others, you know, would love to have it in their portfolio too. We keep that, but we'll keep adding our management contract-driven business to get to a balanced portfolio. From 235 hotels, we'll go to 300+. As far as homestays are concerned, we will be aiming for 500+, you know. We could have even put a figure of 1,000, because at the end of the day, each homestay has only four or five rooms, let's say three to five.
The way we work, the way our core values are, the way licensing works, it's not easy. We have almost 90 of these homestays signed, of which 47 are already in operation. 90 means almost signing a homestay per week. We could have done more, and we could have also aspired for more, but reality is that we rather have quality, we rather have everything perfect. It's not an excuse, it's just the way it is. Anybody dealing with licenses would know that it's not the easiest thing, and shortcuts is not the way any Tata Group company would work. Obviously, staying net cash positive with zero debt. In the past, you've seen a movie. I'll not go too much on it, except for saying that we really focused very strongly on the Indian subcontinent.
We hardly added any hotels or diverted our attention abroad, except for renegotiating our contracts, renegotiating our position so that our contracts are more contributing to our businesses. We did well with that. We did well with Maldives. We did very well with Dubai. We have now three hotels open in Dubai, with a third one, very big one, almost like a success from day one. We increased our footprint, and we started scaling up all these new businesses in a strong way. We were very frugal. We were very frugal in spending money over the last two and a half years, but still we were present all over.
I think one thing nobody can take away from us, whether it's digital presence or marketing presence or brand presence or new brand presence, we were present, but we were very frugal in the. You know, one thing is what one talks, the other is the figures don't lie. Our corporate overhead went down from INR 350 crores to INR 220-230 crores. Despite adding so many hotels after opening 40 hotels. We remain very confident that we are going to be in control of these figures. This is not a one-off. We are not a company that laid off employees in corporate office and, you know, suddenly we are going to rehire because nobody lost a job. On the contrary, everybody even got their variable salaries paid.
I think the change in the business model, the focus on optimization of cost, the reduction in fixed costs, and optimization of variable costs is a part of our reset. Coming on to our pit stop, we remain focused on exceeding the top line of 2019 , 2020, both on a like-for-like and a not like-for-like growth. Not like-for-like because since then we have opened 40 hotels, plus we'll be opening some more this year. Let's say it's a net of 40. On the like-for-like, we must exceed the performance of 2019 , 2020 by a double-digit number, and to that, we have to add the management fees, the new brands, the new sources of income, and that is the most important thing. We will continue to do asset monetization for non-core assets. These are some of those flats.
This is some kind of a land bought 20 to 30 years ago. This is kind of a farmhouse or for growing, you know, wine or vegetables, because that's how business was done 30 to 40 years ago. Some of these places, you have to get the papers cleaned up. You have to get all the title deeds in place, and that work has been going on. We have always communicated on that on a quarterly basis. We'll continue to do so. In this quarter, we have had a good development in which we actually sold a land in Gurugram outside of Delhi, which we have had in our possession for 25 to 30 years. As of next year, we want to benefit and use the platform that we have created to go for exponential growth.
When I say next year, this means only in 10 months from now and given what we have done with our balance sheet, with our new capital structure, pay off the last debt, which is due in April 2023. We don't want to prepay it now, although we have the money, because then we end up paying a big penalty amount. That's how we are net net positive. The strategic initiatives remain the same. It's all about reengineering our margins, reimagining our brandscape, and also restructuring the portfolio. As a 120+-year-old company, the oldest operating company of Tata Group, you can imagine that there is a lot which we have.
The positives are it gives you iconic assets like Colaba, and the challenges you have sometimes is a lot of things which were done in 1960 or 1970 were great for that time, but need to be changed. Restructuring that is an ongoing exercise, and I don't think it's going to even end in 2025. It'll be a new goal, so it will go on. Reimagining brandscape, because brand is not something you do today and then you forget, and then you open the thing again five years later. Otherwise, some other brand will come and displace you. We have to continue to reimagine and reengineering our margins because the commitment and the guidance we are giving to you of a 800 basis point increase will not come from a PowerPoint presentation.
We will have to do some more work and stay focused on it on a daily basis. We will do so by, obviously, sustaining our revenue growth, optimizing our cost, and stepping up the profitability as and when the revenue comes back. I'll give you an example here. If we are back to, let's say, 80% to 85% of pre-COVID revenue and you're doing a 27% margin, when you get to 100% or 110%, that incremental revenue does not convert at 50%. That should convert at 70% to 80%. That is the way our thinking has been. On top of that, when we add not like for like growth, it should help accelerate the margin growth.
Obviously, our operational excellence should be second to none. Our new businesses, Ginger, and we've classified them like that internally, they will also be more digital-driven. Qmin, amã, Ginger are supposed to accelerate all our efforts, including scaling up of our brands in these new businesses, strengthening them, and synergizing them under the umbrella of one company, which is our one IHCL. In terms of restructuring our portfolio, we will go for simplification and streamline a part of our growth. We have a lot of subsidiary companies, we have a lot of associate companies. We were able to amalgamate Taj Madras Flight Kitchen into our business. We have been able to make Roots Corporation, which has the Ginger brand, as a wholly-owned subsidiary.
Similarly, we've been able to do, you know, right across the street, we were able to make ELEL, the company that holds the Sea Rock, as a 100% subsidiary. All this takes away a lot of management time. Today, that time is available for us to keep, you know, fostering and keep strengthening our efforts for strategic decisions. Having said that, we will also be creating value through strategic projects. One of the hotels which we've always communicated, the flagship Ginger, is now reached the fifth floor of construction in Santa Cruz, which is on the left. A new one will be commencing within the next six months in Kevadia, which will be a Ginger and a Vivanta together, separated by a garden in the middle.
I think some of these strategic projects and assets, we will invest and we might sell and then lease it back. The proceeds we get, we put it as CapEx in a new project. That same capital is circulating, and we are not taking on debt or other obligations to do strategic projects in future. That's one. When you have the crown jewels, you have to maintain them, you have to polish them, and you have to make them more beautiful than they have been. That's something which we have been doing with London. We'll be spending more money. The last 80 rooms are left in London that need to be renovated. Taj Mahal Hotel, New Delhi, you know what kind of a difficult renewal it was till three years ago.
A lot of people had written us off, but we not only secured that, but we are also coming back with a bang with the renovations. In the break I was telling somebody, and I tell all of you also, try to book a table at House of Ming in Taj Mahal, New Delhi for next Friday, Saturday or Sunday. If you get it, then give me the tip. I like to help. A lot of my friends were calling me if I can get them a table. That's the kind of renovations, that's the kind of statements we are making, including with The Chambers in Delhi, including with the Machan. Very soon Rick's, which is another outlet there, as a nightclub, will also undergo renovation, and we will bring in something where the Wasabi used to be.
These are very iconic assets and very important for the brand. That's what makes the brand what it is today, and we'll continue to do work on it. After that, at some point, this hotel comes in, so of course it will get the new identity, but we're also going to revamp The Chambers here. It's going to get a full floor of suites. The new presidential suite has started. The new business class lounge will be coming here. Behind the reception there will be a new auditorium. Whole lots of things are happening, and we are still delivering the margin and the profitability. My eye is not moving from that. It cannot only be profitability focused, because long-term, sustainability of profits is only going to come when we take care of our trophy assets like this one.
I think I've touched upon the re-engineering, reimagine, restructure in detail, so I'll skip this slide. Our key enablers. Our key enablers will be more focused on customer centricity than ever before. Our customer centricity was, to some extent, limited by Tajness. Everything was Taj, Tajness, which is a way of life which we spread across brands also. Each brand should have its own. We have created a customer centricity officer, and we have done a deep dive with the help of TCS to improve our positioning, to improve our customer centricity initiatives. Also to come up, another initiative would be to have best-in-class products. All of those that I'm mentioning to you now is best in class. We have created a new position of brand custodian for the traditional businesses.
That is, Mr. Tajinder Singh. He will be taking care of SeleQtions and Vivanta. Of course, Deepika Rao, who was the previous MD of Roots Corporation, has now joined the ExCom. She'll continue to take care of Ginger. Very soon, we will have somebody also help us with both Qmin and amã. They're relatively new brands and still very small, so that we will take that decision during the course or towards the end of this year. All this obviously guided through the three core values of Taj: trust, awareness, joy.
The five values of Tata: integrity, pioneering, excellence, unity, and responsibility. In the spirit of One Tata, that means synergizing more with the group companies, synergizing more to learn from best practices, synergizing more to get more share of their business to the extent possible, and also as a good example of being the founding member of Tata Neu. I very proudly say that when we were showing industry-leading on the movie, we never said industry-leading loyalty before, because on our own strength, we would not have achieved it. That's why we partnered, and we were the first founding member of Tata Neu. All other group companies joined later. Why? Because this is an important element.
Of course, there are startup issues with any kind of a startup, and we are very pleased to inform that our revenue has already increased than what we had before from our loyalty and from our website, and this is beginning to work well. Taj will remain aspirational, so a lot of new coins have to be accumulated till one can buy a free stay at a Palace Hotel, run by Taj. I think it's a good beginning, and it has a very strong future. Also our collaboration will increase with Air India, now. Vistara and AirAsia was always very good. Air India was good, but I hope it also becomes very good, and all three become excellent, going forward, creating travel and a tourism ecosystem, going forward. Also embracing digital.
We are working on a lot of digital initiatives, including data lake platform, within the company. I think at the end of the day, we need an organization, which enables transformation, so that all the objectives, all the road map that we have created for our Ahvaan 2025 can be achieved through an optimal organization, which is obviously a strong pillar, a strong fundament for success. It's the people at the end of the day that make the difference. It's the people using the digital that makes a difference. Digital on its own cannot make the difference. Very proudly, we announced Paathya, 22 March, last month in Delhi. You'll see the Paathya water bottles on your table. You'll see green meetings, coming into force. You'll see more renewable energy. You'll see use of wastewater.
We will get rid of single-use plastic. These are the commitments that we have made, and we are going to honor it. I think there are six key pillars, the best captured in a movie, which I will run it for you now. That Ganga Aarti that you saw is actually the backdrop of our ONE. It's because something we've been doing for over two decades, supporting Ganga Seva Nidhi in Banaras, and we thought it would be a good backdrop for our ONE 2025. Moving on. One of our initiatives also derived from Paathya, which is about skilling 100,000 people as one of the pillars. Of those 100,000, we said 25% have to be women. Also we said we will take our average today of 17% women in workforce to 25%.
Something which we really feel very strongly about, something which we really want to do. We came up with a campaign, She Remains the Taj. As a guest, what are the value propositions that we're able to offer to lady travelers? How do we take care of our employees? We've been doing a lot of initiatives for the women in the organization already in the past, but we want to take it to the next level, and also as partners in the community. As an example, when you see these sarees of the lady staff, you will see that is coming from the Banaras weavers. This has been something which is very good, which we have done for several decades. This has nothing to do with Aspiration 2022 or our Ahvaan 2025.
These strategies are more about preserving what is the good, taking it to a very good level, and also at the same time stimulating the progress on the business front. This campaign, we are very proud of. I mean, it's hit more than 5 million on YouTube. If you put all social media together, it has hit 75 million. We have had maybe 2%, 1% or 2% people who have complained, "Why women? Why not men? Why you're differentiating? Why these women? Why not the women from the villages?" This campaign is about Taj, and Taj will have different versions of this coming over the next 12 months. This is not that you made one movie and it's over, and you launched an initiative, it's over.
We have to work on it on a monthly basis, measure what we promise we will do, check what we have actually done, and keep taking it to the next level. Except for two models who volunteered, is the better word, on their own to contribute to the movie without charging us anything. The rest is the real queens, princesses, our lady staff in our hotels, whether in Delhi or in Mumbai or in Goa. That makes us very proud because it also helps you to strengthen a message internally that when the next versions follow, the others will follow, too. Happy to share that with you.
She is who she is. What matters is she. She chases the stars, spinning tales of her journey. Wondrous, wondrous. She is here to make history her story. Sometimes stormy, sometimes sunny. She's always on the move. Fearless. Free-spirited. She is bold. She is the spirit of change. She Remains the Taj.
Moving on, this pyramid, most of you should be familiar with this. Basically Ahvaan 2025 helps us to strengthen our position as the most iconic hospitality company of South Asia, but also the most profitable one, industry leading in growth, pipeline, margins, EBITDA, market cap, you call it, and we want to be number one in all that. Zero debt, 33% EBITDA margin at the end of the business cycle, 300+ hotels portfolio, and a balanced portfolio by using the three Rs, by using the enablers with the new one of the digital and Paathya coming in, without leaving or going away from the base, which is the core values of both Taj and Tata system.
The next part of the presentation, my colleague, Giridhar Sanjeevi, will take you through the performance drivers, and more factual and more numbers coming your way, so that we have everybody satisfied by the time you leave this room. Thank you. Thank you very much.
It's always a hard act to follow, Puneet, actually, but let me do my best. Thank you. I think, moving on to the next part of the presentation, performance drivers. What are the key areas that you're working on? Honestly, it is consistency in terms of what we have always been saying, and therefore, what you will see on the next few slides is fundamentally a reaffirmation of some of the drivers that we've always spoken about. This is a very interesting chart that we put up from time to time, sort of shows the history of the company from 2015 to 2016.
This is born out of some of the conversations that we have had with some of the fund managers and investors, where I think people used to ask us, industry uptick is there, is your balance sheet strong enough? Do you have strategic clarity in terms of what you want to do? Is your performance, delivery of performance consistent? Is the development momentum strong enough, actually? It's quite interesting to see that when we announced our Aspiration in 2017, 2018, the next couple of years, we were all greens. The pandemic impacted us for that period. Once again, we are back to being green on all the key parameters that matter in terms of setting us up, in terms of Ahvaan 2025. What are the key?
Ultimately, I think there are really three things on the revenue side, on the cost side, and on the balance sheet side. I think these are the three things which are the key performance drivers. On the revenue side, really speaking, we are talking about. I think we believe we are very strong on revenues, because unlike the other hospitality companies where the focus largely is on rooms and F&B, we are blessed because of the way the strategy is being rolled out in becoming a house of brands and some of the other initiatives we are taking, that our revenue drivers are nearly about five-fold actually. Number one is the like for like growth from the existing hotels and existing properties through the RGI improvement, which is really the drivers of room revenues actually.
On the right-hand side is the new F&B concepts, which will help us to drive revenue further. On the bottom left is the growth in new businesses, which is Ginger, Qmin, and amã. On the right-hand side is the robust growth in the hotel pipeline through management contracts, which will add to the management contract income. At the bottom, the SeleQtions hotels on the balance sheet. As we have said, we will always be 50/50, and there will be places where we will invest to build our portfolio, and that will also drive in terms of the revenue. I think as Puneet outlined in his earlier part of the presentation, I think very clearly, if you look at industry data, very clearly the occupancy and average room rate is expected to increase actually.
Starting with occupancy going up, the rate going up, and therefore the RevPAR going up. The other thing is, yes, while there are headwinds in terms of inflation, and while we do not know the full impact of some of these, I think generally it is believed that our industry, there is some power in terms of pricing and therefore there is some level of hedge against inflation actually. What has actually happened? While this was the industry prognostication in terms of how things will bear out, I think April has been very, very strong as we saw in the quarter ended March also. Each of these cities, all India performance was 133% of the pre-pandemic level in the month of April actually.
We were always talking during the pandemic period about this year being the year where we will return back to the pre-pandemic levels. Here we have seen in April the growth, which is far in excess of the pre-pandemic levels on a same store basis. On top of it, if you add the new hotels which have opened up, it is a good start in terms of what has happened. Across all the cities you have seen that actually. It's a good problem to have in terms of the growth in business.
What is also happening as a result, and given our presence in 100+ cities and given the leading market shares that we have in most of the key cities that we operate, we have been able to widen the RevPAR premium from the pre-pandemic level in 2021, 2022. In fact, it went up to 1.94. As part of Ahvaan, we are saying we'll go to two, which means we are talking about increasing market share and widening the RevPAR premiums as we go forward in the next three to four years. This is driven very clearly by the Tajness, driven by the brands that we have, the portfolio mix that we have, as well as the smart renovations that we'll carry on to continue to keep us relevant to all our customers in driving this actually.
In terms of the new brands, very clearly significant progress is being made on all the four areas. This is Ginger, where we expect to be at 125+ hotels by the end of this period. amã, 500+ villas. Qmin, the 3,000+ members in Chambers from the current levels of about 2,400. Qmin as well in terms of its steady growth across the different cities and all the other initiatives around it actually. The new brands will continue to drive the business. In terms of Chamber membership fees itself, I think we have seen the membership base grow quite strongly. In fact, we had a revenue of around INR 85 crore in the current year which just ended.
We think that with the growth in membership base to 3,000, we have a potential of about INR 150 crores in terms of The Chambers memberships itself actually. Not counting the fact that these will also add to revenue potential because the members do spend in terms of rooms as well as stays as well. Moving on to management fees. I think people have always asked us how big a management fee business can be. In fact, we have seen a strong recovery to INR 231 crores for the year ended 31st March 2022. We think that with the pipeline of 60 hotels and more to come, this fee can go to about INR 400+ crores in the next four years actually. That is what we are kind of guiding in terms of growth actually.
On the key drivers of margin expansion, I think very clearly, I think enhancing productivity is critical actually. We have always spoken. I think when the pandemic came in, we spoke in terms of cost controls and how we were able to reduce fixed costs. Now we have a different challenge where the business has surpassed the pre-pandemic levels. We continue to be prudent in terms of cost savings. As we grow through the network, the focus has very clearly shifted on productivity actually, because I think we will become more and more productive due to these efforts actually and given the growth in the enterprise. The productivity efforts are on three buckets. Number one is the hotel expenditures. The second is the staffing, which we'll continually work on.
Finally, the corporate overheads, where we have been able to bring down and which will service a wider set of hotels actually. In terms of the focus on hotel expenditure, there are really multiple drivers. I think whether it is consumables and perishables, whether it is payrolls, whether it is utilities, whether it is the commissions that we pay to all the OTAs and others which come in, and also leveraging Tata Neu there. All other expenses, we are working on a whole set of initiatives all the time actually. Whether it is from centralized procurement to water recycling and utilities, to shared services and payroll, to sort of, Tata Neu platforms in commissions, and also working on continuous tracking and rationalization of all the expenses actually.
We will pursue doing to ensure that cost is optimized and productivity is enhanced all the time actually. In terms of productivity, this is something that we have always spoken about in terms of reimagining and sort of reorienting the service levels and working on manpower levels and core manpower to room ratios, and these we'll continually work on. Of course, depending upon the levels of business and needs, so it may go up and down, but overall, the productivity focus will continually be there in terms of the manning. On corporate overheads, I think very clearly we have been able to bring down corporate overheads from INR 350 crore or so pre-pandemic to around INR 240 crore last year.
While absolute numbers will go up, what we're really aiming is that from an 8% corporate overhead level that we had, we want to keep it at around 5% level as we go forward in terms of business actually. That's the focus in terms of doing it, and we will do it through a whole bunch of efforts, including redeployment, prudence in resource allocations and working as one IHCL and taking a lot of synergies actually. One example I can talk about is that post the acquisition of 100% of Ginger, I think what we have now done is that Ginger had a head office separately in Bombay. I think that head office has been given up, and the different departments are getting merged to the different areas.
Even as how we operate, area directors who historically looked after Taj and Vivanta will now look after the Gingers as well. By doing that, we are actually optimizing and bringing in more synergies in terms of overheads across the piece actually. What this is doing in terms of the focus on the different revenue levers and focus on the productivity levers is that the shape of the P&L is changing. I think in two steps. One is the revenue contribution from new businesses, which is currently pre-COVID at 10%, we expect to go up to about 25% actually, driving up in terms of what it can contribute. The management fees, the Ginger business, the Chambers income, the Qmin, the amã Stays & Trails, and all of that actually.
The EBITDA contribution from this business will be 22% currently from pre-COVID levels, expected to go to 35% actually. That is how we expect to change the shape of the P&L. As Puneet said in his earlier discussion as well, I think these are the high margin businesses which will help us to sort of ensure that we go towards the EBITDA margin guidance of 33% by the end of this cycle actually. This is the shape of EBITDA margin that will happen, what happened in 2019, 2020, what happened in 2021, which was a loss, and how we are coming up and expect to reach 33%. Key summary of performance drivers.
Essentially, all these are coming through a variety of performance drivers, both on revenue and on margins actually, where we expect margin improvement contributions to come both from revenue initiatives and cost initiatives. Driven by all the soft factors that we discussed, which is demand greater than supply, the strong rebound in travel, the pivot to domestic, the power of the domestic we kind of discovered during the pandemic, the stable, the scalable and asset-light models, the entire hospitality ecosystem of brands that we have built actually. In, on the cost side, by new ways of working, by digital adoption, economies of scale, high margin focus and continued tracking actually. All of these should come together to help us to get to the Ahvaan targets of 33%.
On the balance sheet side, very clearly we completed at the end of the last year a recapitalization of the enterprise, resulting in a zero net debt position. What we are trying to do going forward, and this is something that we've always been doing but gains even more focus, is a focus on free cash flows. I think, with this strategy in place and profitability coming through and very careful focus on CapEx and renovations as well, we continue to focus on free cash flows, and this is important for us. We were in 2005, a company with about INR 1,500 crores on the balance sheet actually.
Since 2008 to till just now, we have been a company which has always required cash and therefore, given that context, I think a focus on free cash flow is absolutely right to make sure that we don't go back to those days and yet have money left for a rainy day if ever required actually. Incremental capital allocation will be prudent actually. We continue to be focused on our WACC, and therefore, all our capital expenditures will ensure that they are above WACC to ensure that ROC goes up. Monetization and simplification continues to do. In the last four years or so, our monetization efforts across the network has yielded us nearly INR 500 crores or so, and that focus will continue actually.
Simplification, we have made some efforts and some successes in terms of simplification of the corporate entity structures actually, and those efforts will still continue actually, and you will see hopefully more coming through in this period actually. Focus on cash flows. People keep asking me in terms of free cash flows. I thought as you kind of build your models, give some kind of an indication as to how this will shape up. If revenues are about 100%, EBITDA is at around 30% to 35%, you will have fixed leases, taxes, working capital dividends taking away maybe 10% or so. Normal CapEx and renovations will be about 5%, giving us cash flow before expansion CapEx of about 15% to 20%.
What we mean by expansion CapEx are things like, you know, the Mansingh, for instance, is one of them, and some of the new CapEx projects we're doing like Ginger Santa Cruz, the Kevadia. These will be the others that we will do to ensure that the free cash flow accruals will be between 5% to 10% of top line on a year-over-year basis. In terms of monetization and simplification, I think we think that it is fair to sort of take a INR 1,000 crore target up to 25% to 26% in terms of further monetizations, and that is something that we'll work on. These consist of a mix of, what do you say, land banks, non-core hotels which are not in strategic locations, and some sale of some investments.
Of course, wherever we kind of divest any hotel, like we did in places like Visakhapatnam, we will continue to maintain the flag. On simplification, Ginger is now a wholly owned subsidiary. Yes, recently now, I think we have spoken about it earlier, we are putting in money int St. James' Court to bring down the debt, but through a right issue which allows us to consolidate shareholding, because St. James Cpurt happens to be a joint venture with Orient Hotels. So, we will continue to consolidate shareholding as part of our efforts as well. C-Rock is a question which all of you keep asking from time to time. Thats an area wher this remains probably the last battle that we have in terms of resolving a historical problem that we have had since 2007 or so. We are working with the government to create a landmark hotel
One thing we have always promised is that we do not intend to put in any more capital to build beyond what we have already put in. We believe our vision is to create a 1,200-room complex between Lands End and Sea Rock, which can have a potential of INR 1,000 crore in revenue. A second iconic destination in Bombay, generating not just revenues, but employment, tax potential and everything else for the city of Bombay actually. Diversified shareholder base. Just a slide. We are very proud of this. I think it's very interesting to see that the shareholder base, which is 1.35 lakh, has gone up to about 3.42 lakh in the last five years or so. It is incredible, actually.
The shareholding pattern, we're very proud of the fact that beyond our promoter Tata Group at 38%, the DIIs and FIIs constitute 46% of our shareholding, and we have 16% of shareholding with the retail. We're committed to sort of doing everything we can in terms of shareholder value maximization. Given all we are saying in Ahvaan, it will also be stakeholder value maximization, especially with the efforts around Paathya. Finally, we just conclude by saying that this is the triangle, which is at 33% EBITDA margin expansion, zero net debt, 300+ hotel properties, 50/50 portfolio. Ahvaan 2025, fueling IHCL's reimagination. We're open for questions. I think we'll just come here.
I'm also thankful to the people who are listening to us digitally, and they can also ask questions to us actually. If there are any detailed database questions, my request is that we take it offline because, you know, I think. Otherwise we'll be happy to answer others as well. Thank you. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, since we have guest presence here in the ballroom as well as online, we shall begin with a few questions from those of you present here, move over to our guests online and then come back to you. Kindly introduce yourself before asking your question. Online guests, kindly use the raise hand icon should you wish to ask a question. Now over to you, our guests in the ballroom. Kindly raise your hand and we'll have a microphone passed to you.
Hello. Thank you very much for the detailed presentation. This is Aishwarya Agarwal from Nippon India Mutual Fund. I just want to understand about the cycle. How do you see the hotel cycle in, say, the next three to four years? I mean, I can see in the slide. I mean, one of the slides was talking about there is a strong demand and a weaker supply, and that will probably support the occupancy as well as the RevPAR. What are the three to four key ingredients in that? I mean, to assume that occupancy as well as the RevPAR will keep on moving up for next four years?
Number one, I said it already, is the constraint in supply. The supply growth will not be as strong as demand, so which will help RevPAR to increase. First occupancy and then rate will follow. The second part in cyclicality is the pent-up demand. You know, for two years, travel has been restricted, including overseas travel. We are noticing now, as we speak, even for us in destinations like London, there are a lot of people who are going to London, whether it's Wimbledon or Queen's centenary celebration or whatever it may be. Suddenly we see that June there is hardly any availability.
Even people very known to us, our Chambers members, very group people coming from there, we are finding it difficult because everybody has a desire, travel being fundamental need, so that is why they are traveling. The third important factor is the pent-up demand. One is your leisure, the second is your government delegations. You must have followed recently Indian delegation going to Germany, Denmark, France, Scandinavian countries, right? Similarly, other delegations are coming here, whether it's Japanese or it's at the end of the month, Hungarian, and they are going to increase. That should help in driving both occupancy and rate. Last but not least, there are two, three things which are very peculiar to Indian subcontinent. Spiritual tourism is crisis resistant.
You know, if you have to go to Tirupati, if you have to go to Vaishno Devi, if you have to go to Banaras, if you have to go to Ayodhya, all this is only on the increase. We witnessed that during the COVID. We opened a Taj in Rishikesh and very recently, another one, Anand Kashi near Rishikesh and Pilibhit House in Haridwar. I mean, we were very optimistic about these properties. That's why we signed these contracts.
That these properties, especially the last two that I mentioned, Pilibhit House in Haridwar or in Anand Kashi, that they would do rates that they are doing, I don't think we would have thought it's possible. Spiritual tourism, medical tourism, which is becoming more and more popular, as well as weddings. You know, a lot of weddings either got postponed or delayed or others that happened, they are going to come back with a big bang. I think, because it's a part of our culture, owning a house, buying jewelry, wedding of a daughter, wedding in a family, this is just a part of our DNA. I think these three, together with the opening up of borders and international travel, should provide a very good platform for growth, both in occupancy and rate, which will translate into RevPAR.
That's on the Indian front. Globally, I think it's even stronger than here, because here we sometimes hit a rate ceiling. I know that some of the people known to me ask me for help for booking of rooms in Paris at the time of, you know, recent times of Roland Garros or other events happening. There in luxury segment, the rates are really. I said it in my presentation. Please go online and check, you will see rates which I have not seen in my career before. It's not just a function of supply. I think the cyclicality is partially mitigated in the luxury segment with the people's willingness to pay and enjoy life now than to wait for five years or seven years and keep collecting money. Whether this will stay forever, I don't know.
As we speak today, this is what it is. Save for any pandemic, number one, save for any geopolitical trends, what my colleague, Giri, just now mentioned, we are in the month of April and May trending definitely double-digit ahead of same time in 2019 , 2020.
Sure, sir. Thank you. Just, I mean, maybe at a later stage, if you can touch up more on the supply side, because that information is an information which is not available to us and it's very restricted, and you are the dominant player. So if you have some database and some insights which can be shareable at a later point of time, that will be really helpful for the longer term perspective.
Yeah, sure. We subscribe to similar data. It's four to five global institutions, like STR, Horwath, HVS, or Hotelivate. You know, there are lots of such groups that publish that data from time to time, and we use the same, and it's quite credible. Or we use a combination of the same, but more or less they're all close, including JLL, CBRE. There are a lot of such groups. I would encourage you to get that. That's unbiased. It's not an opinion of one company, rather looking at the sector.
Thank you, sir.
Should we take a question from the audience now? From the online one, in case there are any questions.
We do have one.
Yeah.
Member of the audience, Mr. Vikas Ahuja. Mr. Ahuja, kindly accept our invitation to unmute your microphone, switch your camera on if you so desire, and go ahead with your question. Mr. Vikas Ahuja.
Thanks for the presentation, sir. Firstly, it's nice to see, you know, you guiding for significant margin expansion when most of the companies globally are, you know, looking to reduce margin guidance. So my question is when you were, you know, making this kind of assumption that margins are going to improve by 800 basis points, are we factoring in, you know, some kind of a wage inflation or maybe any macro shock? Because, you know, the macro is also very volatile now. So what are the key assumptions? Have we looked at those assumptions as well?
I think your question, if I rephrase, Vikas Ahuja, is what you're saying is that, with your margin expansion of 800 points, have you factored in some of the macro factors like inflation? I think that's the question actually.
Yes. Yes.
Of course because inflation is always. If you're talking about a dramatic increase in inflation, that's something different. We think that is obviously the short-term volatility. If that is the case, it will be reflected both in cost and in revenue. I do not think that is the main. What we have done is taken our optimized cost base, as Giri showed, in terms of our room-to-staff ratio, our variable cost when it comes to all the variable costs, whether it's food or raw materials or bar or, you know, any other form. Finally, we have taken a very important assumption, which also Giri mentioned, in terms of corporate overhead, that it will stabilize at whatever the revenue level is at around 5% versus 8% before. Now, that's significant because this is like a CapEx.
We always guided CapEx is 3% to 5% of the total revenue for the year on a consolidated basis. Now, if you're coming at a level of which was like 8% to 10% pre-COVID level in terms of corporate overhead, that's a significant reduction versus the increase in revenue and the number of businesses and number of hotels making you far more efficient than you were ever before. I think that is how it is reflected in margins as we said. Number one, your operational leverage. Number two is your new businesses with high margins. Number three is your change in business model from owning and operating to more focus on management contracts because it has a higher flow through.
Aggressive growth because we have all these 60 hotels which are still to open plus whatever we will sign now and open or conversions of existing brands till 2025 which give you that additional margin that you may not have had, if you were owning and operating in the older model. I think these are the four or five key factors, and also not allowing new businesses to come in if they were producing less than 35% margin. I think that was also a part of the presentation. I think all these five combined together should help us take care of any extraordinary inflation or any other negativity, that or negative headwinds that come in our way. It's a very scientifically derived number.
If you come, we are happy to take you offline and through the model in our offices.
Sure. Sure. We don't have any other guests online with questions, so we'll come back to our guests physically present here in the ballroom.
Hi. Good evening. Should I go ahead with the question?
Yeah. Why don't you do? What is it?
This is Amit Agarwal Desai. Thanks for the nice presentation. I note that this time there's a lot more focus on the balance sheet restructuring. My question to you is while you've given some kind of a guidance on margin expansion, you know, for FY 25, with the balance sheet restructuring and margin expansion any kind of a guidance or thought on the return ratios like ROC, ROE? That would be helpful.
Okay. I can take this question. I think we have deliberately. I mean, we have always stated that our focus on ROC is something that we are dialing up actually. I think if I look at our balance sheet, we are. If the balance sheet is really in two parts. One part of the balance sheet which is say domestic hotel assets always gives us very high margins actually. That's very clear. There are a couple of areas which drags down the ROC. Example, the Sea Rock investment which currently doesn't earn anything. International assets we've been working on in terms of improving profitability. But beyond it, I think it is the monetization and simplification which is gonna help in terms of taking us to the direction actually. The only reason we're not giving a specific direction is that the monetization.
I mean, we have had one of the things we always say right from 2017, the whole management team has had a series of things to do and we have been addressing one by one actually. I think these monetizations, simplification, like if you take merger of one of our listed entities into IHCL so that we eliminate one listed entity, I mean, it's something that we've always said we will try and do, but I think there are partners involved and all that and the effort is kind of longer term in terms of doing it actually. That's the only reason that we are not guiding towards a specific ROC target.
Except to say that we had a slide on incremental capital allocation because ultimately from an investor's perspective, what is historical on the balance sheet will only get resolved in a certain way. In terms of incremental capital investment, as long as we are able to make sure that the incremental capital is deployed in a fashion which is beyond the cost of capital, then the ROCs will keep going up actually. I think really three parts. One is existing hotel assets continue to be high ROC. Second is incremental investment will be accretive on ROCs. Number three is that we will have to simplify and monetize to build it. There, the time horizon is a little unclear because of the nature of the work. We are clearly having a number of conversations actually. Yeah.
Okay. Before we ask our next question, may I request you to kindly announce your name and the organization you represent before going ahead with your question. Over to you, sir.
Yeah.
Yeah. Hi. This is Achal from HSBC. I have couple of questions if I may. First of all, you have discussed your EBITDA margin, but you have not given any guidance or any thoughts around the top line. How do you see the top line growing over the next few years? Including you have given, of course, you have given some bit of expectations in terms of, you know, INR 1,000 crores plus revenue expectation from Sea Rock alone. What sort of revenue targets you are looking at for the next couple of years? Have you built in some part of synergies from Tata Group's aviation business and plus Tata Neu?
You said you're the first one, so have you started discussing all other things like, you know, the aviation revenue coming through your hotel to your hotel in the form of the crew stay and all that sort of thing? That is my first question.
Sure.
Secondly, I also wanted to ask you about. You, Mr. Chhatwal has talked about a lot in terms of. You know, the structure changes the customer behavior. But are we really sure that, these are gonna stay back? Because, you know, many of things are actually reversing. Now how confident are we that some of these will stay and not reverse to back to square one? Thank you.
I'll answer some of it, and then I'll request Puneet to build on it. See, as far as the revenue. See, I think one of the things I began with by saying that as far as revenue is concerned, we are clearly blessed with a number of different levers, actually. One is the traditional, what do you say? Rooms and F&B growth. That is one part of it. Second is the new business growth through things like management fees, Chambers, Ginger, amã and all that. Y ou're absolutely right. These factors which are coming in terms of Tata Neu, airlines, and all will add on, actually. If you take one by one, actually. If I take. We have already guided to what Chambers and management fees can be, actually. Which is significant.
We said INR 400 crores in terms of chambers. Sorry, management fees. INR 150 crores in terms of chambers, we have said. Qmin and amã are already doing good levels of top lines. Amã, Qmin last year did about INR 66 crores of top line, I think with about INR 48 crores of pure commercial top line. Actually, that's steadily growing. Amã is already, its asset-light model is pure fees, actually. Now, if you look at Ginger. Ginger, we already have got last year. We ended the year with about INR 178 crores in the middle of a pandemic, actually. Even as we assume a stable year last year, it would have been, say, INR 220 to 225 crores, and this is likely to grow with the new businesses.
Take this Ginger Santa Cruz itself, one single hotel. What was INR 178 crores for 31 March 2022? One single hotel in Santa Cruz can contribute about INR 100 crores of pure top line, actually. These revenue drivers are nevertheless there. On Tata Neu, our loyalty program pre-pandemic used to contribute about INR 1,000 crores out of an INR 8,000 crore enterprise revenue actually, which is roughly what? About 1/8, 12.5% actually. I think what we have guided here is that this can go up to 30% is what we have said actually. 30% of whatever of the revenues as they are going up actually. All these factors have definitely been kind of baked in as we talk of the ambitions on revenue actually. That is the first question. Your second question was on. Sorry.
Change in the-
Trends.
Change in the-
Trends and reversal in trends.
S-sorry, um-
Trends and reversal in trends.
Yeah, reversal in trends. You want to take that, Puneet? I'm happy to give.
No, I want to first take the one on the lighter note, Achal. If we tell you the revenue, we tell you the margin and tell you the year, then I've told you everything for the next five years. We've fixed the stock price.
That's what we wanted.
Yeah.
That's. I think you people are very experienced to figure out if we are saying that we are looking at a double digit growth, then, and Giri just gave you the number which you have from the past, from 2019, 2020. Now, how much that double digit is, I'm not saying 99%, but it's definitely north of 10%. That is important. I think if it keeps going this way, you will start seeing a trend at the end of Q1 results when we announce those and then further at Q2, because Q3 and Q4 are always stronger than Q1 and Q2. It's just the way business has always worked for us as a company, but also for the Indian subcontinent. Q3 is the strongest. Q4 is the second strongest.
Q1 is number three, and Q2 is number four. This time there might be a bit of change that Q1 and Q2 become very strong because of the pent-up demand, but it's still very difficult to surpass Q3 because it has Christmas, it has New Year, it has Diwali, it has all those wedding nights, you know, the wedding dates. It's very strong. In terms of trends, I would say, your words in God's ears, if some of those get reversed, especially the digital meetings, then we will have fuller halls here and we have a lot of banqueting space. It is getting reversed, I fully agree with you, but some of those new trends that we saw are here to stay because they are a boost to our industry.
You know, people driving on holidays in the amount that they are doing now was not happening before. Even now, when things have opened up, a lot of people are reluctant to fly. Firstly, because the ticket sales, you know, the ticket prices have gone through the roof. If you can drive from Delhi to, let's say, Rishikesh, you don't want to fly to Dehradun and then drive down to Rishikesh. You might as well drive, you make a stop, maybe one night in Haridwar, one in Rishikesh, and then go further up to Mussoorie or. These kind of things were not happening in that magnitude as they're happening now. I think that trend will stay. It will not be reversed.
Sorry, you did not touch upon your cooperation with Tata Group on the aviation side. Have you started discussing something on the aviation, the cooperation with the aviation business?
I think I mentioned in my presentation that our cooperation with AirAsia and Vistara has been in place for some time, including with Air India, was good. We are hoping it moves to very good and all three together move to excellent. Why? Because we are in the same business. We were already supplying a lot of meals to Air India, especially from our Delhi and Mumbai stations. That is one. Hosting cabin crew is another one. You also don't want to displace high-paying business with low-paying crews. It depends in which market, what kind of customers you want, in which hotel. I mean, in Lands End, if you get too much of crew or in Taj Mahal Palace, Colaba, then it's not a right strategy.
In Vivanta in Navi Mumbai, if you get crew, it's a good thing. If in a small amount of crew you have in Taj Santa Cruz or few crews when we opened Ginger in Santa Cruz. That is, of course, that is a collaboration we will be working on. Flight catering meals is something we are working on. Collaborating in other forms of, you know, cross-training, cross-selling, we've started work, but Air India is still very new. Please give it another six months or so. It's a new business. It has to settle down. Vistara and AirAsia, we are in that for the last with Vistara, I think already 4+ years. It's a very strong partnership.
Okay, thank you. Sorry, last one. I promise I'll shut and stop here. You have not mentioned anything on GIC platform. Is it still alive or it's gone? If you could please talk about that. Thanks.
Normally, we would, but we have not mentioned because then everybody asks, "When is the next so first deal happening?" I think what we have done is, as two years was a washout, we've renewed that platform's partnership for the next two years, and we are quite hopeful of getting one or the other deal done this year as the gap between the seller's expectation of a selling price and a buyer's expectation of what he is willing to pay has narrowed down significantly.
Thank you so much.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Hi. Good evening. This is Nihal Jham from Edelweiss. Can I proceed ahead? Sir, couple of questions, and best wishes for achieving the targets ahead. One is that if I look at the kind of cash flows you'll make, plus INR 1,000 crore from non-core that you're targeting, there will be enough cash even left for inorganic opportunities, as you mentioned. There, what is your thought in terms of opportunities that you're looking at? And the second question was that while you've given a margin guidance of 33% for the entire business, I would believe that the standalone Ginger and the international operations are at very different stages in terms of their journey. And if it's possible to bifurcate the individual targets for those also.
I think second one, Nihal, you'll have to take it offline with our office and people.
Sure.
We have those numbers available. Of course, each brand is. Each of these brands is not 120 years old like Taj is. They're in their different stages of life cycle, and they will mature as we move forward. On the other question you had was on. What was that? The first one was on-
Inorganic growth
Inorganic growth. I mean, we have said we want to be industry-leading in portfolio growth. We want to be industry-leading in openings. We want to be industry-leading in signings. If something comes up, it's a part of our strategy. Profitable growth of the portfolio is a core part of our strategy. We will not do anything and everything, and again disrupt our brands. We want to have pure brands in their respective segments, and if something comes in which is a good fit or a good opportunity to even create a new brand, we will look at it, and we'll look at it very seriously. That's what the free cash flows will help us do instead of taking on debt.
Yeah. Just a follow-up. That would mainly be in India or you could look at international opportunities also for that?
No, we are not investing into assets internationally.
Sure.
Our philosophy, as we have communicated consistently for four years, or in the fourth capital market day, we are not investing outside of India as IHCL. If the investment comes from somewhere else and we are managing or doing some form of a sliver participation, not in ownership, but in some form of giving a minimum guarantee or going for an operating lease, we will consider. Internationally, we will, to the extent possible, unless it's a very India-driven market, we will only focus on Taj. We are not going with a Ginger and a Vivanta and whatever else, with a Qmin outside of India. That's India-centric.
Thank you so much.
Deepika, I think you had a question. Yeah. Just a minute.
One second. Let's get the mic to.
Thank you, sir. Sir, two things on the balance sheet front. You clearly mentioned that new CapEx is gonna be ROCE accretive, and of course, you're seeing the Ginger Santa Cruz and a couple of other investments in Gujarat. Why consider a sale and leaseback essentially if all of these are gonna be adding ROCE to balance sheet?
Yeah. No, I think it is just I mean, the way we looked at Ginger Santa Cruz, I mean, we don't have to do sale and leaseback or sale and manage back for everything. I think it's a great opportunity. It's an asset which was, has been there free for us actually, and probably costing, you know, the land value itself could be INR 250 crore actually. We're building a property which is gonna cost us another INR 200 crore. It's one example of smart, what do you say, asset management, where on an existing valuable asset, we're just incrementally spending only INR 200+ crore, and an opportunity to sort of monetize and lease back or manage back. And that money can then be perhaps recycled into something else actually. I think that's what we are thinking actually.
Why not, if I answer in a more provocative way, why not sell 50% of it, which was never monetized? I'm only leasing back 50%.
Yeah.
You create margin both in the OpCo and the PropCo.
Yeah.
Understood. Sir, secondly, on the cycle, you already mentioned that you're trending at, you know, double-digit growth compared to 2019, 2020 levels. In terms of sustainability of that going forward, particularly in the large markets like Bombay, Delhi, Bangalore, where a bulk of your room inventory is.
I remain optimistic about the growth on the like-for-like, and it will be assisted on the not like-for-like. If we keep getting double-digit growth, it is very good. If we get higher double-digit, then it's even better. There is nothing that we know which would seem to suggest us or anybody in the industry that would seem to suggest that it is going to fall below as we stand today. Tomorrow anything can happen. That we don't know. As we speak today, there is nothing that suggests since I think STR did a survey that in India, including in key markets, that curve was exceeded around 14th or 15th of April. By end of March until that day, we had reached 2019, 2020 level, and then it just went up after that.
Of course, assisted by IPL, which just finishes. We don't know what impact the end of IPL will have because it occupied a lot of rooms. It depends who you speak to. When I speak to our people who had taken on IPL teams, they said, "Oh, we should not have taken. You know, we could have sold the rooms much more expensive." When they go away, they might say, "Well, sir, we had IPL before, we could, you know, charge higher." It's just a part of this business. All in all, as they say in Latin, you can say that it is higher, it is healthy, it's very welcome by us, by the industry at large, because we have seen very bad days. We don't even want to go there that it will go down.
We want to only see how much higher it goes.
Yeah.
At least for the moment.
We all look forward to that. Just a last one on Sea Rock, since y'all have given some targets this time around. Any target on the development timeline? Once, since it's not gonna be entirely on balance sheet, what happens to the land value which is on balance sheet once the development gets completed?
No, when you say land value, the land value is fine. In fact, we believe that once all the approvals come in, this is gonna be a very valuable piece of land, actually. What we are working on is to accelerate those actually. As we have always stated, we won't put an incremental investment. Hence, we are open to everything on Sea Rock, which means not just a developer coming in to construct, but even open to somebody taking some of our shareholding as well, actually. It is something the chapter has to unfold. I mean, our intentions. I mean, our intent is very clear. Our work is also clear.
Unfortunately, this is an area where things take time, and I think as Puneet always says, we believe that this is probably a great moment in terms of the rapport that we have with the government here to be able to sort of fast track it as much as we can actually. Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah. Is there any question online? I mean, I'm conscious there are a few questions we have taken here.
We've got Mr. Vikas Ahuja with another question.
Vikas, can we come back to you, Vikas? I think, can we take some questions from the audience, please? Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hi. This is Niket here from Motilal Oswal Mutual Fund. I just had two questions. One is, in the presentation you did highlight about restructuring slash monetization. Just wanted to get your sense on your strategy on monetization of some of your international assets, which has been a bit of a drag, for a long-ish period of time. That would be very helpful.
It's an interesting question. Firstly, I don't know where this information comes from. We don't have any asset to monetize, which has been a drag on us. We only have one asset which has been really loss-making, but it's very iconic. That's in New York. We don't own it. It's a long-term leasehold. The question of monetizing on that never arose. There's another smaller one in San Francisco, which pre-COVID was profitable to the net level. The rest, Lusaka is a management contract. Cape Town, we acquired 100% shareholding. We have paid down 100% of the debt now.
Yeah. No, not yet. It'll happen now.
We are waiting for some RBI approval.
Yeah
It should be done.
Yeah.
Dubai is management contracts. Maldives is a winner of the COVID. It was not a problem. Sri Lanka at the moment is a challenge, but we don't own those assets 100%. We used to own some international assets, like we had Boston, which was unfortunately sold before I think both of us joined. Or committed, the sale was committed before we both joined. Which was the crown jewel. It was not profit making. That's true. We had an asset in Sydney which we sold, which was not profit making, which is also true, but this is long time ago. I always joke, I don't know who has inculcated this very deep thought.
No, my question was on the return. Actually, I was trying to understand there is some drag on P&L from international business.
It's not.
No.
London is highly profitable.
There's some losses in the.
London is highly profitable. How many customers use us because we are in London and New York? If all of the brands coming from India were also in London and New York, I don't think we would get so much attraction. I'm sorry, but every time, every quarter, every capital market day, the same question comes up, and I think we should. Next time, Giri and I, we will put up a slide on all our international business.
Sure.
Partially, we did that. We had that discussion. I will say it openly out here. Partially, this comes up because of the way we are structured, and we show those things which is more accounting and tax driven versus actual operations. There is a challenge on that front. If we were to put all international businesses together, it's not a negative, it's a positive.
Sure. Got it. Thanks.
Pre-COVID and as we speak today. Is that fair?
No, that's right. I think if you're asking, will we monetize? Absolutely. I think he's right in terms of saying the assets which drag are the leased property in New York, which we'll not monetize. If you ask me, will we monetize any of the others? That is something that we have always spoken about as options, actually. At what point of time we will kind of do it is a decision which we'll have to take, actually.
Sure. Any more restructuring which is still left, whatever you've already done in terms of acquisition, you know, acquiring 100% and making a 100% subsidiary, is there anything still left within the entire?
No, St. James Court will continue, I think, because we are 54% now, I think now we will infuse more equity to reduce debt, but by increasing shareholding, and that process will continue. So that's number one. Number two is we have always been transparent in terms of talking about some of our other entities in the group, some of which may be listed in terms of simplification. Their conversations have been going on for a long time. Let's see. I think what we see is hopefully a gradual thawing of positions because I think they have seen the partners in many of these companies IHCL grow. There are debt in some of these companies.
Hopefully, during this period, Ahvaan, we will be able to fold back at least one of them, if not more, more than that. That continues to be our effort. As we have also spoken in the past, internationally, maybe there's always an opportunity in a Dutch holding company to sort of find a partner which can de-risk India, at the same time create some capital for growth, where possible, and even bring back some money into India. I think those options we'll continue to do. I mean, as I always say that we have a long list of things to do actually, and I think we have nothing against whatever you're asking, none of it is off our things to do checklist, actually. I think we continually work on all of these.
Hopefully we will announce it as and when appropriate, whenever we have concrete things to communicate, actually.
Sure. Thanks.
Yeah.
Hi, this is Nishal Parekh from Native Capital. My question is on the growth of the Taj that we have to sign additional 60 to 70 hotels in the next three years. Given that we are in a supply constrained market, and we're not planning to set up our own new hotels to the same degree, how do you see the growth coming from a combination of, you know, is it new properties getting developed or are you seeing conversion of non-branded, non-chained hotels to branded chain hotels? How do you see that split?
A part of the question you answered yourself, so non-branded to branded is definitely one part of it. We have 60 hotels in the pipeline in various stages of development, which will open. If we continue signing on an average 15 to 20 per annum, then we definitely achieve that 300+ with the 3+ years to go. I think that is what we have done in the past. Also with the change in focus, some of these properties that we are talking about, as we said, the quantum of growth that will come from a brand like Ginger is far higher than it would come from Taj. We are not saying that we'll be now signing 60 Taj branded properties. Vivanta, Ginger, there is a lot of need for hotel rooms in India.
You know, the tier three, tier four cities are performing very, very well. Each of those cities, each of the district capital, each of the state capital can have, a Ginger and some of the important capitals can have multiple Gingers. Like in Delhi NCR or in Mumbai, we are in Andheri, Sakinaka, we are in Andheri Mahakali. We are going to open in, Goregaon. We are, you know, building Santa Cruz. You could do maybe 10, 15 Ginger properties in Mumbai without anybody feeling any impact of it. I think as I said, the growth follows a scientific method which has to be artistically executed. The science says by brand, by geography, and by contract type. These are the three things. If you balance all these three, the result will be there.
Got it. And my second question is on management contracts, given 75% of the pipeline is through that, and players, some of the international brands like, you know, Radisson, Marriott are obviously, you know, being leaders in that space, and they arguably maybe command a larger international brand than our. In that, when we go to sign these contracts, what kind of competition do we face from the likes of Marriott and Radisson? Going forward, do we see pressure on the management fee percentage that we are able to charge versus some of these international brands?
First, I will answer it on a lighter note so that we wake up the audience. See, they are not larger. They were larger. We had a chart that who was the largest in number of hotels and number of destinations. That's number one. Number two, you're talking to a person who spent 15 years as Global Head of Radisson Development. So I know exactly what we do, and I've only worked in this industry for 40 years. We don't compromise on fees with our mainstream brand. We are not doing management contracts to the extent we were doing before with Ginger. With Taj, we don't need to because discount on fees, because we are the nation's strongest brand or among the strongest brands, and very, very strong globally. Within India, definitely the brand recall of Taj is the strongest, right?
It is going to stay that way. Now, the game comes between Vivanta and SeleQtions, and we don't have to do everything, but some things all the brands and all the hospitality companies do. That is again not driven by a scientific business model. Sometimes you have a relationship. Now we have tied up with Ambuja Neotia, who are doing six hotels with us. Now, if somebody is doing six hotels, I can't charge them the same fee level as if it is for one. There has to be certain performance clauses. There have to be certain kind of discount because the time in servicing that contract is the same, because it is still that one meeting with the owner. It is that one travel of his to Mumbai or ours to Calcutta. There is some kind of.
You cannot cast it in stone, this is our fee structure, that's what it is. It also depends on which owner, which location, how important it is for you to get the hotel. Now he's doing great for us, a wonderful hotel in Darjeeling, a couple in, or three in Calcutta, one which will open next year in Sikkim. Previously we did all these hotels in a partnership as a promoter in listed entities. The comparison itself is completely changed. It's normal. It's the evolution of the brand, it's the evolution of the company, but it's also the evolution of business models. When we did those partnerships and promotorships, the whole philosophy of management contract did not exist in the country, right? All this is in evolution.
All these great international brands are good because they help us to become a better competitor. They help the industry. We all grow together and there is a space for all, and it's not us versus them versus us. Of course, there will be some form of competition, but as long as it is healthy, it's good for the industry, it's good for you as the consumer, it's good for creation of jobs, it's good for everyone. That's the philosophy we have followed and will continue to follow.
Right. Thank you so much. Best wishes.
Thank you.
Is there any other? Yeah.
Yeah. Good evening. This is Adhidev here from ICICI Securities. Just to mention on the EBITDA margin guidance which you have given of 33% for the longer term. If you look at just our Q3 numbers, we achieved close to 30%, EBITDA margin, and our revenues are still significantly below the pre-COVID levels. What you were alluding, the double-digit sort of growth which we may do this year itself in FY 2023. Don't you think that this number would be achievable in this year itself, considering the cost optimization efforts? Just trying to reconcile the numbers.
We will have a separate party for you if we can.
Yeah.
You know, there is a If there is a pent-up demand, there is a pent-up expenditure, there is a pent-up cost, everything is there. There's a pent-up salary increases. Of course, we would try to do it already this year and change the guidance of our 2025. That would be the most ideal scenario, right? For you, for us. We will all be very rich in this industry. There are things that happen that we don't know today. Something always keeps happening in the world. There is something that, you know, that one or two months in a year that somehow push you back and then you come back up again. Like having a smooth ride, nothing coming, no traffic, no headwind. You're the only one driving. Up till now, it's not happened.
I've never seen that, at least in this business.
Sure, sure. Sir, just second question is on the international business. By when do we see some sort of, let's say, recovery on the revenue or on the EBITDA front over there? What is expected?
Now you contradicted yourself. Just now you said 33 you will achieve. The next question says, "When will you see recovery?
Sir, this is without international business contributing.
Correct.
I'm saying that.
Because in India business we already achieve it.
Yes.
It comes down because these kind of margins, because of a different labor cost structure, are not possible in European or Western context. Therefore, the more it comes back the business, the higher will be our margin. Your first statement will come true that if, you know, South Africa, if, you know, Lusaka, if Sri Lanka all start firing on all cylinders, then of course it will go. As I said, there is always something happening in one part of the world which is beyond any management's reasonable control.
Sure, sir. Yeah. Thank you.
Should we say the last couple of questions?
Yes.
Thank you. Yeah.
Sumant here from Motilal Oswal.
Hi, Sumant.
My question for Sea Rock. We are going to add 700 rooms, and assuming INR 2 crore per room, the CapEx is likely to be INR 1,400 crore. As per our annual report, INR 1,200 to 1,400 crore are land value. Assuming that, are we going to dilute 45% to 50% stake in Sea Rock?
I think, given our commitment not to kind of put incremental capital at this as we speak, I think we are open to, we are saying fundamentally that we'll get a developer to construct actually. While we have not done those calculations, but yes, if it means diluting, I think we will be open to that. Let's see how it goes, actually.
Okay.
Yeah.
The question for the pent-up demand side, we are seeing a pent-up demand in leisure segment, also currently in business segment. Assuming in, see the pent-up demand is not going to be there in FY 2024, so what's your view on the moderation in growth in FY 2024 when the outbound is also there, then you have a, the wedding, the. We have seen a pent-up demand from wedding side, we have seen at delegates, then we have, leisure displays and pent-up demand. What is your view on moderation in the growth in FY 2024?
You wanna answer?
Sumant, I think, if one thing goes away, something else comes in. I think, when you are saying the pent-up in leisure and pent-up in other demand and people starting to travel abroad, if that is going away, then international is also coming back. If we get back that 15%, contribution from the international, it should compensate, and more importantly, our growth, of not like-for-like portfolio should help us sail through should one or the other factor become negative. That's what we have been doing for the last, several quarters.
Okay. Thank you, Sumant. Any last question? Okay.
Hi, this is Karan Khanna from Ambit Capital. Should I take the question?
Yes, please.
Yes.
A bit loud.
Sorry.
Yes. Yes.
My first question was on, you know, you've had Aspiration 2022, and like you mentioned, you've achieved almost 80% of what you were targeting to achieve. Now, with Ahvaan 2025, how are you looking at the gaps that you were not able to plug in the Aspiration 2022 strategy. That's question number one. Second, as you mentioned, the incremental capital deployment and the incremental management bandwidth is going to be more towards newer brands and newer revenues. What kind of a team or internally, how are you working towards building those newer revenues, getting you to that 33% EBITDA margin guidance by FY 2025. That's question number two. Finally, third, we've seen the company over last decade and a half, perhaps the ROCs have still been in single digits.
Any conscious reason why you focus more on margins versus ROC, you know, trying to optimize shareholder returns by optimizing the ROC profile of the company? That's question number three.
Yeah. I think the third one we answered some time back in terms of how we think ROCs will go up. The first one was. Could you just repeat the first one?
First one, what were the gaps in Aspiration 2022?
Sure
That you're trying to plug in?
No, I think we only got sharper because what was Aspiration 2022? It was around growth. We said 15 contracts a year. We already showed that we have done 100 contracts a year. That's number one. Number two, we said margin expansion, which we achieved. I think what really helped us in Aspiration 2022 was that we were ahead of the game because we were already talking of an 8% margin expansion. We were focusing on both revenue and cost levers pre-reset. Reset actually allowed us to get even more sharper in terms of driving not just the revenue levers but also the cost levers actually. I don't think there was any major gaps in terms of the.
What couldn't happen, as we discussed, was could we have acquired assets in terms of distressed assets? I mean, valuations kind of were changing, so therefore we could not do that. I don't think there were any significant
There was one more that we did not achieve 50/50 in a balanced portfolio.
Sure.
We were at like a 46, 54.
Yeah.
If there was a bit more time and we calculated, then that would have happened also. We fell short of the 800 basis points by 0.6. It was, I think, 24.5 or 24.6. Either 24.4 or 24.6 was the EBITDA margin versus 25%.
Yeah.
It was. That's why we said, in humility, we said 80%. More or less, we had achieved what we had set out to achieve.
Okay.
On your return on capital versus EBITDA margin, Giri said that we already answered, but I'll give you one thing which is our key learning from the industry. You have to have higher margin so that when the next crisis comes and you fall, then you have different levers on a fee-based business, on assets that you own, so that the fall is not so steep that you're again getting into that, debt cycle. That's why I think. Also historically, the industry has not done the kind of margins it could have done with the exception of few cities and few assets. I think, also in getting the entire company, the management, the employees, everybody, associates to focus that margins are important is not just a service to the company but also service to the industry.
There was a third question you had which.
Yeah. The second question on, you know, incremental capital and management bandwidth getting deployed, more towards newer brands, so.
We have invested heavily and are continuing to do so. Our head of HR is here, and then once we break, Gaurav Pokhariyal is on that table. He will take you through the kind of skilling that we are doing, the kind of scholarships we have created, sending people abroad. We are starting something new, East-West exchange. You know, people from Dubai coming here, from us going to Dubai. There is a lot of within our own group, we have a lot of opportunities to learn and execute, and this is something we've been doing not in an accelerated fashion like we're doing now. We've increased our spend on learning and development, and all the talent that you see today that was driving Ginger or the new brands like Qmin or amã, they're all homegrown.
Giri and I are the last entrants in the top ExCom of almost five years each. He's five. I'm getting close to five. Everybody else has grown from within the company, so it's a very thorough knowledge, understanding, sense of belonging, loyalty, awareness, value system, everything is there. We are giving chances to people from within first, and if need be, we have recently done in one or the other cases, we've got the number two in this hotel from outside. We got the number one in Taj Dubai from outside. We are looking at some more talent, especially in digital. We got from TCS our head of digital. We sometimes don't even have to go outside the group.
We have just now No. two of Gaurav in HR, who has also come in from Group HR. That means startup Group HR to us as one of the, you know, the top leadership. Under him, there are three in all, and this person is one of them. I think there is a lot of opportunity that the group offers, not just in terms of Tata Digital or some this kind of help in airlines, but it is also talent. There is a lot of talent available within the group that we can tap into. If need be, if we need hoteliers, I can tell you something without knowing, being humble. There are a lot of people who had left us seven years ago, eight years ago, who want to come back.
At lunchtime, Gaurav told me yesterday somebody sent a tweet that it's not fair that people who left Taj are not allowed to come back that easily. I think what he said to me was, and he can show you that tweet, is they should be allowed to rectify their mistakes. I think there is a lot of attraction for us as employers and as a brand. Yes, talent is very important, and the people of the right talent will keep forging ahead, so we are very much aware of it. What also is very satisfying is to help people provide that growth from within the company.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. I think,
There's one last question, maybe that's.
Yeah.
Just one question from my side. Thank you for the opportunity and all the best for our 125. This is Chirag from Catamaran. The question is linked to the growth moderation question just asked earlier. You said that the RevPAR growth is almost double digits of the pre-COVID level. If you were to break down it into segments like business, leisure, like for like for MICE events, it will help us better appreciate where the levers are left for growth and where, you know, it could cap out. Thank you.
Chirag, good question, but we can take that offline one of these days.
Okay.
I think it's very clear that the key winners are leisure, as Somnath also said, is very high. You know, in certain leisure destinations we went to as much as 1.5 times or 1.6 times. They sold like never before. So that's one. Business got back to like 85%. Now in April and May, I always said that in all the calls, all the interviews, the day for us Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru come back to pre-COVID level, we would be like doing very well on the top line. That happened because of the delegations, the government delegations, but also because of the IPL. Now we have to see what happens post IPL as the teams begin to check out.
When it comes to MICE, I don't think it's even close to 80% of what it used to be, but it's beginning to take in. There are destinations like Goa. We opened the Taj Resort and Convention Center. 10 days ago, we had the Tata Group conference there with almost, you know, 400 people, 100 CEOs. It was a very successful event, and it's very difficult to find a place in that property for an event if you want to do. You can make those calls and check yourself. We also need the big events at the Taj Palace in Delhi, at the Leela. As they are coming, it has started, but it has not reached 100% of the pre-COVID. Functions have. Weddings have. You know, those kind of social events have.
They are firing on all cylinders. Meetings are also dependent sometimes in companies on lot of international travel. It's not the right time to judge because even if somebody wanted to do, when they hear that the temperature in Delhi might hit 50 degrees, comes the cancellation. Instead of a booking, you get a cancellation. It has nothing to do with COVID. It's just the heat. Now I hear it's like, you know, people traveling from Delhi to Mumbai or Mumbai to Delhi are delayed because it's raining so heavily. There is a little bit of a turbulence, but it happens every year. It has nothing to do with COVID, but that's the thing. It's not a real good time to judge the MICE in India in the months of May, June, July. It's not a good period.
That you'll have to wait, but the rest I think I gave you already. If you want exact figures, you'll have to check with our team in the office.
Thanks so much.
Thank you.
Thank you, everyone. Thank you, everyone for those who joined virtually. Thank you, everyone who are present in the room. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for your support. Thank you for coming here. Would just like to close like we have done over the last five years. We just say these two words, we promise, we deliver. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you.