Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to RateGain Travel Technologies Q4 and FY 23 earnings conference call. This conference call may contain forward-looking statements about the company, which are based on the beliefs, opinions and expectations of the company as on date of this call. These statements are not the guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touch-tone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Bhanu Chopra, Chairman and Managing Director of RateGain. Thank you. Over to you, sir.
Thank you very much and a very good afternoon to everyone, and thank you very much for joining the earnings call for RateGain Travel Technologies Limited for the fourth quarter and full year ending March 31, 2023. It's great to connect with all of you again, we're excited to share some key highlights from our past quarter and past fiscal year. Joining me on the call are Mr. Tanmaya Das, our CFO, Mr. Divik Anand, our Head for Investor Relations, and Mr. Thomas Joshua, our Company Secretary of RateGain. We announced our fourth quarter results for the fiscal year 2023 earlier today, I hope you've had a chance to go through our financial results, the press release and investor presentation that are available on the stock exchanges and also on our company website. It has been a spectacular year for us on many fronts.
It has been a record year in terms of revenue for the company, with well-rounded, robust growth across all segments. Our revenue for FY 2023 stood at INR 565 crore with a growth of 54%. Margin improvement has been strong, as we reported a 17.6% EBITDA margin in our Q4 and 15% for the full year, well ahead of the guidance given at the time of the IPO of 200-300 basis points expansion from the 8.3% margin we reported last year. We had our best quarter ever in terms of new contract wins and for the year as a whole, with a record 543 customers added over the course of the year.
We completed the acquisition of Adara, our fourth acquisition in the past five years, to build the world's most comprehensive travel and tech and pricing data platform to help the travel industry improve their marketing ROI. I'm happy to report that the initial integration has gone off very smoothly with the Adara team pumped up with another great quarter of new business closings for them. The growth potential associated with Adara seems significant, our low-hanging fruit is to bring back Adara to its pre-COVID glory days of being a $100 million dollar company. Adara's addition has also been a significant milestone and an addition to our leadership team with stellar team members from Silicon Valley with great pedigrees. This has also been a significant event in terms of building leadership and talent capacity at RateGain.
We have a very strong pipeline of INR 381 crores as we move into the next year with a host of conversations underway with our customers as we look to capture the opportunity and deepen relationships with them, with our wide product offering. We continue to invest into the future growth of our business by using AI as the challenges that our customers face continue to evolve rapidly because of both internal and external factors. We continue to work towards our vision of providing revenue maximization opportunities that helps our customers to acquire guests, engage, and retain them, and have a wallet share expansion with them. Building towards this vision, we launched our virtual concierge service this past year, our equivalent of ChatGPT, which is called Engage AI, to help our hotel partners to have an easier communication medium with their guests.
We continue to work on some other significant opportunities which we will be launching later this year under RG DaaS. We are also exploring the use of generative AI to drive operational efficiencies within the organization to help solve for customer queries, extract data more efficiently, and also specifically enhance certain products around brand engagement. We generated 3 times the free cash flows as opposed to the previous year, with the free cash flow for the year being at INR 52 crores. It truly has been a great year for us and I would like to commend and congratulate the entire RateGain team who's been the driving force behind it, and I'm confident in their ability to continue to do so in this current fiscal as well.
This past year is also a validation of the faith shown by our long-standing relationships with industry leaders that continue to trust us as we help them unlock new revenue. We posted another quarter of healthy growth across all three verticals, with strong performance on the margin front, with an operating margin of 17.6% on the back of operating leverage and some cost optimization measure taken to drive healthier performance across business lines have started to bear fruit with early signs of stabilization in those business lines.
Our business lines, DaaS and Distribution, which are also our high margin businesses, continue to witness good traction with good volume growth with existing clients, steady travel demand and continued monetization of new logos added in the past quarter. Our MarTech segment continues to find favor with healthy client additions in the quarter gone by and continued focus of customers on direct guest engagement. On a run rate basis, our annual recurring revenue is now around $100 million, another significant feat as we continue to scale up. While the global technology environment continues to be challenging, RateGain continues to be one of the few global SaaS companies that's growing sustainably and profitably and exceeding the rule of 40 benchmark comfortably. Global travel recovery continues to remain strong. We have also seen healthy booking volumes on our connectivity platform for the summer with the opening of Asia -Pac.
The global travel health by Skift holds steady at 97% with all key geographies improving over 2022. Despite inflationary fears looming, booking trends remain favorable. We continue to maintain a cautiously optimistic outlook that travel growth will continue to remain steady. The business and technology world has been buzzing with the use and implications of generative AI. We believe that we are now entering a new era of technological disruption, which will end up transforming the way consumers and travelers engage with brands and products. The travel industry is getting ready to embrace this newest AI revolution and move away from legacy technology. RateGain, being one of the pioneers of AI and cloud technologies, is emerging as a trusted partner to help our customers leverage AI to transform their existing revenue management distribution and brand engagement to drive better outcomes.
RateGain has been at the forefront of using AI for the last decade and a half, using it for driving operational efficiency in our products and engineering teams, as well as using it to enhance outcomes for our customers. Across our DaaS, Distribution, and MarTech business units, we've been using AI to give actionable insights instantly from millions of rates to automatically recommending demand partners on our connectivity platforms, as well as tracking real-time travel intent from leading brands. These are just a few ways we are driving innovation using AI and are continuing to invest in finding new cases to solve. The key differentiator in travel for the success of generative AI would be the quality of data it has to access for training its model.
RateGain has a huge advantage over peers as we have amassed huge data lake with billions of price points that gives us an advantageous position. RateGain is now using generative AI to solve for multiple use cases. Number one, improve our GDM by utilizing generative AI tools. Number two, optimizing conversion in the traveler journey by generating hyper-personalized content and solving for issues of cart abandonment in cases of incomplete purchase. Number three, using generative AI to act as an automated QA tool for content creation. Number four, provide self-training on different products using the ChatGPT platform. We continue to make collaborative investments in growing our sales team in certain geographies. We've added more sales folks at all geographies, including U.S., Latin America, Middle East, and APAC. These investments will have about six months lag, but should show up in accelerating our sales numbers two quarters down.
From a marketing perspective, we continue to accelerate our digital spend as well as participation at events worldwide. All of this goes towards contributing to the strong pipeline of INR 380 crores in growth potential for our company. With that, I will now briefly touch upon the performance across our three business units, starting with Distribution segment. This division accounted for 34.4% of our total revenue. We've witnessed healthy volumes growth in the past quarter, with demand across OTA and GDS channels, along with growth across the midsize hotel chain segment. Expedia's recognition of RateGain as an elite connectivity partner is a validation of the reliability of services we are providing to our partners as we help them grow their businesses on the Expedia Marketplace.
Our MarTech business continues to grow at a healthy pace, contributing to 37% of our total revenues for FY 2023. We continue to make inroads into the APAC and Middle East region, and our brand engagement business witnessed good traction in the North America region. We've onboarded multiple properties with our comprehensive paid digital media solution. Our end-to-end digital marketing further strengthened by the relevant audiences from Adara really make our value proposition to our hotel partners even more compelling, helping drive higher ROI for them. The DaaS business unit grew at a strong pace on the back of increased volume demand and expansion within our existing enterprise customers. Healthy traction across OTAs, car rentals, and airline segments with new logo additions, including onboarding the world's largest vacation ownership business to help optimize their pricing strategy. DaaS contributed to 28.6% of the revenue for FY 2023.
Our M&A strategy continues to be one of the key pillars of our growth strategy here at RateGain. With the completion of the recent acquisition and integration on track, we continue to focus on building on the pipeline and have various engagements underway as we look to further strengthen our value proposition to our customers. We believe that the current environment is having companies hold out. However, as the increasing interest rates and its pressures catch up, it will create great opportunities for M&A, and we are all geared up to capitalize on such opportunity. On the people front, we saw a healthy improvement in our attrition rate quarter over quarter to 21.3%, and we continue to adopt best practices for an engaging and conducive work environment focused on employee welfare and growth.
We continue to launch various initiatives, including our newly launched LearnGain portal and restarting the Trailblazers Club, which recognizes top performers across the company. All of these with the focus to build a sustainable HR focus on improving employee experience of our diverse workforce and making RateGain the employer of choice. In terms of awards and recognition, we were awarded the SaaS Startup of the Year by SaaSBoomi amongst 10,000 SaaS companies in India. SaaSBoomi, as you know, is an equivalent of Nasscom for SaaS companies. This is a great recognition of RateGain as putting Indian SaaS on global map. This award is equivalent to winning the best movie at Oscars and a validation of the efforts that our teams put in towards building a sustainable SaaS business model. I'd like now to ask our CFO, Mr.
Tanmaya Das, to take you through the performance of Q4 and the fiscal year 2023.
Thank you, Bhanu. A very warm welcome to everyone on this call. I'm proud to report that the company has posted another strong quarter with robust revenue growth and margin expansion, along with a very successful integration of Adara, our newly acquired entity. It really has been a standout year for the company in terms of performance across all key areas, contributing to record revenue with commendable margin improvement. This is a validation of the underlying business fundamentals and the value we continue to drive for our customers and stakeholders. We've witnessed healthy growth across all our three verticals with an improvement across all key metrics contributing to a stellar year is a true reflection of the efforts of the entire team.
It is worthwhile to note that we consolidated Adara financials for two and a half months in this quarter, as the entity was acquired around mid-January in 2023. For the year as a whole, the company reported a revenue of INR 565.1 crore with a year-over-year growth of 54.2%. We had a well-rounded growth from all three verticals, with DaaS growing at 54%, distribution at 37%, and MarTech at 74% for the year. EBITDA grew by 177% to INR 84.6 crore for the year at 15% as against last year 8.34%. Strong operating leverage the company has, as operating costs increased by 43% as against revenue growth of 54%.
The EBITDA achievement is significantly ahead of the guidance given at the start of the year, which was around 12.5%. Worthwhile to note that the 15% EBITDA was after consolidating Adara, the newly acquired entity, and amounts spent on completing the transaction on legal and professional expenses. Our new acquisition, Adara, which was loss-making before the acquisition, registered a 10.35% EBITDA for the quarter due to a successful integration which was completed in a record time in 75 days. Our PAT grew significantly last year to significantly to INR 68.6 crore from INR 8.4 crore, almost 8 times, resulting in similar improvement in EPS, which increased from 0.83 rupees to 6.3 rupees per share.
In terms of headline numbers for Q4, which is historically a strong quarter for us, the company has registered a 70% year-over-year growth and 32% sequential revenue growth with Q4 FY23 revenue at INR 182.9 crore. Our EBITDA stood at INR 32.2 crore, which more than doubled from last year and grew 40% sequentially. Operating margins stood at 17.6% this quarter versus 14.2% in the same quarter last year and improving over the previous quarter as well. Proud to mention that the margin did not dip sequentially despite the integration of Adara and the one-time cost incurred in closure transaction. In terms of PAT, it almost tripled from INR 11.6 crore in Q4 FY22 to INR 33.8 crore in the quarter gone by. Sequentially, it was up from INR 13.2 crore.
We are benefited by one-time positive impact due to creation of a deferred tax asset in our US entities was INR 12.2 crore. In US, due to the higher amortization cost and acquisition, brought forward losses and lower profits till last year, we are not required to create deferred tax as such. This year, as profits are soared up, to comply with accounting standards, we had to recognize the deferred tax asset. Without this one-time positive impact, the PAT should have been INR 21.6 crore for the quarter. The company continues to have strong customer relationships that are helping in building scalable, predictable and sustainable revenue streams. Gross revenue retention and net revenue retention stood at 90.1 and 110.4% respectively for the year.
One of the key metrics that we track is revenue per employee, which saw 68% increase over last year at INR 1.16 crore. This was aided by high revenue per employee from Adara, as well as organic growth without much addition to headcount. Our annual recurring revenue stands at INR 774.3 crore, and pipeline continues strong and stands at INR 381 crore. We continue to have a strong balance sheet, where our net worth saw an increase of 15% as compared to last year and stood at INR 709.7 crore. Our cash and cash equivalent balance for the quarter stood at INR 341.3 crore.
Our cash from operation generated during the year increased 3 times from INR 16.8 crore last year to INR 51.2 crore this year. In terms of guidance for financial year 2024. We expect to grow around 55%-58% and end up around INR 875 crore-INR 890 crore revenue in FY 2024. On the margin front, we expect to see a 200 basis point expansion year-over-year to 17%. Our Q1 is soft quarter, both in terms of revenue and EBITDA, due to seasonality of the business and also the annual pay review impact starts kicking in Q1. Our EBITDA margin in Q1 will be around 13.5% and gradually increase to 20% in Q4, delivering an average 17% EBITDA for the year.
We expect to deliver a PAT of around 12% and EPS around INR 10 per share next year. With that, I would like to conclude my update, and we're happy to open the floor for the questions. Thank you.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. Participants present on the audio bridge who wish to ask a question may press star and one on their touchtone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. Our first question is from the line of Manan Poladia from MKP Securities. Please go ahead.
Hello, sir. Am I audible?
Yes, sir. Please go ahead.
First of all, congratulations on posting a great chat. My first question is, sir, what would be the revenue for RateGain console ex of Adara for the previous quarter, since you said you integrated Adara for two and a half months worth?
Adara.
Is that correct?
Yeah. Adara revenue for two and a half months was around INR 41 crore. ex Adara, we would be registered around.
142.
INR 141 crore. Yeah.
Understood, sir. Sir, you mentioned that Adara was loss-making last year, correct?
Yeah.
Okay. What are we targeting, like, with our turnaround and integration for the next full year, what sort of profit should we target from the Adara acquisition?
Our target is to continue to grow the business what we guided last time around, which is around, you know, 15% growth and 15% EBITDA margin.
Okay, understood, sir. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Karan Uppal from PhillipCapital. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity, and congratulations on a very strong numbers yet again. The first question is on margins. The margin improvement continues to be really strong since last 4 quarters. Could you help me with the organic margins of the business, the core margin ex of Adara? What led to such sharp increase?
The organic margin, you know, if I exclude Adara, we would register around 15.8% without Adara. With Adara it is around 15% because Adara registered around 10.35% EBITDA margin. The reason for expansion in margin, like last year we were around 8.3%, it improved to 15.4%. It's on the count of the high level of operating leverage we have in the business because we have a 75% gross margin business. Majority of this 75% gross margin flows to EBITDA once the revenue organically grows, right? Most of our costs, like headcount, in tech or operations, et cetera, are not directly related to revenue growth. That's why the margin expansion is possible.
Okay. Any outlook you can give segment-wise, DaaS distribution and MarTech, what sort of growth are you looking in FY 2024? Just a bookkeeping question, in terms of the tax rate, what should we assume in terms of the sustainable tax rate for the company?
Okay. Well, on the tax rate, effective tax rate, we are around 16%-17%, which is a good benchmark for Indian global companies, Indian headquartered global companies. I think 17% effective tax rate is a good benchmark. We are around that only, and we expect to be in that range going forward for next couple of years. In terms of growth, you know, guidance, obviously we have got Adara also. From an organic perspective, you know, we expect DaaS to grow around 30% because we are seeing a, you know, great traction in terms of our existing account expanding their volume requirements. We expect distribution to grow around 15%, MarTech to grow around 20%.
With Adara, I think we should be able to expand, grow around 55%-60%, 56% next year.
Okay. In terms of DaaS particularly, in last couple of quarters, we have seen good addition of the airline customers.
We are seeing press releases of Akasa Air India and then some airlines from Middle East as well as, other geographies. What is happening in terms of, overall contribution of airlines in the DaaS segment?
Yeah, I think airlines is a new, relatively new segment for us. We are in this business for last two, three years only. There are around 300 plus airlines who can buy this data solution from us, and we currently have, like, 40-odd airlines in our kitty. There is only one competitor that we're competing with. We are seeing a very good traction in terms of new logo addition in airlines. Like if you see all the Indian logos are added at this point of time. In different geographies also we are continue to add new logos. We are also seeing volume uptake by the large airlines, for an example, Singapore Airlines.
All the account size are also increasing, quarter-over-quarter because if there is more travel, they require more data, right? It's all related. From both new logo addition perspective and, you know, existing account expansion perspective, it looks pretty well. It really grew well this year. We expect similar kind of growth next year as well.
Thank you. Mr. Karan Uppal, may we request that you return to the question queue for follow-up questions, as there are several participants waiting for their turn. Ladies and gentlemen, in order to ensure that the management is able to answer questions from all participants in the conference, please limit your questions to one or two per participant. Should you have a follow-up question, we would request you to rejoin the queue. Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Rohan Nagpal from Helios Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi, thanks for the opportunity. One of the things that came out a couple of weeks ago was that Expedia and Booking turned out record numbers of room nights booked. I think their sequential growth or quarter-on-quarter was about the sequential growth numbers were about 30%. That being said, RateGain distribution numbers seems flattish. It's gone from about INR 54 crores last quarter to about INR 55 crores this quarter. Why is there the disconnect, especially since a decent chunk of the distribution revenue comes from transaction-based contracts? Can you just give some insight into that? Hello? Hello. Am I audible?
Yes, you're audible.
Were you able to hear my question?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I heard your question. Tanmay, do you wanna take that?
Yeah, sure. The booking, you know, in terms of the way our business is organized. Basically, Q3 is our, the biggest quarter for distribution segment because all the planning of the bookings happen in Q3. Q3 and Q4 are more or less similar in terms of historically from a seasonality perspective. Look, Booking.com and Expedia, yeah, I agree, they have, you know, reported record number of bookings. All bookings are not through our systems. You know, we are, you know, limited to certain supply and demand side pairings. From a historical perspective, my Q3 and Q4 are always neck to neck, whereas you will see a lot of growth in from Q1 to Q2 and Q2 to Q3.
That's how the historically it has happened. The other, I think that's it, Bhanu. Do you have anything, any other thoughts?
Yeah. You know, in terms of, you know, the overall growth, I think that a number of bookings that we did in terms of new business happened in Q3 and Q4. Some of the larger deals that we signed on have not really contributed, meaning they're in our order book, but they haven't been monetized. Some of that relies is on our partners' ability to, you know, enable some of those pairings as well. A large monetization of our business will happen really effective Q3 of this year of that order book, that's when we should see a big bump up in revenue as well.
Overall, if you see, the annual growth of distribution business is impressive. It's around 37%. It's little bit cyclical for us when we compare year-over-year. 37% growth is kind of in line with the bigger ones.
Right. I mean, if the bulk, if most of the, if most of the OTA room nights booked in the world go through Expedia and Booking, and they have recorded 30% sequential increases, it's natural to expect at least some of that to flow through, right? Is it just like... I mean, it seems a little odd that these guys are channeling 30% extra, 30% growth in volumes, and you are reflecting almost like 2% growth in distribution revenue sequentially.
That's true. I think Booking and Expedia, if you talk about like, most of the bigger chain, bigger hotels or supply side, they are kind of directly connected to Expedia and Booking. We connect Expedia and Booking to some of the suppliers, which are not that big. Also we connect the supply side to other, you know, OTAs, like Hotwire and, you know, Traveloka, et cetera. Yeah, Booking and Expedia had a great year. Do we have these pairings that we want to connect, to, you know, do the pairings for the supply side and the demand side. Once those pairings are live, then we probably will be more sync with how the OTAs are reporting to the numbers.
there is a still a some way to go to completely relate a OTA growth to our growth.
Tell me this, if you're telling me that Expedia and Booking are directly connected to the enterprise customers, then from where are you unlocking this growth that will get you in sync with those numbers, moving forward? Like, how are you going to demonstrate revenue growth here?
There are a couple of avenues for growth. One is, so our distribution business is, you know, of course, pairings to the big OTAs, but we also do a bunch of, you know, mid-tier and tertiary OTAs that are sort of regional players. With the big enterprises, you know, that's sort of been our green field as new and emerging OTAs. We are, you know, we are sort of first in line to do those kinds of connectivity. A lot of our growth has come from there.
The second area of focus for us has been to expand, you know, sort of horizontally in terms of moving up the value chain in not just connecting these hotel chains to OTAs, but also becoming their, you know, complete distribution system, whether it's connecting to GDSs, that is more of the offline channels on how travel agents book or the direct channel, which is the hotel's website. Part of our efforts has gone into building this, you know, overall portfolio, or holistic platform for distribution where we can, you know, own the entire distribution for some of these mid-market chains. We're seeing some very, very good early signs of traction where we are piloting, you know, this integrated tech stack with some of the big markets.
I do think that it can be a game changer in terms of our distribution business, we will only see, because it's gonna take some time as we're building and getting traction, and we have to solve sort of some of the teething issues as we go. I do expect this to really accelerate in next year. It's not an FY 24 story, but more of an FY 25 and 26 story.
Thank you. Mr. Rohan Nagpal, may we request you to rejoin the question queue for follow-up questions. Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Aditya Jhaveri, individual investor. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi.
Mr. Jhaveri, may we request you to use the answer?
Yeah, I'm using answer. Can you hear now?
There is a disturbance or a static from your line.
Now? Hello.
Yes. Please go ahead with your question. Once you're done with your question, I would request you to mute your line from your side.
Sure, sure. I'm asking on the Adara acquisition. Currently we are doing INR 40 crore of revenue from month of March. Where do you see the potential in the scaling of Adara at the maximum capacity, maybe next year or down the line in 3 years? How big the revenue can be in the Adara and margin profit?
I think I understood the question to be what is the growth prospects and margin profile for Adara. As I indicated earlier on the call and something that we guided last time around also, we are, you know, aiming it's a conservative number of 15% growth and 15% margin. We are only almost like 45 days into the first quarter, and I'm happy to report that, you know, I think we should internally, though we've set those targets, but I'm quite optimistic that, you know, as we learn more and we, you know, unlock newer opportunities that, you know, those numbers could get accelerated. That's what we're guiding the market.
It will be roughly around INR 300 odd crores in the next year or INR 350 odd crores, right, from Adara? On 15% growth.
Yeah. It's basically $27 million, you know, then, you know, as of March 31st. If you do the 15% on $27 million, you know, that's roughly about $31-32 million. Converting it into by 82, it's more like INR 250-260 crores. That's. Yeah. Then a 15% margin on that.
Okay. Okay. The second question is regarding the tech and exciting work you are doing at RateGain. I just wanted to understand what kind of work, and in Adara also, as well as your own team, RateGain. What are the things, like can you share some any details regarding this, the tech work? What are you excited about this next year?
Yeah.
next couple of years? Yeah.
Yeah. In terms of tech investment, you know, I would bucketize them in two categories, right? One is, you know, some of our mature products we continue to invest and, you know, launch newer features in each of our product lines based on what the customer needs are. Then, you know, the second bucket, which always gets me excited, is our RG Labs, which is, you know, all the new product initiatives that we launch. You know, this includes revAI, Demand.AI, Content.AI, Engage AI, and then the integrated tech stack that we are working on that I talked about, our holistic distribution platform. These investments we made, really we sowed the seeds two years ago, we are not, you know, launching anything more new because we already have our hands full.
Our focus is now really on accelerating the go-to market on some of these new products because they're already live, and continuing to accelerate the feature development so that, you know, greenfield opportunities that we are creating in some of the markets, we're able to seize it. As I noted in my comments as well, we have been, you know, we made a good degree of investments in this quarter in hiring sales folks across different geographies. As you can imagine, there's always a lag between making those investments and seeing, you know, some fruit of them. I do imagine 2 quarters down we will begin to see some fruits of these investments that we've made into sales and marketing as well.
Thank you. Mr. Aditya Jhaveri, may we request you to rejoin the question queue for follow-up questions. Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Ashwini Agarwal, individual investor. Please go ahead. Ms. Ashwini Agarwal, your line has been unmuted. Please go ahead.
Hello. Yes. Am I audible?
Yes, you're audible. Please go ahead.
Yes. Firstly, congratulations for a great set of numbers. I just wanted to know of the response of the latest products which we built announced, EngageAI. What kind of customers are showing interest in the product? Are they mostly like bigger hotel chains or hotel chains having hotels in single digits? What kind of hotels are showing interest in the product?
you know, anytime we launch a new product, we are very, very careful about, you know, piloting that product in a certain key market. As of now we are focusing the product largely in Middle East and Asia Pac. We've had a combination of both, you know, independent properties sign up as well as, you know, large international chains that are very, very active in the region, you know, subscribe to one or two hotels, you know, to test out the product. The initial feedback that we have from the hotels is quite encouraging because this product is really to help engage with the guest at the property, but also use it as a channel to cross-sell and up-sell, you know, different things at the property to the guest.
You know, your spa or, you know, your restaurants, et cetera, or room upgrade. What we have seen the, in the initial adoption is that, you know, people are able to get more than like a 10x ROI in terms of just the cross-sell, up-sell that they've been able to do with the platform. We are, however, experiencing challenges in terms of integrating with the local systems that they use at the property. It's, you know, so we're working hard on solving for some of those challenges so that we can, we can scale this product.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Nitin Shah, individual investor. Please go ahead.
Mr. Nitin Shah, your line has been unmuted. Please go ahead with your question.
Am I audible?
Yes, there is a lot of background noise.
Yeah, I hope the question was audible, right? Sorry, I'm little bit of foreign.
Sir, the line is not clear because of the background noise.
The top 10 customers are contributing 67%. Can we reduce this, to-
Hello? Mr. Nitin Shah has left the queue. We'll move on to the next participant. The next question is from the line of Mr. Nilesh Jethani from Bank of India Mutual Fund. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, Bhanu and team. Congrats for the great set of number, and thanks for giving me the opportunity to ask the question. First question was on the Adara itself. It also asked by the previous participant, but I wanted to understand, before acquisition, somewhere a few years back, I believe Adara was doing revenue of around $100 million. Is this understanding right? If it is, wanted to understand, when do you see that number to be recouped? Maybe in a 1, 2, 3, 5-year period. What is the thought process on that?
Yeah. That understanding is absolutely correct. pre-COVID it was $100 million, as I had indicated on previous calls, you know, the company actually could never recover from COVID, and as a result of which, the revenues were subdued. In terms of the platform that is built, it is built and has seen generate, you know, $100 million in revenue. In fact, I see that as the biggest opportunity for RateGain as well and really see it as a low-hanging fruit to bring it back to $100 million. I do see it going back to that number. Your question on how long will it take? Well, our endeavor is to get there as soon as possible. But I wanna set our, set ourselves up for success, and I wanna build the right set of expectations.
You know, I believe whatever indications we are giving you are conservative. As we sort of, you know, get the integration in play, which is, and learn more, you know, we'll be able to accelerate these growth numbers to get back to that $100 million.
Okay. Any number on it, two year, five year, what kind of a period for recouping that $100 million again?
You know, like I said, the endeavor is to get there as soon as possible. But, you know, we still feel like we are learning more and given, you know, the company is running on a very, very disciplined manner. As you are seeing margin expansion happen, you know, we are taking a relook at our numbers and recalibrating investments on a quarter on quarter basis. You know, in fact, the way I look at our business right now is although we have an annual budget that we are heading towards, there isn't really an annual budget for Adara, so to speak, because we are looking to accelerate whenever we see the opportunity and recalibrate investments.
It's, it's hard for me to give you a number, but internally that's the goal that we have set ourselves, that we wanna, you know, recoup to that $100 million as soon as possible. I think over the next two, three quarters, you know, I'd be able to give you a much more meaningful timeline.
Got it. That's really helpful. Second question was on the margin piece. With the broad expectation of INR 250 crore-INR 260 crore kind of a revenue from Adara, in FY 2024 and today, overall business clocking a revenue of.
Hello? Sir, the line for the participant has dropped. May I request the management, we move to the next question.
Okay.
Our next question is from the line of Mr. Rahul Jain from Dolat Capital. Please go ahead.
Hello, can you hear me?
Yes, sir, please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi. First of all, congratulations on strong numbers. Just wanted to clarify, if you share
EBITDA margin outlook for FY 2024. Also if you could break up the revenue of Adara in the distribution and MarTech segment.
Sure. Talking about FY 2024, margin is 17%. Sorry, you said you want margin break up between Adara and ex-Adara?
No, no. The first was related to your outlook, if you have shared for FY 2024 margin?
Yeah.
current expectation.
Yeah. We did 15% this year, consolidated everything. I think we expect to deliver 17%, which is 200 basis point improvement next year.
Sure. secondly, on the Adara breakup into distribution and MarTech for the quarter.
It is actually Adara breakup between DaaS and MarTech. Currently it's a 50/50 breakup, 49/51. 49 to DaaS and 50 onto MarTech.
Right. Yeah, my second question is your MarTech guidance for 2024 is I guess for 20%, which is good, but this looks bit slower compared to the comment that we hear from AdTech media is talking about tripling of budget from travel players. Any thoughts on what you're witnessing in your conversation with clients? Or is it like some part of your portfolio within MarTech is not seeing that kind of a momentum post you acquiring that?
In MarTech, you know, we have got two segment. One is brand engagement and brand monitoring, and the other is paid digital media. The paid digital media side, we are seeing a bit good traction both in our MHS solution as well as Adara. That, you know, from paid digital media solution, we'll be expecting around 30% growth. But from a, from brand engagement and monitoring, as we have been, you know, indicating to the market that, you know, we have experienced some, you know, discounts and waivers that we had given during COVID, and those contracts were not profitable. There is voluntary churn of some accounts that is happening.
For that aspect, we'll see a subdued growth in that area, which will lower the growth percentage in MarTech.
Right.
From a paid digital media perspective, I think the traction is pretty good.
Right. Right. Any mix that we have for FY 2024 for these two sub-segments?
Mix in the sense... I think the paid digital media is much bigger, larger, than the brand engagement and monitoring. I think paid digital media will be around INR 140 crore, whereas, you know, brand engagement and monitoring will be around INR 60 odd crore. I think we're expecting a 30% growth there and the brand engagement more flattish.
Right. Thanks for the color. Just last bit from my side. Any update on the RevMax platform? How we are seeing where we are on the tech side, where we are looking from a go-to-market side? Any updates on that?
Yeah, Rahul. We, as I mentioned, we have launched. The first release of the platform is already out in the market. We've got 2 beta customers. You know, the traction is, you know, quite good. What excites me also is the fact that how we have moved our distribution platform to being this full RevMax platform. The ticket size has gone up quite substantially, you know, almost 3x. It gives me the confidence that as we sign more customers, you know, the deal sizes will be significantly higher. It's work in progress. It's, you know...
Something that I mentioned earlier as well, I think this year is gonna be a lot about learning on both go-to-market as well as how do we productify and iron out any of the teething issues that we have on the product. Real substantial scale and meaningful movement of the needle would, you know, really happen in FY 2025/2026.
Right. Thanks for the color. Just last bit, if I could ask on this, the LLM or generative AI side. You said, we have this concierge thing that we have started, a virtual concierge. What is the initial acceptance in the market, and what kind of overall monetization we could see around our initiatives on this generative AI side?
Yeah. That's the Engage AI product, Rahul. As I was mentioning, to the other participant as well, it's initial days. We just launched it in Middle East. We have a few clients. In terms of monetization capabilities, it's a hybrid model. There is a minimum fee of, depending on the size of the hotel, anywhere between
$3,000-$5,000. Also because it's a channel to cross-sell and up-sell, there is a revenue share for whatever additional ancillary revenue we bring to the hotel. I would say that the potential is at each unit, this can be, you know, anywhere between, you know, $5,000-$20,000, depending on the size of the hotel. It's early days. I do have to submit that a lot of the investments we made into building new products, and this endeavor started in the heights of COVID, I think I underestimated the challenge and how long it will really take for these products to fructify and really have an impact on revenues.
As you can see, given the data acquisition and a great year that we've had, our revenue base has also increased quite, you know, significantly. We are now over a $100 million company. For any of these new products to really, for me to talk about, and, you know, for it to create meaningful impact, they need to be generating tens of millions of dollars. I have to say that, you know, some of these investments will take time, but I am confident that these can be, you know, multi-baggers for us. But these investments will take time. The focus now is also to really accelerate on these new products that we are building, so we are no longer launching any more products.
The focus is to, you know, accelerate the investment and developments of these products so that they can create a meaningful impact to our overall revenue.
Sure. Sure. Thanks for the color and best of luck for the year.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Pratyush Agarwal from Vitol. Please go ahead.
Hey, hi, Bhanu Chopra. Good evening.
Yes.
Yeah, congrats, Bhanu, on a good set of numbers. I have 1 question sort of related to Sabre, especially on the booking side and some of the traction that we've seen overall. How much this year has it been a function of, you know, some of these international tests, even Sabre, you know, not executing well, having problems with debt and so on? I mean, what is our revenue overlap, and have we seen traction because of this particular reason in our growth and bookings?
Yeah. It's a great point. You're absolutely right. They were actually announced, cutting almost 15% of their staff, and they're having very, very large issues on execution, especially when it comes to distribution. Our RevMax platform will enable us to capitalize on this window of opportunity that's been created. However, our product, as I mentioned, is still quite new, but this is a $few hundred million opportunity, and Sabre is one of the current incumbents that is struggling, not innovating. Although we've launched the product, like I said earlier, it will take us, you know, some time before we can really capitalize on this opportunity. All efforts are, you know, because these windows where others are struggling, you know, don't necessarily last forever.
We are, you know, doing everything that we can to capitalize on this opportunity. I don't see any, you know, currently any meaningful impact that is yielding because they're suffering.
You know, other than the fact that, you know, we have a bunch of resumes that are flowing to us, given the company is in trouble.
Sure. That's helpful. Finally on the DHISCO piece, right? On the distribution part. Within DHISCO, from what I understand, there's OTA, GDS content, and let's say others. Within that, have all these individual segments, rebounded to their above their pre-COVID sort of levels, or is there still a rebound left in any of these segments within DHISCO?
Yeah. I would say for the most part it has come back. If your question is, you know, are more transactions, you know, that the kind of volume growth that we saw coming out of COVID because of the revenge travel, I feel like that's sort of now normalized. I still feel that the demand is quite robust and strong and we will, you know, continue to see acceleration, and it's largely because of the change of people's attitudes and behavior towards travel and having experiences. A bunch of consumer surveys that have been run, they continue to suggest that, you know, people will not buy cars and clothes, but will not sacrifice any more on having these experiences, which entails travel. That's very, very reflective on our numbers.
Do I, you know, foresee that we will just organically grow because of the growth in volume. No, it will not be as significant as we saw it in the last year or two coming out of COVID. I do see that, you know, the growth may not be through volume growth as much, but I do see a lot of new customer wins and pairings that we have, you know, like I was saying earlier, that we already have in our order book that we are monetizing, and some of these are very, very large pairings that will have a significant impact on our revenues on the upside in Q3 and Q4 of this year.
Just sort of a follow-up on what you mentioned, right? Within DHISCO, has the mix of DHISCO content gone up? Is that a reason for margin increase, right? Compared to the GDS part, the content would be significantly higher margin and higher fee, right? In that sense. Is that a contributor here?
Our content revenue is... In fact, pretty much everything in enterprise connectivity, which, you know, earlier was referred to as DHISCO, is seeing great expansion on margins because as Tanmay also pointed out, you know, this is the beauty of the SaaS model. Once you do the connectivity and it generates more volumes, and given the high margin profile that we have, everything sort of flows on to the EBITDA. I mean, just to give you another reference point, most of our mature products actually generate north of 30% margin. Why we, you know, still show 15% is all these investments that we are making into new products, because we don't capitalize them, we expense them. I...
as we continue to scale, I just see that margin profile continuing to expand. Given our growth aspirations, we take some of that and reinvest into the business by, you know, looking ahead and launching additional products. Even for distribution, you know, to get, like, a huge kick, we, you know, have focused on this holistic distribution platforms that I refer to as the RevMax platform. That can be a game changer for us because the opportunity is a few $100 million there.
Thank you. We move to the next question. Our next question is from the line of Rohan Nagpal from Helios Capital India. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for the follow-up. You said your Adara revenues split roughly evenly. That means organic revenue, or organic revenue for your MarTech business was on the order of 45 crores, which is a sequential decline. Could you just comment on that? Are there a lot of headwinds in brand management or, like, what exactly is going on over there?
I'll let Tanmay respond to part of the question. I'll respond to part of the question. I didn't follow the numbers that you mentioned, but, you know, the way to think about our MarTech business is really twofold. Even Adara falls into this, these two buckets that I'm gonna talk about. One is sort of brand engagement and monitoring, and the other is really performance marketing, right? Helping our customers maximize the ROI on the digital spends that they do. The brand engagement and monitoring, which is more sort of people and service oriented, you know, we are actually struggling there, given, you know, given coming out of COVID, we had discounted and given the fiscal discipline that we have, that we had to churn out some of those customers because it wasn't profitable.
We're still figuring out, you know, how to sort of move forward with that business and prioritize it such that we can scale. That's the part of the business that, you know, not growing. The performance marketing, which is the paid digital media solution, you know, that is experiencing very, very healthy growth. Even in the coming year, we're targeting, you know, pre-Adara, we are targeting 30%, but on the Adara side we are targeting 15% growth.
Thank you. Due to time constraint, that was the last question of our question and answer session. I would now hand the conference over to Mr. Bhanu Chopra for closing comments.
Thank you everyone for participating on the call today and giving us your time. We had a very stellar year. I'm very confident going into the next year, given all the investments that we are making into sales and marketing, the innovative product line that we have lined up, and, you know, the team that we've added through Adara. It is a great combination to continue to see a stellar result in the upcoming fiscal as well. Thank you.
Thank you. On behalf of RateGain Travel Technologies, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.