Good evening, everyone. I'm Snighter Albuquerque from Adfactors IR, investor relations. On behalf of TBO Tek Limited, I would like to welcome you all to the Earnings Conference Call of Q3 and nine-month FY2025. Today on this call, we have with us from the senior management, Mr. Ankush Nijhawan, Co-founder and Joint Managing Director, Mr. Gaurav Bhatnagar, Co-founder and Joint Managing Director, Mr. Vikas Jain, Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Anil Berera, President of Strategy, and Mr. Rajiv Kumar, Head of Investor Relations. We begin the call with a brief opening remarks from the senior management, followed by a Q&A session. Please note all participants' lines are in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask a question after the presentation concludes. Please note that certain statements made during this call may be forward-looking in nature.
Such forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results of projections to differ materially from those statements. TBO Tek will not be in any way responsible for any actions taken based on such statements and undertakes no obligation to publicly update these forward-looking statements. I would now like to hand over the call to Mr. Gaurav Bhatnagar for his opening remarks. Thank you, and over to you, Gaurav.
Thank you, Snighter, and welcome everyone to our Q3 earnings call. Before I kick off on the numbers, a quick reminder on our business. So TBO is among the top four global travel distribution platforms. Our vision is to be the largest travel distribution platform in the world. We aggregate offline travel demand on one side, offline demand driven through travel agencies, tour operators, independent travel advisors, travel management companies, so on and so forth on one side. And we aggregate travel supply on the other side, supply being hotels, airlines, car rentals, transfers, cruises, etc. And we make money on every transaction on the platform. The business is very global with over 185,000 registered buyers across more than 150 countries.
We operate at a global scale with more than 55 currencies supported on the platform, more than 20+ payment options across the world, including alternate payment modes enabled on the platform. The platform operates in 16 languages. Coming to our numbers for this quarter, we continue to look at our business metrics, starting with the North Star metric of monthly transacting buyers. The thesis of the business is that our GTV will typically grow faster than the number of transacting buyers on the platform, and we expect revenue, gross profit, and EBITDA to grow faster than GTV on the same lines, so now, if you were to look at the numbers for Q3, and I have the nine-month numbers as well on the slide, there is a 9% increase in the monthly transacting buyers compared to the same period last year.
This has led to a 26% increase in GTV, leading to a GTV of INR 7,166 crores. This led to a 29% increase in revenue and a 34% increase in gross profit, leading to an overall increase of 26% in Adjusted EBITDA, ending at INR 75 crores for this quarter. The numbers look largely similar for the nine months as well. So this, in fact, we have accelerated growth on certain parameters in this quarter, as you will see that active agents growth is faster in this quarter, and GTV growth is faster in this quarter compared to full year. But full year numbers are trending at the same pace, and we are trending towards a 25% increase in Adjusted EBITDA. So what is really driving the growth in the business is the growth in hotels and ancillaries segment overall.
You would see that for this quarter, the year-on-year growth is very impressive, 48%. Both India and the international operations are growing at a fast clip. Leading contribution this quarter has been from Europe, which has grown 90% year-on-year. This, of course, has contribution of Jumbonline, which is an acquisition we completed last December. But even if I was to take the Jumbonline contribution out, it would still be a 60%-plus growth on the organic business in Europe. And just as a reminder, when we talk of business from a source market, it is where the business is originating from. So it is not a destination, but this is demand originating from Europe. Similarly, LatAm has seen a very impressive 34% year-on-year growth. Middle East, on a very large basis, has grown 31% year-on-year.
APAC and North America are new markets for us and growing at a fast clip. We have been making significant investments in the adoption of AI into our business processes, and I'll talk a little bit about it through the course of this presentation, but I'm very happy to report that overall, we are seeing very impressive gains in productivity and user engagement wherever the early trials on some of these AI bots have concluded, and finally, we are fast-tracking, given the growth that we've seen in the first nine months of the year and as we plan for next year, we are fast-tracking our planned investment and geographic expansion, and I'll talk a little bit about it in subsequent slides. Looking at the KPIs, our active agent base has grown by 10% compared to the same period last year.
This is largely driven by a 24% increase in the active agent base outside of India in the international business. Our active booker base continues to grow at a faster clip than active agent base, which is always a positive sign because it shows user engagement. The difference between bookers and agents is that agency is one travel agency working with us. If there are multiple bookers within that travel agency working with us, that counts as multiple active bookers from the same travel agency. So if active bookers grow at a faster clip than active agents, it generally means that there is more engagement in the travel agency and we're probably gaining valuable share. GTV grew by 26%. 52% growth in GTV outside of India, largely driven by the hotel segment. And finally, revenue has grown by 29% at an enterprise level.
There was a request in the last earnings call that we should provide more color on the source of growth of the international business. So we split it out by source markets. And once again, a reminder, when we look at these numbers, this is origination of demand, not destination. So you would see Europe contributes 33% of our hotels and ancillary GTV, and it is by far our largest source market now. This has grown 90% on a year-on-year basis in this quarter. Middle East and Africa is the second largest market at 27%. GTV contribution has grown by a very impressive 31% on a large base. India is 13% of our hotels and ancillaries contribution, growing at 18%. And then Latin America is 10% of overall GTV contribution, growing at 34%.
Just to highlight on Latin America, this growth is especially impressive given the currency headwinds that Latin American markets have faced in Q3 since the U.S. elections. Just going deeper into the hotels and ancillary segment, so now the numbers on the screen are only for the hotels and ancillary business. So overall, our monthly transacting buyers is growing at a faster clip in the hotel segment as compared to the overall enterprise by 13%, which is again 28% growth in the international markets. We've added over 2,000 new active travel agents on the platform compared to the same period last year outside of India. Overall, hotels GTV has grown by a very impressive 48%. Similar revenue is growing at a more or less similar clip, and gross profit has grown a little bit faster to grow by 52% compared to the same period last year.
So what is driving this growth? So I want to take a couple of minutes just to explain how we are thinking of the business and where we invest to drive growth. So there are three pillars to the business. The first one is the platform itself. We run a state-of-the-art B2B distribution platform well geared to service both small, mid-sized retail travel agencies as well as large enterprise customers. We continue to make significant investments in just improving the quality of the platform, the ease of use on the platform, the conversion on the platform. A lot of interaction and engagement on the platform is very data-driven. So we have what we internally call a customer 360 view, which is our internal warehouse, which houses a lot of decision-making on what offers, coupons, marketing is personalized to what travel agents basis this 360 view.
Finally, AI and automation has become a new theme for us, and I'll talk about some of the initiatives, but it is very clear that this will have quite a material impact on our business going forward. The second pillar of business is diversifying the lines of revenue. Hotels and air are our core businesses. We have started to make investments in other lines of businesses as well, which are admittedly quite small today, but we should likely grow at a faster pace in the overall business to become meaningfully important for us. Also, these are required for the completeness of the platform because if we want travel agents to largely depend on us for fulfilling outbound complex itineraries, then access to high-quality attractions, car rentals, rail cruise, etc., is extremely important. The third bit is our playbook for geographic expansion.
We've been doing significant work on setting the base for growth for next year, which includes setting up legal entities in different parts of the world, investing in hiring local talent and local leadership, setting up local payment options, and also making sure that we support all the languages that are relevant in the market that we're expanding into, so on the hotels platform, two new initiatives I want to talk about. The first one is, and we talked, if you may remember, we talked about a new hotels platform called H-Next, so that rollout continues at a very, and the outcomes are quite positive right now. One of the new features that we're launching on H-Next in the next couple of weeks is an AI-enabled smart search. The idea here is that as a travel agent, often I get queries which are slightly high-level in nature, right?
So a customer would approach a travel agent and say, "Look, I want to go to Dubai, but I want to stay near the beach, a kid-friendly hotel, but I also want a pool villa inside the hotel." Now, these kinds of queries are very hard to solve for today, even on B2C platforms, because the data is not structured that way. It requires a lot of filtering, a lot of research before you can narrow down. So we are enabling this AI-powered smart search on the system, wherein you can see it on the screenshot on the left, where a travel agent can just copy-paste a query that they received from a customer, or they can type in the query in basically conversational English. And the system uses AI to shortlist the hotels and pricing for those hotels, based on the query that was made.
On each of the recommendations that we make, we also mention why we are recommending the property that we are recommending, and we believe this is quite useful for a travel agent because these are the kind of complex queries a travel agent often needs to deal with, and their ability to turn around faster on these queries with more high-quality results will help them improve their own conversion, and in return, it will help us improve our conversion as well, so that's one big initiative on hotels. The other initiative is we are launching a new program called TBO Platinum. The idea here is that we are doing some exclusive/semi-exclusive tie-ups with a curated set of luxury hotels. As we have talked in the past, our sweet spot is premium outbound traveler, so somebody is traveling overseas and going to spend a significant amount of money on that travel.
So typically, at least a four or a five-star hotel. So we are working with a handpicked set of luxury hotels, bringing them into our TBO Platinum umbrella. What the hotels have to commit to is some exclusives that they will provide to our travel agents. So these exclusives could be in the form of a guaranteed room upgrade or a guaranteed early check-in or a meal upgrade. So you book a room only, but you get a breakfast included, or you book a breakfast, but you get a second meal included, or an airport transfer may be included. So the hotels are going to offer something exclusive for TBO travel agents to offer to their customers. And there's some incremental commission that they will pay us for it.
In return, we will give them very, very high-quality enhanced visibility on the platform, increased marketing on the platform to drive traffic and bookings for these Platinum hotels. It's a brand new initiative, just a few days into its launch, but we do believe it will allow us to create very meaningful engagement with key hotels, and it will also allow our travel agents to get access to something exclusive that they can offer to their customers, especially on the luxury segment, so we've been working the last two quarters on various experiments to see how we can adopt all the advancements in AI into our business, so two projects that have gone live now. The first one is that we've implemented a voice bot, which is mirroring some of our outbound calling processes, specifically where we have to call the hotels.
Right now, it is live for about 16% of our workflow. The initial results are very promising. So the voice bot has similar or slightly better quality of outcome in comparison to a human caller. But it is 5x faster. So if on average, we are taking 5 hours to close a ticket with a human caller, it takes only 1 hour to close a ticket. So it's 5x faster. And it operates at 50% of the cost. So this rollout will cover roughly 50% of the workflow very soon. What this will do for us is, one, it improves the quality of customer service because our turnaround time is reduced. It also starts to free up our resources for more high-quality customer service. Right? So these initiatives are largely going to lead to higher NPS and quality of customer experience.
Hopefully, it will also mean that going forward, as the business grows next year, our cost structures grow at a slower pace, especially on the operations. The other bot that we've gone live with is a bot which reads supplier emails and classifies them into actionable and non-actionable emails. So currently, we get several thousand emails every day from various suppliers on the bookings that have already happened in the platform. And there is a manual process where we have to go through these emails and decide what action needs to be taken. Now, this bot is able to, with a very amazing accuracy, with 99.5% accuracy, this bot is able to close 45% of those notifications automatically. So it's a huge reduction in workload for our operations teams with what this bot is already achieving.
The roadmap for this bot is to eventually be able to action some of the emails as well, to become a little bit more agentic as well, but so far, very promising results on both the bots that we have launched. Finally, we also launched NPS on the international business via an external tool. The overall NPS stood at 70 in December of 2024, which we believe is a very industry-leading score, which is also a reflection of the low churn on the platform. Though even though the NPS score is already very high, it is creating very meaningful insights for us on how we can improve our customer experience going forward. Talking a little bit more on the sightseeing experiences business, this is a relatively new business for us and only starting to get attention and investment recently.
We believe this is very important because, again, the outbound premium traveler who is booking through a travel agent is often very driven by experiences. So providing a large variety of high-quality experiences on the platform is very important for us to make sure a travel agent is able to fulfill the needs of their traveler. So in the past quarter, we have completely revamped our sightseeing and experiences portal. We have made it more visually appealing. We have updated the quality of content on the platform, the quality of imagery, the quality of offerings that we have on the platform. Several new tie-ups have happened with other suppliers who will be providing us these experiences.
We expect four new suppliers to go live in the next few weeks on the platform, which will significantly increase the depth and quality of offerings that will be available for sightseeing and experiences. The Umrah portal has also seen significant, meaningful traction in the last few weeks. Just a quick reminder, Umrah is the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina during about 11 months of the year, so minus the Hajj period. It's a very large opportunity. The stated goal of the Saudi government is to get to 30 million inbound tourists into Saudi by 2030, and Umrah is going to be a significant portion. Why we have created a separate experience for Umrah is because of two, three reasons. Umrah is a complicated itinerary because there is always going to be an element of not just a hotel, but a local transfer.
So people usually land in Jeddah, then go to Mecca, and then go to Medina. And often, people need some kind of assistance also in terms of local guides. So we have created an Umrah-first experience with very high-quality, again, very high-quality imagery. The hotel booking engine is geared towards solving for the fact that I am going for a pilgrimage. So the filters change. It goes to distance from Haram and things like that. The hotels are, again, the quality of content on the hotels is very handpicked, curated by us. The ranking of the hotels is decided by us. And this is backed by 24/7 365 support in various languages which are relevant for this segment.
So what we've seen is that the number of the attachment of multiple products on the same booking, so for the same travel agent, so for the same passenger booking a hotel and a transfer, for example, the attached data on this portal is significantly higher, though on a very small base, to be fair, right now. But overall, we see this as a very high-potential project for us because I don't think any other B2B or a B2C player is actually offering a unique dedicated offering like this for this segment. Finally, a note on our geographic expansion. So the playbook for the company is quite clear on how to expand into new countries and new geographies. During this year, we've expanded our sales presence in 15 new countries and 40 new cities within those countries.
Australia and New Zealand, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, Romania are some of the highlights. Three new legal entities have been incorporated in the last quarter in Indonesia, Greece, and Israel, again, setting the base for significant ramp-up in these source markets. Footprint expansion is happening in these new territories as we speak and will continue to accelerate through Q4 and into the next year. One significant integration we did on payments is a new integration called Tazapay. They provide us a bouquet of alternate payment modes across the world, especially in developing markets like Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Mexico, Colombia. Again, the objective is that, and that's how the playbook operates, is to be truly local to the market that we are operating in. And we see, especially in the developing markets, alternate payment methods are quite relevant and quite prevalent.
We continue to invest in these integrations to make sure that we are able to provide travel agents every possible way to collect from their customers. Before I hand over to Ankush to talk about in detail on the India business, I just want to take a minute to highlight a few things on seasonality in Q4. Just a reminder, Ramadan is going to be in March this year. All of March is essentially Ramadan. Ramadan is traditionally a low season for the business because businesses essentially are closed in the Middle East, Indonesia, and in many of our key markets. As we talked about it in, I think, Q2 as well, the month of Ramadan has an impact on the overall numbers for a quarter. But it will get more than made up for in Q1 because Q1 will have Eid and all the holidays.
So just wanted to make sure that we are aware of this, that because Ramadan is going to fall in Q4, we will have some impact on the growth rate that we have seen in Q3 vis-à-vis Q4. With that, I'll hand over to Ankush.
Thank you, Gaurav. So I'll just talk a little more about the India business. So a total GTV for India market came in at INR 32,000, growing nearly at 5% year- on- year. This was led by strong performance in hotels and ancillary segment, which grew at 18% YOY to reach INR 559 crores. Similarly, segments' gross profit demonstrated an equally healthy growth of 16% YOY and came in at INR 13 crores. We are committed to build on this growth and further solidify our market share. Towards this, we launched a Platinum Desk program for our top hotels and ancillaries account, which is basically our travel agents.
This exclusive program, focusing on top cohorts of the buyers, is expected to drive our share of wallet with them through personalized service and focused cross-selling of hotels and sightseeing and other ancillaries. Early responses to our Platinum Desk are very, very encouraging. With focused efforts in platform-driven interventions that will drive cross-selling and agents stickiness and focused expansion in sales, we are confident in delivering continued growth in the Indian market. We are also enthused by multiple initiatives announced by the Union Budget 2025, like the increase in TCS threshold to 10 lakhs from 7 lakhs, with Noida and Mumbai airports kicking off very soon, 120 new airports connectivity in the pipeline under the UDAN scheme as per Budget 2025. India outbound story should continue to grow at an accelerated pace.
With this, I would like to hand over to Vikas to speak about the financial performance of the company. Over to you, Vikas.
Yeah, thanks, Ankush. Good evening and very warm welcome to everyone on this call. Thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to share our financial results for Q3 and for the first nine months of FY 2025. For the quarter ended 31st December 2024, at an enterprise level, we saw a good growth in key performance metrics. Our monthly transacting buyer base expanded by 9.2%, driving a 26.2% year-on-year increase in GTV. Our revenue from operations reached INR 422.2 crore, up 29.2% year-over-year. Our enterprise take rate improved from 5.76% to 5.89% year-on-year. Breaking this down further, the air business take rate dropped from 3.03% to 2.57%, primarily due to performance-linked incentive actualization since last year's same quarter.
At YTD level, take rate is in line with last year at 2.6%. Hotels and ancillary services take rate saw a decline from 7.99% to 7.84%, primarily due to change in supplier and customer mix during the quarter. Gross profit as a percentage of GTV for the quarter improved from 3.89% to 4.14% on year-on-year basis. This enhancement was largely driven by an increased share of hotels and ancillary services within our GTV, which rose from 51% to 60% year-over-year. On the profitability front, adjusted EBITDA reached ₹75 crore, representing a 26.1% year-over-year increase, while profit after tax came in at ₹50 crore, showing a marginal drop of 1.6% over the previous year, largely due to ₹12.48 crore forex loss triggered by sharp movement in USD against other major currencies. For the quarter, our adjusted EBITDA margin stood at 17.77% and PAT margin at 11.84%.
Turning to our performance for nine months for FY 25, cumulative GTV for nine months grew at 21.1% year-over-year, driven by consistent growth in our buyer base by 7.5%. Our revenue from operations totaled INR 1,291.3 crore, making a growth of 26% compared to the nine months of the last year. For the first nine months of the year, adjusted EBITDA reached INR 249.7 crore, up 24.5% year-over-year, and PAT totaled at INR 171 crore, reflecting a 10.9% increase. Our adjusted margin for nine months stood at 19.34% and PAT margin at 13.24%. Additionally, it is important to note that the income tax is now applicable to our wholly-owned subsidiary in UAE from the beginning of the financial year, and thus the nine-month effective tax rate is approximately 16.07%. Our balance sheet remains robust with a net worth of INR 1,115.5 crore as at 31st December 2024.
Notably, our working capital continues to remain negative. Our cash and bank balances are also strong, standing at ₹1,335.5 crore as at 31st December 2024. Thank you, everyone. And with this, I will hand over the call back to Snighter.
Thanks, Vikas. We will now begin the Q&A session. Participants are requested to raise their hand, virtual hand to ask a question. Post which, we will unmute you, request you to introduce yourself and the firm you represent before going ahead with your question. We will wait for a moment till the Q&A queue assembles. We have a first question from Manish Adukia. Manish, please introduce yourself and the firm that you represent, and go ahead with your question.
Thank you. Hi, this is Manish Adukia from Goldman Sachs. Thank you so much for taking my question, and thank you for the presentation.
I really appreciate you disclosing that hotel breakdown by region. Quite helpful. I have a couple of questions. The first one is just the incredible growth you've seen across most of your major international markets. Most of the markets are growing at 30% plus with Europe, you said, 60%. One, I mean, just trying to understand, and you explained, Gaurav, the drivers for this growth, where maybe penetration is still low and you're still adding customer base. But just trying to understand the runway for this growth in your view, is this 30% plus growth sustainable for the foreseeable future in your view, or will the base, as it becomes larger, impact this growth? And in that same context, optically, the India growth of 18% for outbound hotels looks a bit low or counterintuitive that India is actually growing slower than your global markets.
Is that because the penetration of MTBs already is quite high in India, and that's why the growth there is lower? Just if you can help us explain those dynamics, that'll be great. That's my first question.
Thanks, Manish. So Manish, look, the Q3 has especially let me talk about Europe first. One thing to note in Europe compared to Q3 last year is that because of the start of the Israel war, there was a slight depression in Europe last year, which is why the growth looks abnormally high. But irrespective, I will admit, I think the growth is very strong, especially in a market like Europe, which fundamentally is a slow-growing market. So as we've always talked, Manish, our belief is that the TAM is very large, and the runway for growth, the headroom for growth is also very large. We are growing in three different ways.
One is just pure new market expansion. I talked of when you go to 40 new cities, now within those cities, you have absolutely no base today, right? Our playbook is very strong, and our conviction is that amongst all the platforms that are available to our travel agent, we remain the best possible platform. So once we localize ourselves, so we have local account management in place, we have local payments in place, and we have local language support, we do see that we see very good traction happen. So when you open those 15 new countries or 40 new cities, so that is just like landing in new markets. The second bit is expanding our base in existing countries. Like you're seeing very good growth in Latin America. Now, we've been around in Latin America for a long time.
But again, Brazil, for example, is a very large country. So just to have complete market coverage would require you to have more sales presence within the market. The third bit is, which somewhat shows up in the fact that bookers per travel agent are increasing. The third bit is that the engagement with the platform is increasing, and we are actively working on building out capabilities for cross-sell and upsell as well. So the third bit, and which is something that we believe will start to get relevant in maturing markets like the Middle East. So that's the broad view. My view remains that on the international business, we do feel confident that even though the basis is increasing at a rapid pace, we should be able to demonstrate similar growth. And there is seasonality. It's a bit. Seasonality is what it is in our business.
It is very cyclical, and it doesn't happen at the same time every year, so you will see a little bit of troughs and highs come in. But on the whole, we do believe we should be able to sustain this level of growth for the foreseeable future. I'll pass on to Ankush for the India business.
Manish, just to add to the India growth, we grew actually from 9% in Q2; we actually grew at 18% in Q3. This shows that what we had planned; it's going in the right direction to see a double growth in Q3 versus Q2. If you see the headroom for growth in active agents in India, we are still 3%. Yes, we have a very large active base, which is very high.
But keeping that in mind, the market still remains beyond the whole outbound story which all of us read in the press. I don't think I need to spend time on this. But the fact is this outbound story and the addition of new routes and airlifts being added will only help our story. So 9% to 18% in India, I think, is a very significant growth from Q2 to Q3.
Thank you. Thanks, Ankush and Gaurav. My follow-on question on that is, again, just specific on the India non-hotel business, which, of course, I mean, we've turned it around from a GTV perspective. But again, from a steady-state standpoint, is that like a single-digit growth business, just the airline business or the outbound airline business from India? Or do you think that business also has room to accelerate into double digits?
And the second follow-on question was just this addition of international markets, Gaurav, which you talked about. And I think you've added 15 countries just this year alone. Now, from a margin standpoint, how should we think about the impact of that? I mean, the Adjusted EBITDA margin, obviously, this time around is down quarter on quarter and also YOY. Is this likely to be like the bottom of margins, or as you expand into new countries and invest in salesforce, maybe in the short term, you could see a little bit of further margin headwind before they start bottoming out? Thank you.
Yeah, Manish, I think on the margins, so look, growth comes at a cost. And the cost is investment into sales, product, tech that we continue to do.
We do believe that because the business should be orders of magnitude larger than what it is in the future, right? I'm not saying in what foreseeable future. In the future, we continue to invest quite heavily. So while the business is generating a lot more cash, it is getting reinvested back. On an ROI perspective, a lot of those investments have quick turnaround on just the payback. But they do bring the EBITDA margin down. So one way we are looking at it internally is that are we delivering healthy EBITDA growth, right? Dollar to dollar or a year-on-year basis. So for example, this year, we're tending to more 25% increase in EBITDA compared to last year.
The aspiration is that if we are able to continue to invest in the business, continue to be into our geographic expansion, continue to invest in technology, and still maintain this 25% EBITDA growth every year, we are happy with that. Right now, this may not translate into operating leverage per se because the operating leverage is getting invested back. At least the management view is that it's a very happy compromise to be able to grow high digit, continue to invest in the business while continue to increasingly generate more cash. That's the way we are looking at it.
Manish, on the question was regarding the India air business, that it has started growing in a single digit and will it continue? Was that the question per se?
Yeah, the question was specifically on the India air business.
Directionally, let's say steady-state medium term, how should we think about the growth outlook for that business?
Okay, so if you see, basically, this quarter, we have grown in a single digit. But if you see the last two quarters, we were kind of having negative growth. So we are trying to move towards making a balance between the growth and the gross profit margin. So even managing our gross profit margin in the range of 1.2%-1.3%, we are able to now grow at least in the single-digit growth. And we are working towards that direction that we are able to manage such kind of growth with such kind of GP numbers. But yes, we will keep on reviewing our strategy on an ongoing basis for the air business.
Got it. Thank you. Just last quick question, again, maybe Gaurav directed towards you.
Of course, the expansion into international market continues at a fairly rapid clip. I mean, can you contextualize for us? I mean, the expansion in the last 12 months that you've done, has that been faster compared to, let's say, your pre-IPO history? And the reason I'm asking is in terms of, let's say, your ability to manage multiple markets and sub-markets, at what point do you think maybe you get to a place that maybe you're growing too far or expanding too far? How do you strike that balance that, oh, you're not doing too much and making sure that wherever you are, you're adequately focusing on those before you expand into new markets? That's my last question. Thank you.
Yeah, so Manish, the good news in our business is that the playbook is very homogeneous.
So whether we open a new market in Latin America or we open a new market in Asia-Pacific, the playbook changes very marginally. And that is something that we spend years kind of perfecting that if we need to open in any part of the world today, we know what are the three or four things that need to happen. We know where the hiring is going to come from. We know what we need to do for payments and APMs. We know what languages to support. And there's a bit of a flywheel effect over here because most of the languages now, when we cover 16 languages, most of the languages are covered. So any new Spanish-speaking country we go in, we already support Spanish as a language. Any new Arabic-speaking country we go into, we already support Arabic as a language.
We go to Portuguese as a language, French as a language. So our sense is it gets easier. We must keep in mind that while there is this large sales team on the ground and the go-to market is very sales-led, ultimately, it is a platform business. The transaction happens on the platform. The travel agent, once onboarded, largely interacts with the platform, which is why the efficiency of a salesperson grows very rapidly. And from a management perspective, creating a clean sales structure is not very hard, and which is largely in place, right? So as you know, our regional leadership is pretty much in place. Their country managers are pretty much in place.
So when we expand, if a country manager needs to hire a few more salespeople on the ground, from a management bandwidth perspective, it is very, very isolated to the country where that hiring is happening. But not much changes in terms of taking up the management bandwidth of senior leadership or any significant investment that needs to happen on the tech platform to customize it.
Thanks, Gaurav, Ankush, and Vikas. We'll move to the next participant. Mr. Karan Uppal, please introduce yourself, the company you represent, and go ahead with your question. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity.
This is Karan Uppal from PhillipCapital. The first question is on the organic growth. So I can see that the GTV has grown by 28% on a YOY basis, and revenue growth is around 29%. So you can help me with the organic growth in these two categories.
Vikas.
Organic growth in terms of the GTV, without including the Jumbo numbers, basically, we have grown overall at around 20% year-on-year in this quarter.
And I think, Vikas, the hotels standalone is 35%. Without Jumbo.
Standalone is 36%. 36%.
36% organic in the hotel business. That's correct. Hotel business, yes. Okay. Second question is on margins. So the margins have dropped on a sequential basis as well as on a YOY basis. Now, if I look at some of the cost items, so other expenses have been quite sticky. It's not moving in tandem with the GTV. So what is leading to this elevated other expenses, and what's the outlook there on the overall margin?
So if you see, when you're seeing margin as a percentage of revenue, there might be a slight decline coming in because of the revenue overgrowth as compared to the GTV.
But if we see adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of GTV, we have maintained a similar kind of margins at 1.05% this quarter versus last quarter, same year. Yes, however, while our GP has increased, but as Gaurav had mentioned, we will keep on investing in the future for the future growth. So that's the investment that we have made. But as a percentage of GTV, we are trying and keeping the similar kind of margins that we earn as a percentage of GTV for the adjusted EBITDA margins.
So going ahead directionally, if you can provide some sense, EBITDA margins at this point, reported margins are at 16% versus, let's say, 18% last year. So directionally, how should we think about the margins?
So at a YTD level, if you look, that we are trending towards 19%+ EBITDA margin.
So that's what we are targeting towards maintaining in the future as well.
Okay. Thanks. Thanks for the clarification. The third question is on the take rates. So Gaurav, the take rates in the hotel business have been improving. This is the third consecutive quarter of take rate improvement, especially in the hotel business. So is it because the Jumbo's take rate have improved post our acquisition that is leading to improvement in the overall take rate? And what's the sense? How should we think about it from a go-forward basis?
So Karan, actually, Jumbo being more of an enterprise business is slightly dilutive to the overall take rate. Largely, while we've seen a slight, the take rates have been inching up in the last three quarters, largely, it's a function of mix.
So for example, our retail business happens at a slightly higher take rate compared to our enterprise business. So if in a quarter, the retail business grows faster than the enterprise business, then the take rates improve. If the international hotel business grows faster than the India hotel business because that operates at a higher take rate, then the take rates improve a little bit. Our view remains that they'll remain fairly range-bound, right? I think we've been guiding around between 7.2% - 7.6%. Because right now, the company is not really focused on improving the take rate. We do want to maintain them because that is an important metric. So we don't want to buy business by reducing take rates. But we are also not focused on increasing take rates at this point in time because, again, the focus is on top-line growth.
So as long as we can deliver profitable top-line growth without meaningfully having to increase take rates, that's better for us, right? Just like we've said this in the past, we are a platform business. So everything that we keep as a take rate is taking away from the travel agents from their own commissions. So we try and maintain a certain range within which we operate with our take rates without any specific effort to significantly improve them in the short to medium term.
Okay. Okay. And last bit is on the impact from Ramadan. If you can quantify the impact for Q4. Yeah. Thanks.
Karan, hard to quantify it because, one, it is just hard to quantify given that there are many factors that come into play. But just from a year-on-year perspective, Q4, you will see two changes happen.
One, Q4 will have full impact of Jumbo nline in the business. Jumbo nline is a mature business, so it will definitely not grow at the same pace as our organic business. So that is one, and second is, Ramadan will mean that the Middle East business will see a little bit of slowdown towards the end of February and then for most of March for 20 days of March. Very hard for me to say what it translates into actual growth rate, but it will have some impact, which the converse to it is that because last year, Ramadan was in Q1. So when you see Q1 on Q1 numbers, then we will have a tailwind over there because last year, Q1 numbers were depressed because of Ramadan.
Thanks, Gaurav. Thanks, Karan. We go on to the next participant. The next participant is Swapnil Potdukhe.
Please introduce yourself and the company you represent and go ahead with your question. Swapnil.
Hi. Thanks for the opportunity and congratulations on a good set of numbers. This is Swapnil from JM Financial. So a couple of questions. First, starting with the previous participant's question and dwelling a bit more on the mix between the retail business and enterprise business today. And if you could just give a sense of where we are in terms of that mix and any trajectory that we have seen. I mean, have we been significantly increasing our retail business of late because of the expansion that we have done in your countries? Any sense of that?
So Swapnil, if I include the Jumbonline business as well, then the enterprise business is slightly larger in terms of GTV compared to the retail business.
The thing with enterprise business is that it's slightly lumpy in nature because when you sign up a customer, often these are large customers, right? So they may take a long time to get started with you. But once they start, then they suddenly bring very meaningful business growth. But in the long run, the company is quite clear that the value proposition and the differentiation from all the other B2B players is on the retail side. And all the investment is going into building in the retail business. So yes, going forward, right, if I had to look at the mix over the next 12-18 months, it should swing back to more of a half and half. Today, I would say with Jumbonline, it's probably skewing slightly more towards the enterprise business.
But in the medium term, the retail business should grow faster than the enterprise business.
Okay. Fair enough. The second question is on your forex losses that you have mentioned. Now, I would like to understand the nature of these losses. Is this operational loss or this is related to the cash which might be sitting in some of our subsidiaries, foreign subsidiaries?
So this is primarily, so Swapnil, there is a time gap between a booking is made and either we receive payment in the local currencies or we make payment to the suppliers in the local currencies. But due to this sharp movement in USD versus currencies like GBP, Euro, BRL, and others after the post-U.S. election results, this has caused us a big impact on the forex losses that we have in our books. So that is the key reason, basically.
Okay.
And the other question is with respect to your tax rate. Now, there was a mention of Dubai being getting some tax increase recently. But that didn't reflect in your Q3 numbers, it seems. I mean, your tax rate has, in fact, come off on a sequential basis if I were to look at it from that perspective.
So yeah, yeah. A good question. So one, Dubai tax is effective 1st of April, 2024. This is baked in our nine-month number. But in this quarter, per se, in one of our subsidiaries, there were some losses wherein we were able to take benefit of the offset exercise. So that has helped to reduce our overall effective tax rate for the quarter.
But if you ask me for the full year, it should be ranging in the range of around 16.5%-17% on the overall effective tax rate for the full year.
Got it. And just one last question on some of the countries where we have already been present. And Gaurav did highlight about expanding the base in existing countries itself. So apart from Brazil, is there any other opportunities that we have been working on and we see significantly large market, which is untapped despite the fact that we have been present in those geographies?
Yeah, definitely, Swapnil. I think even though Europe already looks large on the numbers, we have been making quite significant inroads in the southern European markets like Italy, Spain. We are still very small over there, especially on the retail business, but that is where some serious investment is going through.
Investment is happening in markets like Australia as well. We continue to expand our sales presence in Indonesia. So just on the whole, Swapnil, the way we are structured, every region is looking at their own market expansion. And it happens at a fairly micro level because, like I talked, the cost of setting up a new market, or especially in an established market, opening a new market or a new city, is fairly low for us, right? Operationally, the cost is almost zero except for probably people on the ground. And hence, it continues to happen fairly democratically across the globe, right? So I don't want to pick up. We are not banking on one or two countries to deliver very large growth next year for the enterprise needed to move.
Okay. And just the last question, any updates on possible M&As that you will be working on?
I mean, earlier, we were considering something in North America. So any movement on that side? Thank you.
Swapnil, we continue to explore opportunities. And like we have said in the past, we are very cautious in committing to something. So all I can say at this point is we are exploring across the globe in multiple geographies, but nothing at this point in time which looks close to coming to fruition in the next few weeks or months. So no further comments on that.
Thanks, Swapnil. We move to the next participant. Anirudh Agarwal, please introduce yourself, the company you represent, and go ahead with your question.
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity and congratulations on the strong performance. I had a few questions. So Gaurav first on the 36% organic growth. If I just try to back calculate the Jumbo numbers, it seems that Jumbo has very strong seasonality.
I mean, absolute jumbo GTV seems to be meaningfully lower versus what we've been doing in the past couple of quarters. So just wanted your take on that and in terms of the like-to-like jumbo growth rate that we would have experienced in this quarter.
So Anirudh, the like-to-like is not possible in this quarter because the integration of the business was acquired only on 18th of December, 18th of December last year. So we will have slightly more like-to-like numbers in the coming quarter. Jumbo business does have a strong seasonality because of the nature of the business. So that business largely services the tour operators and the leisure market from northern Western Europe traveling to southern Europe, largely Spain, Portugal, the Mediterranean coast. And hence, the summer is when most of the check-ins will happen, right? So July, August is where most of the check-ins happened.
But the nature of booking windows in these markets is very different from the rest of the world. They book well in advance. So January-February-March is where you will start to see bookings happen for July and August. And hence, you will see a spurt in bookings in January-February, leading to check-ins in July and August. We are expecting Jumbo to deliver on the business case we have created for it in terms of EBITDA and growth. I will reiterate that it is a very mature business. The business has been around for almost 50 years. It's a very mature business in a mature market. So the real uptake in the business is going to happen. The use case we have created is the cross-sell that happens between the Jumbo inventory selling on TBO and TBO inventory selling on Jumbonline.
So some of the growth will actually start to appear in the TBO business because when Jumbonline buys from TBO, it has a top-line growth in TBO as well. So we will absolutely not expect Jumbonline to deliver similar kind of growth rates. Like this 30%, 36%, 37% growth rates is absolutely not possible, not factored in, and not budgeted for. But having said that, on a standalone basis, it's a meaningful portion of our business, and it meaningfully improves our overall value proposition, supply value proposition in Europe.
Got it. Second question, Gaurav, was on the use of AI across operations that you mentioned. So this is one part that could help us with some margin expansion while understood that we are investing incremental margin or profitability into growth initiatives across the globe.
But is there some part on the operations and admin side that we can see which helps with near-term profitability or that will also go into growth at least in the near term?
See, the overall view of the company is that the AI-led initiatives are largely to improve customer experience and stickiness on the platform. From a cost perspective, and I don't have the exact numbers, but operations is probably 5%-6% of our revenue as cost, right? So it will not have a huge impact on our EBITDA margins if we were to shave off some cost, and we're not planning to shave off cost because really the objective is to free up resources to focus on high-quality customer service where actual human interaction is required.
Yes, what should happen is that the pace at which our operations cost grows with our top line, that should slow down, right? So if operations are growing by X%, if GTV is growing by X%, the cost of operation should not grow at X%. It should grow at some X minus 5%. That should definitely happen. I think in the medium term, you will see some margin expansion on account of this. I do agree with it. But because it is not 20%-30% of our cost, right? It's like 5% of our cost. So it is not going to be a very huge improvement in margin on account of reducing this cost.
Understood. Thanks. Final question from my side in terms of just profitability of the business.
So while reported margins may continue to look more in the similar range in terms of the mature geographies, if you could share a ballpark in terms of how would profitability be looking in markets, let's say like the Middle East, wherein we're large, mature, and been there for a period of time?
So Anirudh, one, it is hard to bifurcate profitability in this manner because the supply is common. And just from an accounting perspective, it is not possible to derive true accounting profitability by source market just because of the nature of how revenue is counted. Having said that, one indicator we look at is what we call regional contribution, which is generally speaking, and it's a loose metric, but we're looking at after taking out all the cost in a region, what is the net contribution, cash contribution of that region to the business.
That number as a percentage of GTV continues to improve in mature markets, like Middle East would be one example. Every year, as a percentage of GTV, that number continues to improve. One, we are not kind of disclosing what those numbers look like. And second, it is also very hard for us to create and share a number with you which will tee up with the accounting numbers just because of the nature of how revenue is getting counted. But yes, we are definitely seeing. If you wanted to, if your question was, are we seeing operating leverage at least in a mature region? Absolutely, yes.
Got it. Got it. Fair enough. Thanks a lot and all the best.
Thanks, Anirudh. Before we go to the next participant, may I request anyone who has a question, may please raise your virtual hand?
We would go ahead and unmute you to ask your question. The next question is from Raghav Malik. Raghav, please go ahead, introduce yourself and the company you represent, and ask your question.
Yeah, hi. This is Raghav from Jefferies. I just had two questions. So the first one is a follow-up to the previous participant's question on the Forex impact. So I mean, I had asked this before in terms of any permanent sort of hedges that we may have, and I don't think we do. But is there some sort of natural hedge that we have in terms of your business to mitigate some of currency headwinds as they may play out? Yeah, that's the first question. Which is higher as far as I know.
We prefer to employ the combination of both the natural hedge as well as the forwards being taken for the currency where the net level being expanded, and this is particularly so while, yes, the natural hedge helped us to mitigate our losses, but in terms of the forwards that we have been taking, we have been taking purchase call basis. This is the kind of currency that we are dealing in and the kind of volatility we were having, so in some markets, we were taking forwards and in some we are not, but after the sudden movement that we have seen in USD versus other currency, the kind of revamping our hedging strategy, as well as we are also increasing the frequency of review of our foreign exchange exposure so that we are able to mitigate our losses.
We are also exploring some tech solutions which can help us out in doing a micro hedging kind of thing.
Okay. Got it. And secondly, more of a strategic question. While I know we're prioritizing our growth of GTV over margins currently and not asking for a timeline by any means, but in terms of the strategy for the longer term, when we see that we expect margins and EBITDA and profitability to grow faster than GTV, do we mean more like when we are in a mature sort of situation with GTV kind of normalizing to say high single or double digits, and that's when margins will start to play out better? Or how do we see this more from a strategic point of view, say five, 10 years or no timeline foreseeable, just strategically?
Yeah, I think, Raghav, it is fair to say that margins should expand quite significantly when we stop reinvesting or reinvesting some of those margins into top-line growth. Again, we can't share timelines on it because as long as we see runway for growth, because the company's aspiration is very clear, we want to be the largest travel distribution platform. So as long as we see runway for growth, the company will continue to invest in that top-line growth. It is very important because a lot of initiatives which will actually drive incremental margin to the bottom line, for example, cross-sell, ancillary sales, sightseeing, car rentals, all of these are dependent on having a large active customer base buying air and hotels from you because these attachments only happen on these core products, and those products have much higher gross margins as well.
So from a strategy perspective, our view is we are building a platform. So more nodes on the platform, more active nodes on the platform is the number one thing that we are focused on today. What we are happy about is that we are able to do it profitably by reinvesting some of the profits and the cash we generate through the year. So in the short term, absolutely, the margin expansion might be quite muted. But in the long run, in a steady state, we absolutely expect it to be a much higher EBITDA margin business from where it is today.
Okay. Got it. Thank you, Gaurav.
Thanks, Raghav. Anyone who has a question, you can please raise your hand. We'll unmute you, and you can go ahead and ask your question. Yes. The next one is Sarthak Awasthi.
Sarthak, please go ahead, introduce yourself and the company you represent, and ask your question.
So yeah, hi. So this is Sarthak from Sanlam Equity Asset Management Fund. So my question is on that hotel industry as a sector is very cyclical. So I just wanted to understand the long-term perspective that in a previous down cycle of the hotel industry, how did we tackle at that time the market scenario? And suppose if there is an oversupply in the hotel industry, then how are we going to tackle that time market scenario, sir?
So Sarthak, so one, because our focus is on the outbound premium traveler, that segment is slightly more immune to cyclical factors like inflation or other geopolitical factors. So I think there is some resilience in the business because of the fact that we are not focused on a budget traveler.
We focus on a more frequent, slightly more mature, high-spending traveler. Your other comment on oversupply, see, oversupply usually works in our favor because when there is oversupply, hotels very heavily lean on platforms like us to offload inventory, right? In fact, the reverse happens when the supply is very tight and demand is far outpacing supply. That is where the intermediaries have a challenge creating incremental value for the hotels. So hotels' oversupply does not really bother us much because that actually allows us to create more value for the hotels by driving meaningful volumes for them. And on cyclical look, yes, travel business per se is influenced by geopolitical factors. We've seen many of those come in. And for example, the Israeli-Palestinian war is as recent as last year. There was a slight dip in the business because of that.
Prior to that, the Ukraine-Russia war, because we have meaningful business in Eastern Europe and in Ukraine as well, also had an impact on the business, but again, a slight dip. So how we look at it is that because we are building a global business, no one country, no one geography, or no one region is overwhelming the revenue mix. And secondly, by focusing on the premium outbound traveler, we are a little bit resilient to factors like inflation or cost of living and things like that.
Yes, and that's answered my question. So my second question is on that we are focusing on luxury hotel segment. So we will be having our take rates on a higher end on that part?
So Sarthak, we may receive better commissions from hotels.
The question always comes on this is that how much are you keeping for yourself and how much are you going to pass on to your travel agents? So we continue to maintain a view over here that it's in the interest of the business and the travel agents on the platform that if we pass on the majority of that benefit to the travel agents right now. So we are not expecting, while yes, that program is very important for us, luxury hotels are important for us, it will probably create more income for us from the hotels. But we are not expecting it to increase our take rates because a lot of that benefit we will likely pass on to our travel agent partners.
Okay. So sir, just one more question if I may.
So recently in Channel checks, I came to know that there's a lot of increase in the competition in the domestic front. So how we are going to tackle that part means travel agent has a lot of options of the platforms.
So Sarthak, are you talking about the air business or the hotel business?
I'm talking about the hotel business.
So Sarthak, for us, our focus still remains is the outbound story, and that's our key focus for India outbound and for people traveling overseas. From a domestic hotel point of view, our business is relatively small, right? So I don't think that kind of bothers us. But yes, we are focusing on organized chains, the typical five-star structured chains, which we will continue to get the supply on our side. But we're not into that business of selling two-stars, three-stars, etc.
So our stories remain outbound, and that is the plan going forward.
Thank you, sir. Thank you. That answers my question. Thank you.
Thank you, Sarthak. That was the last question for today. Since there are no further questions, if you would like to end the call, I would like to hand it over to Gaurav for his closing remarks.
No, thank you, Snighter. Thank you, everyone, for attending this call and for all the insightful questions. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Gaurav. Thank you, Ankush and the management.
Thank you, Snighter. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you, everyone. In case of any queries, please reach out to us. And we will now end the call.