Good evening, everyone. I'm Snighter Albuquerque from Adfactors IR. On behalf of the company, I would like to welcome you all to the earnings conference call for Q1 FY 2025. Today, on this call, we have with us from the 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, and Mr. Anil Berera, President Strategy. We will begin the call with brief opening remarks from the management, followed by a Q&A session. 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 or 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 like to now hand over the call to Gaurav Bhatnagar for his opening remarks. Thank you, and over to you, Gaurav.
Thank you, Snighter. Good evening, everyone. We are pleased to share our results for Q1 FY 2025. We had a very good quarter, with all KPIs showing healthy growth. Our active agent base grew to 35,194 travel agents at an enterprise level. Our GTV was up by 14%, while revenue grew by 21% compared to Q1 of FY 2024. The company delivered a net profit of INR 61 crores compared to INR 47 crores for the same period last year. Before delving into the results further, I'll take just a few minutes to quickly recap our business model. TBO operates in the global outbound travel space.
We aggregate outbound travel demand via travel agents, tour operators, OTAs across the world by providing them an online platform, which allows them to book global travel supply, including airlines, hotels, transfers, rail, and other products seamlessly. Our platform solves for discovery, trust, payments, and service for both the buyers and travel suppliers globally. Our travel agent base is spread across more than 100 countries. Our platform supports almost a dozen languages. We transact in more than 50 currencies, and we have a commercial teams based in more than 47 countries. The global travel and tourism industry is growing, is about $1.9 trillion in 2023 and expected to grow at a CAGR of 8.2%, reaching $2.6 trillion by 2027.
The key highlights for this quarter was the increasing share of our higher margin non-air business. We continue to grow our hotels business at a faster pace compared to our air business. The share of non-airline business grew from 46% in Q1 of FY 2024 to 57% in Q1 of FY 2025. This was primarily driven by increasing share of hotels GTV of both our international and India businesses. To remind everyone once more, our international business caters to travel agents based outside of India, though they may be booking destinations anywhere in the world. The strong growth in our international business was driven by robust growth across all regions, led by high double-digit growth in APAC and Europe source markets. The cumulative number of transacting buyers in the quarter reached more than 12,000 for the first time.
Our average monthly transacting buyers grew to 9,449, which is 24% growth over the same period last year. For the organic business, without including Jumbo Online, growth was 20%. Interestingly, the number of bookers within these travel agencies using the platform grew faster at 22%, indicating strong engagement with our travel agent platform. The number of bookings per booker also increased to more than 37 bookings in a quarter, compared to 34.6 bookings in Q1 of last year. This is strong evidence of increasing loyalty to the platform. Over the past year, we have made several platform enhancements to improve our booking experience. This resulted in improvement in our hotel look-to-book ratios. In Q1, for the international business, our look-to-book ratios stood at 8.72%, compared to 8.07% a year ago.
We showed robust GTV growth across all international source markets. Overall, GTV grew by 47% compared to Q1 of FY 2024. Part of this growth can be attributed to the acquisition of Jumbo Online, which has now started to contribute meaningfully to both top line and revenue of the business. We saw strong organic growth as well, with GTV growing by 17%, excluding the GTV contribution of Jumbo Online. There were two major holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha in Q1, which typically lead to slowdown in sales, especially in the Middle East market. Otherwise, we would have seen even stronger growth. We expect to see stronger organic growth in the international business in Q2 of FY 2025 compared to Q2 FY 2024. I'd like to share some color on the Jumbo Online business.
Jumbo Online, based in Palma, Spain, aggregates hotel inventory across the Mediterranean coast and sells to tour operators and travel agencies across Europe. The business generated a GTV of INR 814 crore and a revenue of INR 32 crores. Our integration efforts to realize synergies with Jumbo Online are progressing well. A part of TBO's inventory is now available on the Jumbo Online platform and vice versa. We expect to complete a significant part of the integration before the end of this financial year. Finally, I'm very pleased to share that Mr. Gerardo Del Rio has joined as the President for our International Business based in Dubai. With over 20 years of experience in global management, finance, and business development across hospitality, travel, and consulting sectors, he'll be responsible for driving the overall P&L for our international business.
I'll now hand over to Ankush to shed some light on the India business.
Thank you, Gaurav. Thank you everyone for joining us today. We are excited to share with you an in-depth, promising trajectory of the aviation industry, particularly in relation to the expanding outbound travel market from India.
We are on brink of significant growth in the aviation sector and is demonstrated by large aircraft ordered by the Indian Airlines. This momentum is driven by a combination of factors that are reshaping global travel trends. Central to this growth is the growing outbound travel market from India, which is set to become a major force in global tourism. India's outbound travel market is on a remarkable growth trajectory. Outbound airline sales from India are projected to reach $19.6 billion by 2027. Initially, the number of outbound air passengers is expected to soar 42 million by 2027, reflecting a compounding annual growth of approximately 6% from 2023. The increase in overall travel spending is equally noteworthy, with figures reaching $17 billion in FY 2024, an impressive 24.5% increase from the previous year.
This growth is not only substantial, but also aligns with the OECD view of India's outbound travel as a key driver for global tourism. Several demographic and economic factors are fueling this growth. Rising incomes, younger generation, more adventurous population are driving increased spending on travels. The urban lifestyle is also a significant factor, with more people from urban areas opting for international travels. Furthermore, enhanced air connectivity, the digital revolution and visa liberalization are making it more accessible and convenient. We are also witnessing the growth of new travel segments, luxury travel, study abroad programs, adventure tourism, cruise vacations, sports tourism, MICE, destination wedding, and musical tourism are all gaining popularity. Each of these segments represent a unique opportunity and reflects the diverse interests of Indian travelers.
Looking ahead, India's strong GDP growth of 6% annually will drive a projected 9% annual increase in travel spending. Airlines are responding to the surging demand by expanding their network and increasing flight frequencies. Flexible payment options, such as EMI, are democratizing international travel, making it accessible to a broader range of consumers. Additionally, the rising aspiration in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities present a vast, uncharted market. Finally, the fact that a significant portion of the Indian population still doesn't have passports represents a substantial growth opportunity for the outbound travel industry. The outlook for the aviation industry, driven by the growing outbound travel market from India, is incredibly promising. With the continued infrastructure development, increasing connectivity, and a growing diverse travel base, India is to become a central player in the global travel market. This dynamic environment presents exciting opportunities for growth and innovation.
Now, let's talk about an update of our performance of Q1 FY 2025 for the financial year 2025. Firstly, we saw a growth in our IATA BSP India participating carriers for international air business, which increased by 6.6%, Q1 FY 2024 versus Q1 FY 2025. This is given that the overall international sales from BSP India or IATA India participating carriers decreased by 4.4% according to the IATA data. Additionally, our market share on IATA BSP airlines has significantly grown over previous year. On a more positive note, our business in North India saw double-digit growth, while West India also showed single-digit growth, and we are optimistic about a strong performance in South and East India markets in the coming quarters.
We have implemented strategic measures to enhance our talent acquisition efforts to capture potential market share, particularly in South and East India regions. In our hotel and ancillary business, we achieved a 2.3% growth in GTV despite the market degrowth. However, we faced some challenges this quarter, including the impact of general elections, disruptions of the Maldives business, which notably affected our performance. Without these challenges, we believe our growth could have reached double-digit growth. Regarding active buyers, we had an all-time high active transacting, reaching 23,283 in Q1 FY 2025. We have also enrolled new transacting buyers this quarter. Their contribution has been significant. The GTV from these new buyers increased by 30% on a quarter-over-quarter basis. This reflects a successful focus on higher spending potential customers.
In a cross-sell initiative, the monthly average of active hotel and ancillary buyers increased by 7% from Q1 FY 2024 to Q1 FY 2025. As a result of this initiative, the share of non-air active buyers among total active buyers improved from 46% to 49%. This growth is a direct result of our efforts to expand and reach the engagement of our non-air agent base. Finally, let's talk about our wallet share enhancement initiative. We've introduced a comprehensive strategy to increase both from both air and non-air agents. A key element of this strategy is a raffle scheme designed to foster competition and excitement. The scheme rewards agents who generate higher volumes of business with increased chances of winning significant prizes. For every increment of additional business beyond the entry level, multiple raffle tickets are issued, which has significantly boosted agent engagement.
These results have been remarkable, and we observed substantial impact, with 66 air agents contributing INR 315 crores, and 191 non-air buyers contributing INR 101 crore of GTV. This brings total additional business from 257 buyers to INR 496 crores of GTV in the last financial year. The effectiveness of our incentive scheme is boosting performance is clear. We have relaunched this scheme with modifications in the current financial year, including a reduced minimum business criteria to encourage wider participation and drive further growth. Now handing over back to Gaurav to share some tech initiatives.
Thank you, Ankush. I'll now share some of the key platform enhancements that we delivered in Q1. We launched a new cloud-native platform that significantly reduces customer latency for our API customers who purchase hotels from us. This led to a reduction in latency for our largest customer from an average of 3.1 seconds to 1.9 seconds. We made several platform enhancements to support multi-tenancy. This functionality allows several of our group entities to operate and invoice on the same platform. This would be a key enabler for rapid integration of current and any new acquisitions. We also invested in improving the self-serve features on the India platform for international ticketing. This led to a 9% increase in the number of international ticketing transactions, which required no manual intervention. This led to improvement in customer experience while increasing our operational efficiencies.
Finally, we also launched several cross-sell initiatives on the platform. We saw an increase of 33% in our GTV from selling transfers within the international market and a 15% GTV increase within the India market. In the current quarter, we are evaluating several AI-driven voice bot technologies to drive better customer experience while reducing operational costs. These initiatives are still in early stages, but we expect them to make meaningful impact few quarters from now. I'll now hand over to Vikas to share a commentary on our financials.
Thanks, Gaurav. Good evening and very warm welcome to everyone on this call. I'm delighted to present the financial performance of TBO for the quarter ended 30th June, 2024. In the quarter ended 30th June, 2024, at an enterprise level, our monthly transacting buyer base grew by 7%, which led to an overall increase in GTV by 14% year-on-year. Our revenue from operations surged to INR 418 crore, marking a growth of 21% year-on-year. Our enterprise take rate improved from 4.96% to 5.2% to 7% year-on-year. Airline business take rate improved from 2.49% to 2.63% year-on-year.
However, there is a decrease in hotels and ancillary business take rate from 7.662% to 7.13% year-on-year, primarily due to consolidation of the Jumbo numbers in Q1 FY 2025. In case of Jumbo, it works primarily on markup model and with minimal incentive payments to the buyers, and the take rate and gross profits are similar. Net profits are, as a percentage of GTV for the quarter, improved from 3.22% to 3.52% on year-on-year basis. This was largely driven by increase in share of GTV of hotels and ancillary business from 46% to 57% year-on-year. Our adjusted EBITDA increased to INR 85 crore, growth of 23% year-on-year, while our PAT reached to INR 61 crore, demonstrating a growth of 29% year-on-year.
Adjusted EBITDA margins and PAT margins for the quarter stood at 20.33% and 14.56% respectively. Based on one-off items, our Q1 FY 2025 numbers includes amount of INR 2.88 crore of share issue expense pertaining to fresh issue of shares in IPO. Our Q1 FY 2024 numbers included exceptional items of INR 7.7 crore, primarily pertaining to written-off advances for Go Air. Income tax is applicable on our fully owned subsidiary in UAE , from current financial year, and our current tax, quarter tax expense includes provision for the said expense. Thank you, everyone. And now, we would like to open the floor for questions.
Thank you, Vikas. We will now begin the Q&A session. Participants are requested to raise their virtual hand to ask a question. Request you to introduce yourself and the firm you represent before going ahead with your question. We will wait for the question queue to assemble, and accordingly, I will unmute, and you can go ahead and unmute yourself and then ask your question. We can start with Karan. Karan Uppal, please introduce yourself and the firm you represent, and go ahead with your question.
Yeah, hi, thanks for the opportunity. This is Karan Uppal from PhillipCapital. Couple of questions from my side. Firstly, on the organic business, what was the organic growth? I missed that comment. You know, if you can clarify that.
So the international GTV, or the international business GTV, on an organic basis, without including the Jumbo Online business, grew by 17% year-on-year.
17% YoY. In terms of the revenue, how much was the revenue growth, organic?
As mentioned by Gaurav, the Jumbo contributed 52% in overall revenue of the enterprise.
Okay. Okay, and second question is in terms of the seasonality in the business. So if you can clarify, you know, how should we model the seasonality, with respect to, you know, India and international markets?
Karan, because we have a significant presence in the Middle East market-
Mm-hmm.
...The seasonality of the international business has two components. One is the summer holiday, which is typically going to be largely in July, August, September, so in the current quarter.
Mm-hmm.
However, the dates of the two Eids and Ramadan also have an impact.
Mm-hmm.
So, like I talked about it, because this quarter, both the Eids come, unlike last year, in this, both the Eids fell in the same quarter. So typically, you know, for Eid, the, most of the regions will shut down for about a week or 10 days.
Mm-hmm.
Hence, there is a slight slowdown in business over that period of time.
Okay.
So when we are looking at seasonality, and that's why I made the comment that we expect the Q2 growth from Q2 of last year for the international business to be higher, because of just because of the seasonality and timing effect of the festivals.
Good. And Karan, regarding India, you know, the latter obviously peaks from the summer holidays, which is, basically Q1 of the FY.
Mm-hmm.
This quarter, currently, we, we'll have a lot of corporate, MICE business, plus, you know, the long weekend, which is now the August 15th, which will, which will also see some leisure traffic. Diwali is on 31st of October, so the booking period, which was October last year, which now will shift to September for the Dussehra, Diwali breaks, and then followed by the New Year's/Christmas.
Mm-hmm.
Then January, when school goes back, I mean, people go back to corporate travel and, the bookings are happening for the summer as well. So that's the typical season. The only shift we see this year is the Diwali moving from November to October.
So just to summarize your comments, basically you're saying that, Q2 and Q3 of this year, you are looking at a strong, quarter, quarters. Perfect.
Yeah. I think, see, the India peak season will be usually Q1.
Mm-hmm.
Because that is where the India summer happens. But rest of the world, the European, Northern Hemisphere summer is typically Q2.
Yeah.
We would expect Q1 to be very India-heavy, Q2 to be more international. Typically between Q1 and Q2, you would see the heaviest traffic, travel happen.
Right. Okay. The other question I had was on the international expansion. So in your annual report, you have mentioned that, you know, you want to expand your sales presence to, you know, more than 47 countries, which you already have the presence. So, so which are the markets you are looking at in terms of the regions like, Middle East, U.S., Europe, APAC, where you want to expand both from the supply as well as from the demand side?
Yeah. See, on the source markets, which is demand side-
Mm-hmm.
...We are significantly investing in the APAC market, and for the APAC, we include all the way from China to Australia.
Okay.
In APAC, Indonesia, and Australia are two markets we've made significant investments in the last one year.
Okay.
The other investment is happening in building out the European source market, which is a large market. So we typically look at Europe as three different segments. We look at U.K., Ireland separately, we look at Eastern Europe and the Dutch countries as one group, and then we look at Southern Europe and Israel as one group. So we are making investments in, creating feet on street sales team and enhancing supply to service this demand quite aggressively. Also because we did the Jumbo Online acquisition, so which also gives us good differentiated supply to service that market. So those are the two regions, we expect to see significant demand growth from.
From a supply perspective, you know, the strategy is fairly global, because our focus is, as we've talked in the past as well, on building out the luxury, slightly premium travel.
Mm-hmm.
More than looking at just, you know, just a region or a destination, we look at specific hotels and, chains that we want to work with globally. So there, while the spectrum of hotels will run into a few thousand hotels, like 7, 8, 10,000 hotels-
Mm-hmm.
...Those would be spread across the globe, wherever the demand is traveling to.
Okay, got it. The last question from my side is, if you can share a typical CAC, to acquire a travel agent, let's say in India or any international markets. A ballpark figures.
Karan, we don't do CAC calculations, and I'll explain why. Because it's very, it's very hard to articulate CAC.
Mm-hmm.
The way our business works is that there is a typically, when acquisition is happening to a feet on street sales team, there is a salesperson who will go out and acquire a travel agency. But as if you look at, and we've shared our cohort in the past, the stickiness of a travel agent is quite high, so they will stick on the traveling for, on the platform for many years, and they'll increasingly do more business every year. So the way we look at sales efficiency is that we have the cost of a salesperson on the ground, but he's doing two functions: he's acquiring new customers, but he's also managing existing relationships.
So the revenue per salesperson is typically, you know, the number that we want to optimize for, but it does not necessarily translate into a CAC, because we don't know what portion of that per salesperson cost should we allocate to acquiring a new customer, versus what portion should we allocate to account management. Hence, CAC is not a good metric to measure the business on, but, you know, long-term agent retention and increasing share of wallet are the two numbers that make more sense.
Okay, great. Thanks, and all the best.
Thanks, Karan. Participants, please raise your hand if you need to ask a question. We will accordingly unmute you. You can unmute yourself, introduce yourself and go ahead and ask your question. The next question is from Swapnil Potdukhe. Swapnil, please go ahead and introduce yourself and the firm you represent, and ask your question.
Hi, this is Swapnil from JM Financial. Hi, Ankush. Hi, Gaurav. I had one obvious question actually, starting with so the air ticketing GTV has meaningfully declined on a year-on-year basis. And the other thing is we are hearing from the OTAs that the outbound business seems to be doing quite, quite well for them. So, so any, so that that's - there seems to be some disconnect over here, if you can help with that, Ankush, yeah.
So, Swapnil, regarding the domestic air, we shied away from our low-margin business, which we were selling in domestic air, and we actually low-margin business and high volume business, we gave it up, you know, because we wanted to maintain our net retention margins, you know, which I think are healthier than our previous quarter. So that's on the domestic air side. On the international, you know, we have outbidden the market. If you see, the market kind of shrunk by 4.2%, but we grew almost 6.5%. We also gained our market share. What you are seeing on the OTAs, you know, there are also other segments which they have been serving. It's just not the B2B business which they are looking at.
You know, they, they're also serving the corporate slash B2C markets. So to compare, you know, it, it won't be fair because they're also catering to other segments as well, where we are only servicing to the offline travel-assisted market. But on the international side, I think we have gained our share versus last year, and obviously outbid the market by almost 11%.
Got it. And Ankush, any guidance as to how should we model this thing going ahead in the air segment, specifically?
So, Swapnil, I think the trend will follow, because our story is, you know, outbound travel is what our theme, main theme of the company is. You know, so we will continue to build on our hotel, ancillary and our international airline business. And domestic air for us is important because it's a hook, right? But, is it a big margin, revenue contributor? Yes, but you know, I think the resiliency for the bottom line remains in the hotel slash, international air business. So that trend will continue.
Okay, got it. With respect to the recent tensions in the Middle East, any comment on that? How will there be an impact on our business? And, how do we see that, I mean, if the tensions grow?
Swapnil, we are not seeing any, immediate softness because of, because of the political situation in the Middle East. Historically, we've seen that, unless some very, very adverse event happens, like what happened October 7 last year, which caused a temporary break in the Israel source market. In general, we have seen that so far, travel, especially from the Middle East region, has been fairly resilient to the broader macroeconomic situations.
Okay. And I think, while you have mentioned some of the source markets in Europe and APAC China as growing in double digits, you have not mentioned North America. Which I think was one of our key markets to target, in terms of growth going ahead. Any particular reason why that market may not have grown at the same rate as the other markets?
So to be fair, Swapnil, the market is growing. But if I looked at the order in which the size of the market they stand today, it is a smaller market for us. There are investments planned in H2 in North America, which we also believe will probably have some impact within Q4, by the end, by Q4 of this year. But for this, for Q1, North America was not a big focus for us. We will be absolutely investing in this market later this year.
Okay. And any guidance on the tax rate going ahead? Because 19%, I think, was something which was significantly higher than what we were expecting at the time of the IPO.
Yes, the current quarter, the tax rate is coming at 19%, but on a full year basis, we project it at around 17.5%. One of the key other reason is basically, the Jumbo Online business also get taxed at a higher rate, which is at around 25%. Overall, effective tax rate for the full year should be around 17.5%.
Okay. If I can just squeeze in one more. So if I got it right, you mentioned a GTV of around INR 814 crore for Jumbo versus a revenue of INR 52 crore, if that is, those numbers were right?
Yes, yes.
So if I were to use those numbers, then your take rate in Jumbo seems to be significantly higher than what it used to be at the time of acquisition. Any particular reason for that?
The take rate is coming at around 4%, which was a similar take rate when we had acquired Jumbo Online.
Swapnil, may I request you to join the queue?
Sure. Sure, sure, no worries. Thanks for advice and all the best.
Thank you, sir. Request all participants to raise your hand, introduce yourself, and go ahead and ask your question once we unmute you. The next question is from Anirudh Agarwal. Anirudh, please, unmute yourself, introduce yourself, and go ahead and ask your question.
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. This is Anirudh from ValueQuest. So I had a few questions. The first one, Gaurav, was on the international business. So this 25% growth in international agents, should we take it as a lead indicator for the kind of organic growth that one can expect in the international GTV going ahead?
Yeah. I know, you know, I don't want to comment on this, you know, as guidance, but yes, we do believe that with some lag, active agent growth is the strongest indicator of future growth. And that is why we think of it as a monster metric. That's the number that we focus and invest in increasing. So like I said, you know, just the organic growth in active agents was almost 20%, north of 20%, this quarter. So that, combined with active booker growth as well, which was about 22%, is an indicator that, yes, we are increasing engagement, and a lot of these travel agents would have joined us for the first time. So if you see our cohorts, you will see that travel agents do...
Typically, if they do $1 of business in year one, they will do more than, you know, double of that business, year two, historically, right? So not to say that this will continue. But yeah, I would agree that from a, you know, just directionally, the active agent growth is a lead indicator of future GTV growth.
Got it. Second question was on, the regional point of growth. So, you know, while you alluded to the fact that Middle East was weaker, if you feel comfortable sharing, you know, what the growth was like in Europe and APAC specifically, where we put in a lot of investments. Was it significantly higher than the 17% international growth that we see organically?
See, Anirudh, just like to just to clarify on Middle East as well. Middle East has shown high double, you know, a high teen growth in spite of the fact that there was on the core business, in spite of the fact that there were the two Eid holidays. But yes, APAC and Europe, coming from a smaller base, are growing significantly higher. I don't think we have split our numbers with our base geographies at this point in time. But yeah, they I would say significantly higher than the average growth of 17%.
Got it, thanks. Final thing was on Jumbo. So Jumbo, if you could just, you know, you mentioned the INR 800 crore of GTV and INR 30 crore of revenue. On a like-for-like basis, what would that growth have been versus Jumbo's own numbers last year?
So, we can't comment on those numbers, because one, that were not part of the consolidation that we did. The numbers at the kind of regions are very high-level numbers that we get to know. So we'll not be able to comment on their growth. But we can just say that the growth is there; there is a good growth, and is in line with our organic business. But yeah.
Understood. Understood. Sure. On take rates, Vikas, if you can just help us, I mean, how should one look at, you know, take rates evolving going ahead, given that Jumbo is obviously lower take rates. But as you know, the business evolves over the next two, three quarters, are, are these the kind of take rates that you would expect, or there is some room for take rates to kind of inch upwards as, you know, Middle East does a little better, India does a little better over the next two, three quarters?
So yes, as the mix of GTV changes and shifts from one particular region to other, there could be minor improvements in the take rate, but it would primarily be coming from the mix impact rather than we increasing our take rates or gross profit in any particular region. So as we have mentioned earlier as well, our focus is primarily to maintain a similar kind of gross profit number, rather than trying to optimize on the take rate and the gross profit number.
We are, as if you see in the current quarter as well, overall, the GP gross profit numbers have increased from 3% to 3.22% to 3.52%, and this is primarily coming up because of the mix of the hotels and the air business, and that's how the improvement would happen in future as well.
Okay. Thanks. Thanks a lot and all the best .
Thank you.
Thanks, Anirudh. The next question is from Prateek Kumar. Prateek, please unmute yourself. Introduce yourself and the firm you represent, and go ahead with your question.
Hello, yeah, good evening, good evening, this is Prateek. I'm from Jefferies.
Hi, Prateek.
My first question... Hi. Hi, Gaurav. My first question is on, like, broad industry trend. I mean, like, we have seen, like, because of travel, high track travel industry, so there's a global moderation in the growth, in hotel industry in terms of air hours. Also, there is a slump in, like, across the world, many countries, and which because of the demand issue in general. Is this something which also impacts our growth in business, because of contraction in the areas? And, I mean, and likely, the way we grew, across the world, like in line with India also, unlikely to see it, going forward. So how does that impact?
So, Prateek, I think there are two ways to look at it. There are, if there are short-term headwinds, because of softening of demand, in different markets, it may have some marginal impact on our growth. But we have to keep in mind that, one, as, in general, our size compared to the overall size of the market is very small, right? So from a share of market perspective, we are still so small. So irrespective of whether the market grows or not, I think the headroom for growth is always there. Second is we are in the business of aggregating existing demand. So until we start to saturate a source market, we will always have an opportunity to just aggregate the existing demand without having to rely on new demand to come in.
Third, just because of the size of the market is so large, it's almost $2 trillion if you look at outbound travel, which, you know, if it is growing at 6%-7%, even it doesn't grow at 6%, it grows at 2% also, it's growing on such a large base that our growth hopefully doesn't get hampered by, you know, minor headwinds across the globe. Yes, if something significant happens, of course, it can impact. But there is always some seasonality, there is always some softening of demand, and which is very cyclic. That should not hamper us too much.
Okay. Question was actually not from a demand perspective in general. My question was from growth and pricing perspective across the world on more in air and hotel segment. But I understand that you are saying that because the market is so large and our size is small, and we can continue to grow at our own pace, I guess. Another question is on right now, you're listed for, I think, a couple of months. And is there any, and your financials are now sufficiently available in public domain, so quarters results are out and with that. So is there any change in, like, on the ground and competitive intensity from some of your listed and unlisted peers of India and maybe elsewhere in the world?
I think not as much. It's domestic here obviously is very competitive because, you know, everybody's trying to get a piece of that, be it offline or online. So that, you know, sometimes can have compression. But I think when it comes to the international air, you know, our share has increased, so that demonstrates that we are winning from competition. And our outbound business also had a significant growth, keeping in mind the general elections were there. We could have gone better, but I think from a commercial side right now, post-listing and our results being out, I don't see any major pressures right now from our competition.
Prateek, can we...
Prateek, you are-
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, sorry. Yeah, I got the answer.
Oh, okay. Thank you.
One last question on inorganic. Can you just, like, sort of talk about, like, again, like the last acquisition, obviously you are integrating it and ramping up the Jumbo acquisition. But, how are we looking at inorganic strategy over the next 12 months for the company?
So, Prateek, we are constantly evaluating opportunities. You know, it's a stated part of our strategy to look at opportunities that make sense. This and the how we look at opportunities remain same. We are looking at complementary demand. So those markets where we may not have significant presence ourselves, we may look at those markets from a demand network perspective. Or we'll be looking at complementary supply opportunities where aggregating, getting access to supply, which we may not have direct access to previously. And third is, like, there are solid technology or travel technology opportunities which are available. So those are kind of like the three buckets. So constantly looking at opportunities, but nothing concrete to share right now.
Sure. Thank you and all the best.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks, Prateek. Anyone who has a question, request you to please raise your hand and, introduce yourself and go ahead and ask the question. We have our next question from Karan Uppal once again. Please go ahead, Karan, unmute yourself and ask your question.
Yeah, thanks for the follow-up. Just one question in terms of the hotel segment. So out of the total hotels which we are contracting on the platform, how much is the direct sourcing?
The direct sourcing is in the range of about 35-ish%, right? I don't have the exact number at hand, but it's about in the range of about 35%.
Okay. And the international expansion which we are doing, so the strategy would be for direct sourcing only?
No. So, Karan, you see, we are, because we are a two-sided platform, as a platform, we remain open to working with third-party suppliers as well. The reality of travel business is that supply is extremely fragmented, right? There are at least, I would say, roughly 2 million+ property records across the globe that could potentially be sold to travel agents on the other side. We do not intend to aggregate all of that inventory ourselves. In fact, we believe that our ability to combine direct sourcing with third-party supply efficiently is one of our key unique selling points, just from the sector diversity of supply that we're able to bring on board. So while we'll continue to invest in building our direct supply, that's not the only channel to increase our supply base.
No, I understand that, but my question was mainly if we are increasing our focus on direct supply, then it may, it might positively impact the take rates for the hotel segment. That's where I was-
No, no, that is true, Karan. So it does, it give us pricing advantage, but it does, you know, then, how we use that pricing advantage is either to top the, draw the top line, grow the top line by just being more price competitive.
Mm.
Or by, you know, keeping that margin for ourselves, by increasing our margin, then this will improve our bottom line. Given that we're in a growth phase right now, the broad objective is that use the price competitiveness to pass on the benefits to the travel agents, and continue to grow and invest in growing the top line, and then drive operating leverage to drive EBITDA margins.
Okay, great. Thanks. Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Thank you, Karan. The next question is from Swapnil. Swapnil, please go ahead, unmute yourself and ask your question.
Yeah, hi. Thanks for the opportunity again. This is more of a modeling question. So if I see your depreciation and amortization expense, last quarter it was around INR 15 crore. This quarter is INR 12.4 crore. I would just like to understand, like, how should we look at this expense line item going ahead, and yeah, and any reason for the variation in the quarter-to-quarter?
So, yes, okay. So the decrease is primarily because of some intangible blocks getting depreciated fully, amortized fully out, and that was the reason. However, on a full year basis, on the basis of the expected capitalization that we are looking at in the current year, the overall depreciation and amortization expense for the full year should be around INR 55 crore.
INR 55 crore. Okay, got it. Just one more of a basic question again. This is what is the difference between active agents and active bookers?
Okay. Yeah, so I think... Thanks for asking this question, Swapnil. I, you know, I didn't realize that we didn't clarify it. Look, a travel agency will typically have more than one booker, right? So when we look at active agents, we count one travel agency working with us as one active agent. But if there are three bookers within the travel agency using the platform, then they count as three active bookers. This ratio of a growth at which active bookers is increasing, or the average number of bookers per agency is an important metric because it's a, you know, it's an easy growth lever by making sure that all the bookers in the travel agency are using the platform.
It also is an indication that if a travel agency was trying out the platform and saying, "Okay, let's one or two bookers use it," but then they start telling everybody else in the travel agency to use the platform. That's a very strong indication of engagement, and hence we are tracking the two numbers separately.
Got it, got it. Thanks a lot for the clarification.
Thank you, Swapnil. The next question is from Anirudh Agarwal. Anirudh, please go ahead and unmute yourself and ask your question.
Yeah, thanks for the follow-up. Just one question on the other income numbers. It seems much higher this year versus last year. So is that just on account of the treasury income from the cash we raised during IPO, or is there something else, too?
Yeah, primarily, it is, the increase is driven by both, increase in the treasury income generated through the funds in IPO, and plus, there were some old liabilities which were written back in the current quarter.
I understand. Okay. Okay, thanks.
Thanks, Anirudh. To all participants, if you have a question, please raise your hand. We will unmute you. You can go ahead and introduce yourself and ask your question. The next question is from Pranay Shah. Pranay, please go ahead, introduce yourself and ask a question. Unmute yourself, introduce yourself, and ask a question.
Hi, this is Pranay from Anand Rathi. So my question is in terms of airline GTV and take rates. So I think I might have missed the previous. If you can explain the decline in the GTV, which has been caused, and but simultaneously, we have seen an increase in our take rates in terms of airlines. So if this is so, what is the thing, what is the downside over here, like some markets which are affecting or some airline contracts we have been not going ahead with?
So, decrease in GTV was due to the reasons which Ankush has explained earlier in the call. This is primarily that we let go some of the high volume, low margin domestic air business. So overall increase in the take rate is primarily again because of the mixed impact as our international air outbound business increases, wherein we again receive incentives, commissions, more from the airlines as compared to the domestic business. So that's the reason of the marginal increase in the take rates for the airline business.
Okay. And sir, also on this-
To answer this last thing, we haven't lost any contract with any airline, be it domestic or international, just to answer your second point.
Okay. Also, sir, and second thing, in terms of hotels and ancillaries, where we see the service costs being increased as compared to quarter, last quarter. So is it a quarter one phenomena, which like we have the service cost increasing and then at the quarter four we see the decline in the service cost? So is the seasonality being played out over here or how it is?
So it is not more a factor of seasonality. It again depends on the mix of the suppliers that we are working with in the hotels and ancillary business. Wherein some suppliers or hotels work on a net model, wherein we mark it up, and there is no further service fee or payment to the travel agent. However, there are suppliers who give us commission, and out of that commission, we pass some commission to the travel agent. And so depending on the mix of the suppliers, you may see increase or decrease in the service fees accordingly.
Okay. And also, sir, continuing the previous participant question in terms of active bookers. So you said that you are tracking in terms of the travel agency. If there are three persons who are booking from the same agency, you consider it as active bookers, but your code and everything will be the same. So how this tracking will happen, if you can explain the process only?
Pranay, the way our system works is that every travel agency has a login, and then they create sub-users in the system. So if a travel agent has three bookers, they will have their own logins, and they will be attached to the same travel agency. So we're able to track how many distinct travel agents within the travel agency are using the platform.
Okay, sir. Thank you.
Thanks, Pranay. Anyone who has a question, please raise your hand. We will go ahead and unmute you, and you can ask your question. We will just give it a moment. Anyone who has a question can please raise their hand. Mitesh, we will unmute you. Please unmute yourself, introduce yourself, and ask a question.
Hello, can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Yeah, I just wanted to ask you, can we develop a platform like Booking.com for a B2C category of business?
So, Mitesh, technically we can, but it would be a very different business from what we do. So it's not on the horizon for us to enter the B2C business.
Okay. Okay, but, any long-term plans, any thinking on those lines?
No, Mitesh, I think our view is that we're building a travel distribution platform. B2C business is more of an online travel agency business, so no short-term or long-term plans around it.
Okay. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you, Mitesh. Anyone who has a question, may please raise your hand. We'll go ahead unmute you, and you can ask your question. Yes, Pranay, please go ahead, unmute yourself and ask your question.
Sir, just a follow-up on that active booker. So when we say that we have registered buyers and in that monthly transacting, so that includes the travel agent only, right? It doesn't include the booker's part in.
No.
It does have-
Yeah, so when we talk of active travel agents, even if there are three bookers in a travel agency, that counts as one.
Sure.
When we're talking about active travel bookers, then we are talking of three... Then we'll count those as three.
Okay, sure. Thank you.
Thank you, Pranay. Yes, Swapnil, please go ahead and ask your question.
Yeah, just one more clarification. In the Indian air business, what would be the share of domestic and outbound now that we are focusing more on the outbound side?
So, the outbound is around 70%.
Okay.
The domestic is around 30%.
How do we just to expand that point, like, what would be the growth rate on a YoY basis, let's just say on the outbound side and domestic side, if you could just break it down? Thank you.
Outbound side, as I just mentioned, on the international low-cost full-service carriers, we grew by 6.6%. And on the domestic side, we grew, and that's the reason for the overall decline in the GTV of airfare.
So giving up that high volume, low margin business, Swapnil, which we kind of gave it up, so therefore that degrowth which you see in the domestic air.
Right.
We increased our GP on the domestic business, what we sold in this quarter.
Got it, Ankush. Thanks a lot.
Cheers.
Thanks, Swapnil. We'll take our last question from Karan. Karan, please go ahead, unmute yourself and ask your question.
Yeah. Thanks for the follow-up again. Just the last question on the wage hikes. When are you planning to give the wage hikes? In this year?
So, our increment cycle works on from July to June, so increment happens in the month of July. So that gets effective from July month.
Okay. So in Q2, we'll see the wage hike impact?
Yeah.
Sure. Okay, great. Thanks. Thanks, and all the best.
Thanks, Karan. We'll take our last participant before we hand it over to the management for their closing remarks. Jeet Shah, please go ahead, unmute yourself, introduce yourself and ask your question.
Yeah. Hi, thank you for the opportunity. I'm Jeet Shah from [Alchemist Star]. Just going ahead, do you expect the GTV growth more towards volume driven or more price driven? Just a sense on, you know, what you are expecting the market to play out in the next two, three years.
Well, Jeet, didn't understand the question. What do you mean by what's a bit by volume driven or price driven?
So the bookings you get, so your GTV increase, right? Will be more like the way hotels would increase their prices, because see, in the last three years, post-Corona.., when the prices were-
Mm-hmm.
...Were, had declined drastically. So there is going to be a value component, like price rise, they might have increased, right?
Yeah, no, got it. I think, Jeet, our view is that at this point, it is going to be more volume driven than just average transaction value driven, because there is already some correction starting to happen in pricing, right? We saw much higher pricing last summer and last to last summer, which was post-COVID revival. But at this time, I think just the, when pricing stops and demand increases, so we would expect the future growth to be more demand driven than just price driven.
Okay. Just want to say, you expect this trend to be more like a long-term trend, right?
Yeah. Look, very hard to predict, what happens in the future. But yeah, I think for the foreseeable, at least for the medium term, that's what it looks like.
Okay. Thank you for that information.
Thank you, Jeet. That was the last question. With that, we conclude the Q1 FY 25 earnings call of TBO Tek. With that, I would hand it over to Ankush for his closing remarks.
So, thank you everyone for joining this evening and spending time with the management here. The deck and everything is loaded on the websites. If anybody has any questions, feel free to please write to one of us, and happy to revert back. See you next quarter, and thank you so much.
Thank you everyone for participating at this call. We look forward towards you participating at the next quarterly call. Thank you.
Thank you.