Yatra Online, Inc.
Q4 2019 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 23 Jul 2019

[Operator:]

Good day, and welcome to the Yatra Fourth Quarter 2019 Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Manish Hemrajani. Sir, please go ahead.

[Manish Hemrajani:]

Thank you, Katy. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Yatra's fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2019 financial results for the period ended March 31, 2019. I am pleased to be joined on the call today by Yatra's CEO and Co-Founder, Dhruv Shringi; and our CFO, Alok Vaish. The following discussion, including responses to your questions, reflects management's views as of today, July 23, 2019. We do not undertake any obligation to update or revise the information. As always some of the statements made on today's call are forward-looking, typically preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate or similar statements. Please refer to Company's filings with the SEC for information about factors, which could cause our actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning these statements is contained in the Risk Factors section of the Company's Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC on July 31, 2018. Copies of this and other filings are available from the SEC and on the Investor Relations section of our website. Please note that the purpose of this call is to discuss our fourth quarter results and we are not answering any questions on the EBIX merger. We will file our proxy materials with additional information about the merger in due course.

[Dhruv Shringi:]

Thank you, Manish. Before we actually talk about the quarter, let me just quickly touch base on the pending merger with EBIX. As you know, on July 17th we announced that we have entered into a definitive agreement under which EBIX will acquire Yatra via a merger. In connection with the merger, each share of Yatra will be entitled to receive 0.005 shares of a new class of preferred stock of EBIX. Each share of EBIX convertible preferred stock received to each Yatra ordinary share will in turn be convertible into 20 shares of common stock of EBIX. We will file our proxy materials with additional information about the merger in due course. As we said that we are quite excited about this transaction. This provides our shareholders with the opportunity to participate in the significant upside potential of the combined entity. As part of EBIX’s EbixCash Travel business, we will be a larger more diversified organization with the necessary scale and resources to be a leader in today’s dynamic travel market. We will provide more options and an enhanced experience for our joint customers and will be an even stronger partner to the airlines, hotels, car rental and other businesses we work with. We are confident that combining Yatra’s loyal customer base, comprehensive service offering and multi-channel platform with EBIX’s complementary Via and Mercury businesses will create a leading online travel platform and India’s largest corporate travel platform that will help capture growth opportunities and deliver enhanced value to shareholders. That said, the purpose of today’s call is to discuss Yatra’s fourth quarter and full year results. We will file our proxy material as I mentioned earlier with additional information about the merger in due course. Moving on to our results, in the last twelve months, we further consolidated our position as the leader in the large and growing business travel market in India on the consumer front as well we continue to grow our market position driven by the strength of our brand. A combination of these factors helped us deliver annual adjusted revenue growth of 20.3% coming in ahead of our guidance despite a very challenging macro environment towards the latter half of fiscal year 2019. We were able to deliver solid growth in the March 2019 quarter, as well despite a challenging aviation macro environment with air ticketing gross bookings up 17.6% against a backdrop of low-single-digit domestic air passenger growth.

[Alok Vaish:]

Thank you, Dhruv. On the key financial highlights for the year, on an overall basis, our adjusted revenue grew by 20.3% year-over-year to INR8.9 billion, which is slightly ahead of our guidance of at least 20% growth. Gross air passengers booked were 10.2 million representing year-over-year growth of 14.5% with a favorable mix towards international travel. Standalone hotel room nights booked were 2.3 million representing an increase of 11.6% year-over-year.

[Operator:]

Our first question comes from Jed Kelly with Oppenheimer.

[Jed Kelly:]

Hey, how are you doing? Just one quick question for me. Is there any way you can break out the percentage of revenue from the corporate business versus what was generated from the consumer segment for this year?

[Dhruv Shringi:]

No, Jed, historically we haven’t broken that out. And unfortunately I won’t be able to share that in today’s call either. That’s the decision I guess that we need to decide in terms of corporate segment break out which we are not doing at the moment. So hence I won’t be able to share that in the call.

[Jed Kelly:]

Okay. Due to the pending acquisition, you will not be giving anymore guidance, correct?

[Alok Vaish:]

That is right. Yes.

[Jed Kelly:]

All right. And then, what’s the – can you sort of bridge what’s the difference between your net cash balance on the March 2019 balance sheet and the and how the enterprise value is calculated for the EBIX acquisition? Because it seems like it went from like a net cash balance to net debt of about 100 million.

[Dhruv Shringi:]

Jed, we will be sharing that as part of the proxy. So as we mentioned in our opening comments, in terms of how the price walk looks over there, how the fully diluted share count is calculated on the EBIX transaction, those are things that we will have to file as part of the proxy. And we will request a little bit of patience on that. All this information should get covered in that.

[Jed Kelly:]

Okay. And then just one more. Once you are able to work – once – I guess, or once the industry is able to work out all this Jet Airways headwinds, I mean, when do you think the industry returns to normalized growth?

[Dhruv Shringi:]

At this point in time, based on conversations with the airlines, it looks that it will take them the best part of this fiscal year to get to a more normalized growth rate. So you are looking at, maybe the latter half of this fiscal year or early part of calendar year 2020 to start seeing growth coming back to more normal levels.

[Jed Kelly:]

And then, can you talk about sort of anything that’s developed competitively with your largest competitor acquiring a corporate travel provider and then how your expansion is progressing in the Middle East?

[Dhruv Shringi:]

Sure. So with regards to the competition and acquisition that MakeMyTrip made, it’s a fairly small asset that they have acquired and as we’ve seen and said in the past, the corporate travel acquisition process of a customer is quite different from a normal B2C consumer that process goes through a much longer than larger technical evaluation process, it goes through a much more detailed RSP process, customers look at not just the technology but they look at your servicing strength as well. It’s a full comprehensive offering. So while I understand that competition has made a small acquisition, we haven’t really seen any impact of that in the market at this point in time. We remain very confident that the kind of comprehensive product that we have created and the self-book implementations that we have done which deeply integrate within our customers creates a very sound barrier from a new competitor entrance point of view. So we are very secure in the position that we have on the corporate travel front.

[Jed Kelly:]

Thank you.

[Dhruv Shringi:]

Sure. Thanks, Jed.

[Operator:]

Our next question comes from Andrew Carreon with the University of Notre Dame.

[Andrew Carreon:]

Hi, Dhruv. Thanks for taking my question.

[Dhruv Shringi:]

Sure.

[Andrew Carreon:]

I was hoping maybe you could give an update on the Agoda partnership and how that has progressed. I know it’s fairly early innings for that now, but hopefully get an update on how that’s going?

[Dhruv Shringi:]

Sure. We’ve been expanding the number of properties that Agoda is live, that they initially went live with a state of about 5,000 properties. That’s now almost doubled in terms of the number of properties that we’ve got live on Agoda right now. So we are seeing good progress over there. In the overall scheme of things, it’s still relatively small. But given that the Agoda portfolio of 100,000 plus properties in India, as we start scaling up towards that number, we should see good traction out of that. So, Agoda, we continue to be very positive about that partnership and we think there is a good opportunity for us to expand and use that to get inbound customers.

[Andrew Carreon:]

Great. And then, on the corporate travel front, I know, for a while now, it’s kind of benchmarked off of the KPMG kind of 12% growth in the sector and with your share being plus or minus that over the past several years. What – I am just trying to understand because it seems like adjusting for the PL Worldways acquisition, the total large corporate customer count hasn’t seem to have changed very much. How much of the growth, whether it be 12% or more or less, would you expect to come from net new large corporate customers versus winning business within the existing customer base?

[Alok Vaish:]

See, in the quarter that ended March, we have seen some slowdown in terms of organic growth on a same-customer basis. That number has been more in the late single-digits number as opposed to the high double-digit number. But that’s on account of Jet Airways’ capacity going out and the amount of disruption that got calls in that quarter. And plus, we had elections which were coming in the subsequent month. So on the back of that, corporate houses have been circumspect with regards to their expense. But post the elections which happened in middle of May, we have seen that number rebounding quite fastly. So, on the whole, we think it from a growth point of view, we should again look at trending that 12 plus percent of that growth with that coming as organic, and then another 3% to 4% of new customer acquisition adding to north of 15% growth for the corporate business.

[Andrew Carreon:]

Great. That’s really helpful. And then, one last, maybe somewhat nuance question. The EBIX Travelution product, that they gotten through Zillious and I noticed that in their deck they referenced Yatra as a customer. Can you help me understand how Yatra uses that product?

[Dhruv Shringi:]

Sure. So that product was being used by ATB. That was the legacy system that ATB was using and over the course of the last few months now, we’ve migrated some of those customers on to the newer Yatra platform. In the new environment or rather the combined environment with Zillious and EBIX, our endeavor would be to create a best-in-class travel product which will combine the features from the Yatra product and the Zillious product. So that’s where the two synergies will come from by combining and creating one best-in-class product.

[Andrew Carreon:]

Great. Thanks. That’s all I’ve got and congratulations again on the deal.

[Dhruv Shringi:]

Sure. Thank you, Andrew.

[Operator:]

Thank you. At this time, we have no further questions in the queue. I would now like to turn it back over to Dhruv for closing remarks.

[Dhruv Shringi:]

Sure. Thank you, Katy. Just to again summarize, we are very excited about the merger opportunity that we see ahead with EBIX. I think there is tremendous amount of synergy opportunities which exist on the ground between their businesses and ours. And it also creates a platform for us to be able to take our products like corporate travel to other emerging and high growth markets. So we are very excited about that opportunity and we look forward to interacting with all of you in the near future once we file the proxy statement. Thank you. Thank you everyone.

[Operator:]

Thank you ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's teleconference. You may now disconnect.