MakeMyTrip - Earnings Call - Q3 2025
January 23, 2025
Transcript
Vipul Garg (VP of Investor Relations)
Investor Relations at MakeMyTrip, and welcome to our fiscal 2025 third quarter earnings webinar. Today's event will be hosted by the company's leadership team, comprising Rajesh Magow, our co-founder and Group Chief Executive Officer, and Mohit Kabra, our Group Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, this live event is being recorded by the company and will be made available for replay on our IR website shortly after the conclusion of today's event. At the end of these prepared remarks, we will also be hosting a Q&A session. Furthermore, certain statements made during today's event may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Safe Harbor Provision of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, are subject to inherent uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially.
Any forward-looking information relayed during this event speaks only as of this date, and the company undertakes no obligation to update the information to reflect changed circumstances. Additional information concerning these statements is contained in the Risk Factors and Forward-Looking Statements section of the company's annual report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC on July 2, 2024. Copies of these filings are available from the SEC or from the company's Investor Relations Department. I would like to now turn over the call to Rajesh. Over to you, Rajesh.
Rajesh Magow (Co-founder and Group CEO)
Thank you, Vipul. Welcome, everyone, to our third quarter call for fiscal 2025. Happy to start the call by sharing that Indian travelers continue to demonstrate their eagerness to travel and experience new horizons in this seasonally strong quarter for leisure travel. Confluence of rising income levels and changing consumer behavior to spend a bigger portion of available discretionary surplus is driving the growth for both domestic and international tourism in India. A recent survey by Visa indicates that 62% of Indian consumers plan to increase their spending on discretionary goods and services. These favorable macro trends, combined with our focused executions, have enabled us to outpace industry growth consistently.
We are pleased to deliver strong performance across all our business segments, with an accelerated year-on-year growth rate of 26.8% in gross booking value in constant currency terms during the reported quarter, compared to a growth rate of 22.9% during the first half of this fiscal year. Alongside accelerated booking growth, we have also been able to drive operating leverage, and the adjusted operating profit, which is at an all-time quarterly high of $46 million, has registered a year-on-year growth of about 38%. On the macroeconomic front, India's GDP growth forecasts reflect a positive economic outlook driven by strong domestic demand and strategic public investments. The World Bank recently said that India's growth is projected to remain steady at 6.7% a year for the next two fiscal years, beginning April 2025, making it the fastest-growing larger economy in the world.
India is undertaking significant investments in infrastructure to bolster economic growth and achieve its development objectives. Travel infrastructure, comprising roads, railways, and airport infrastructure, is a pivotal part of these investments, making point-to-point travel seamless, convenient, and reliable. This seamless connectivity has been one of the major reasons for the growth of travel and tourism in India and will continue to drive growth in the future as more and more domestic and international destinations get connected. Along with domestic Indian travelers, we are increasingly exploring international destinations now. In the first half of 2024, 15 million Indian travelers traveled abroad, marking a 14% year-on-year increase and a 12% rise compared to 2019. Skift projections suggest that by 2027, India will become the world's fifth-largest outbound travel market, thus presenting a huge opportunity for us. Our international outbound business continues to grow at a faster pace.
For Q3 fiscal year 2025, our international Air Ticketing revenue grew by over 32% year-on-year, far outpacing industry growth. Similarly, our international Hotels revenue grew by over 63% year-on-year, making this one of our fastest-growing business segments. Let me now turn to the business segment, starting with our Air Ticketing business, where near-term supply challenges, particularly in the domestic air market, remain. Despite the slow growth in domestic air supply, we have been able to maintain our leading market share position while outpacing the industry growth rate overall on the back of the under-penetrated international air segment. Our Air Ticketing revenue grew by 20% year-on-year in constant currency terms.
In our endeavor to keep improving consumer experience, we have recently launched a very customer-friendly product feature of part payment on international air tickets, which enables our customers to get a confirmed booking by paying only a certain percentage of total fare upfront. The remaining balance must be paid either before the travel date or within 45 days of booking, whichever comes first. This will help increase affordability and address cash flow issues. We also launched value bundles for international flights, including relevant fintech products such as visa rejection full refund, cancel for any reason, and free date change. This has provided more flexible add-ons for the customers and led to more adoption. Our accommodation business, which includes hotels, homestays, and packages, continues to witness strong growth. We recorded 24.9% year-on-year growth in the adjusted margin on a constant currency basis.
While October was a little slow due to the festivals, the season picked up significantly in November and December on the back of holiday season and MICE and wedding-related demand. We also witnessed broad-based growth this quarter. There was an uptick in demand across all price points and consumer segments and use cases. As a result, we witnessed record check-ins in the last 10 days of December during the peak holiday season. Spiritual tourism is emerging as one of the other key growth drivers of tourism in India, with new destinations getting added to the existing popular destinations like Varanasi, Katra, Tirupati, Shirdi, etc., besides specific events like Mahakumbh-related demand for this segment.
To cater to this demand, we have enhanced supply depth in these emerging new cities on our platform and help such travelers easily find suitable properties by highlighting key aspects such as distance from pilgrimage sites, wheelchair accessibility, availability of lifts, and vegetarian food options. These features are now integrated into our product to provide smarter, more personalized property recommendations. As a result, this segment is growing faster for us, reflecting strong customer demand and satisfaction. We are also seeing concerts-driven demand across the Tier 1 and metros, which is a relatively new phenomenon in India. As per estimates for the recent Coldplay concert in Mumbai, around 25% of the ticket buyers were local Mumbaikars, while 75% traveled from other Indian states, thus presenting a new demand use case for travel.
We are also seeing good demand not only for domestic but also for international destinations, for example, Coldplay concert in Abu Dhabi and Taylor Swift in Singapore. Another consumer segment that is showing growth promise for us is inbound, especially from Indian diaspora. You might recall that last year we made our platform GDPR-compliant, making it accessible in 150 countries. Recently, we have also enabled multi-currency feature, allowing payments in 22 major global currencies, solving an important need of these customers. I am happy to report that we have started to witness growth in inbound bookings, albeit on a small base. As part of our overall GenAI strategy, this quarter, we expanded Myra, our GenAI-powered chatbot for our accommodation product. Myra enhances the booking experience by handling real-time pricing, availability, and specific hotel-related queries.
It complements our other generative AI capabilities, including image ordering, filters, and user review analysis, helping customers find the best places to stay with ease. Our homestay business continues to scale during the quarter. We sold over 21,500 plus unique properties across 920 plus unique destinations, with strong growth across business and leisure destinations. The demand from pilgrimage cities grew the highest on the back of increased supply in destinations like Varanasi, Ayodhya, Prayagraj, Amritsar, etc. While property ratings and reviews have always been a cornerstone of our platform, we have taken a step further by introducing subcategory ratings and summarizers across key elements like amenities, food, and location. This enhancement aims to build deeper trust and transparency, especially in the non-standardized category of alternative accommodation, empowering customers to make more confident and informed choices.
Our holiday packages business delivered robust performance as well, achieving highest-ever gross booking numbers driven by strong growth in international outbound packages, with Malaysia and CIS countries witnessing 2x order growth year-on-year and Vietnam witnessing over 70% year-on-year growth in orders. In our bus business, growth has further improved in Q3 on the back of about 15% year-on-year growth in private bus supply. Demand was buoyant in the quarter due to the festive period in October, travel for weddings and auspicious occasions in November, and the holiday period in December. As a result, market growth has been robust, with occupancy rates going up by nearly 5 percentage points year-on-year. As market leader, our growth was ahead of the market, resulting in share gain for us.
During the quarter, we expanded our language offering in redBus and now offer a full-fledged booking and post-sales experience in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada as well. Our international business continues to grow well in all countries as well, with a growing contribution to the overall pie. For our rail business, we continue to bring in new users to the platform besides growth in ancillary revenues, primarily from seat guarantee product. For our cabs business, we continue to scale both airport transfers and intercity cabs. During the peak season, we were able to scale our fulfillment to over 97%, thus catering to the peak demand. On the product front, we scaled the multi-city booking option for outstation cabs, enabling seamless itineraries with multiple stops during this quarter. Our corporate travel business via both platforms, MyBiz and Quest2Travel, is witnessing strong growth.
Our active corporate customer count on MyBiz is now over 64,000+, compared to 56,000 customers during the same quarter last year, and for Q2T, the active customer count has reached 493 large corporates, compared to 334 customers in the same quarter last year. Our ancillaries business is scaling up well. We are witnessing healthy attach rates for products like travel insurance, forex, etc. We have launched various bite-sized insurance to address specific customer needs, leading to an uptick in adoption. Growth in the forex business was driven by cross-sale campaigns, including reaching out to international flights, hotels, and holiday customers, with multiple customer-impacting funnel persuasions.
Lastly, our strong performance this quarter was also ably supported by our marketing and customer reach strategy, with well-thought-through brand campaigns featuring three films based on deep consumer insights for hotels and alternative accommodation users, combined with wider customer reach via effective and efficient media mix. This campaign reached 200+ million consumers across categories, leading to new user acquisition and helping us achieve our highest top-of-the-mind recall in the travel category. With this, let me now hand over the call to Mohit for the financial highlights of the quarter.
Mohit Kabra (Group CFO)
Thanks, Rajesh. Hello, everyone. We are pleased to report all-time new highs in quarterly gross bookings, revenue, and adjusted operating profit during the quarter, which was a seasonally better quarter for leisure travel.
We saw a strong performance across all business segments and, more importantly, from emerging pockets of demand that we have been focusing upon, as well as for new services that we have been adding to our platforms in the last few years. As shared by Rajesh, the highlight of the quarter has been acceleration in bookings growth, along with improvement in operating margins in comparison with the previous quarters for the year. Adjusted operating profit for the quarter came in at $46 million, and adjusted operating profit margin as a percentage of gross bookings came in at 1.76%, which is significantly better than 1.6% during the same quarter last year and 1.65% in the first half of this year. Moving on to our segment results, air ticketing gross bookings for the quarter came in at $1.5 billion, witnessing a year-on-year growth of 23.1% in constant currency.
Adjusted margin stood at $93.8 million, registering a year-on-year growth of 20% in constant currency. While Rajesh has updated about the continued outperformance in international ticketing, let me share some more color on domestic Air Ticketing. In the domestic air market, while daily departures were broadly at similar levels as last quarter, the market growth picked up to almost 9% year-on-year on a flown basis in this seasonally strong quarter. We continue to grow slightly ahead of the market with a continued 30% plus share of the domestic flight ticketing market. Gross bookings for the quarter in hotels and packages segment came in at $681.5 million, registering a growth of 23.4% year-on-year in constant currency. Adjusted margin growth was 24.9% year-on-year in constant currency terms, resulting in an adjusted margin of $121.9 million during the quarter.
Our continued efforts around adding more properties across the country have resulted in us being able to sell room nights across more than 1,850 cities throughout the country and compared to about 1,750 cities during the same quarter last year. This spread has more than doubled from pre-pandemic levels. This augurs well for us as new supply expansion has been faster in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Almost 120 new hotels have opened in the first 10 months, adding about 8,000 rooms in the branded segment in these Tier cities. We have spoken about scaling up direct contracting for international hotels in the recent years, and this strategy has helped us get accommodation bookings in over 160 countries during this quarter.
Earlier, during the fiscal year, we had called out efforts put in to become compliant with GDPR and similar requirements in certain international geographies, which now allows our platforms, including our mobile applications, to be accessed in over 150 countries. As a result, our inbound gross bookings crossed the initial 1,000 room-per-day milestone during this quarter. We believe that the combination of inbound and outbound bookings growth will lead to an increase in the portion of international hotels business in the coming years, which currently stands at around 19% compared to 14.8% during the same quarter last year as part of the segment. In our bus ticketing business, gross bookings for the quarter stood at $328.9 million, growing at 23.6% year-on-year in constant currency. Adjusted margin stood at $35 million, registering a strong year-on-year growth of over 31.3% in constant currency, with demand driven by festivals and holiday seasonality.
Take rates continue to remain stable and in line across all our business segments. Similarly, our customer acquisition costs, that is, marketing and sales promotion expenses, remain efficient and in line with the same quarter last year at 4.9% of gross bookings. This is slightly higher than the 4.6% reported in the previous quarter, linked to change in seasonality. In addition to driving strong bookings and margin growth, we remain focused on building operating cost efficiencies and driving operating leverage in our fixed costs, including personnel, selling, or general administrative expenses. Our disciplined approach to cost management, combined with targeted investments in technology and customer experience, has enabled us to capitalize on this growing travel demand and drive profitable growth.
For instance, backed by our investments in automation and artificial intelligence, our post-sales cost center costs for the quarter increased by just about 7% year-on-year, compared to almost 26% year-on-year increase in bookings and revenue, thus driving cost efficiencies. Considering that this was a seasonally high travel quarter, coupled with the fact that the pickup in demand improved during the later half of the quarter, there has been higher-than-expected deployment in working capital, which is likely to reverse in the coming quarter. Our cash and cash equivalents stand at over $700 million. Besides maintaining a healthy watch list, we will continue to leverage this strong cash position to invest in potential organic and niche inorganic growth opportunities, as well as opportunistic stock buyback programs. In line with this strategy, we signed a business transfer agreement to acquire the Happay Expense Management platform from CRED.
Happay is a leader in expense management with over 900 corporate customers and robust capabilities in product development, data-driven insights, and scalable solutions that consistently drive value and efficiency for corporate clients. Under the agreement, the Happay brand and its expense management business, as well as the dedicated team for this particular business, will transition to MakeMyTrip. This acquisition reinforces our commitment to becoming the go-to platform for comprehensive corporate travel and expense management solutions. We expect the transaction to close in the coming quarter. With that, I'd like to turn the call back to Vipul for Q&A.
Vipul Garg (VP of Investor Relations)
Thanks, Mohit. Any participant who wants to ask a question can click on the raise hand button, and we will take the questions one by one. I already have a few participants. First question is from the line of Sachin Salgaonkar of Bank of America. Sachin, you may please ask your question now.
Sachin Salgaonkar (Managing Director)
Thanks, Vipul. Congrats, management, for another set of fantastic and strong numbers. I have three questions. First question is on Air. I remember in the past, you guys have said that the engine issues for the airplane operators might get resolved, but by the looks of it, you know, this gets delayed. So I wanted to get some color on that in terms of how should we look at the growth at air for calendar year 2025. And a related question, of course, is on the take rate. We do see take rate going down in the quarter. Presume it's largely seasonality, but also wanted to understand if there's any pressure from IndiGo's direct booking out here.
Rajesh Magow (Co-founder and Group CEO)
All right, Sachin, thank you. Thank you, firstly. And yes, you're right.
You know, we had spoken about the supply constraints or the short-term headwinds on the supply side, specifically for domestic market, probably getting and we had called that out. You know, we were hoping that it'll get solved in the coming one or two quarters when we had spoken about it last time. You know, our understanding is that you know, the improvement is happening right now. Improvement is definitely happening on the overall supply because supply new supply is definitely trickling in, but it is at a slow pace. Therefore, you know, I guess you know, for it to get completely resolved, it's getting pushed for a you know, for another quarter or two for it to get completely resolved.
The engine issues, you know, the planes that have been grounded are, again, and they continue to sort of remain grounded because that problem is also not necessarily fully addressed, but I think, you know, where there is a better progress between the two, you know, the new supply versus, you know, existing supply, which is grounded thanks to the engine issues, I think there is positive progress happening on the new supply and not necessarily as the expected progress on the existing supply with the engines down, and that is sort of making it up, so overall, I think we have to see this in perspective. In the beginning of the year, the overall projection on, you know, the growth rate of supply on a net basis was X, let's say.
It is about, you know, there is a lag of about 10%-15% on that, you know, year to date right now. So, you know, the outlook for 2025 is, and we are hoping, you know, sort of that the pace picks up for the new supply and hopefully this situation gets resolved in the next couple of quarters, but certainly there is some delay there. As far as take rate is concerned, maybe Mohit, you can take that.
Mohit Kabra (Group CFO)
Yeah, I think I can take that one. This is largely optical, you know, in line with change in seasonality. As you know, you know, the average selling price, you know, during, you know, Q3 tends to be much higher than Q2.
Therefore, if you look at it from our comparative purposes with Q2, the take rates have come down from about 6.8% to 6.1%. But this is largely close to about 13% overall, 12%-13% kind of you know increase in ASPs on a blended basis. And in fact, if you look at it across domestic, you know the air industry, then the ASP increase was even higher. So this is largely optical coming in from change in pricing regime based on seasonality.
Sachin Salgaonkar (Managing Director)
Got it. Thank you. Very clear. Second question, wanted to understand how should we think about your steady state adjusted EBIT margin. You guys are already at a 1.7%-1.8% right now. Question out here is what stops you from going to, let's say, 2.5%-3% in medium term? You guys are pretty disciplined in cost control. Competition is low. Good operational leverage is playing out.
And of course, there's an added layer of inefficiency what an AI brings in. Any thoughts out here?
Mohit Kabra (Group CFO)
Yeah. So you know this quarter generally, as you know, is a you know seasonally the best quarter of any year, Q3. And therefore, probably Q3 by itself is not necessarily an indicating of you know how much the margins would kind of you know play out. But yes, we have seen a good consistent growth in kind of you know operating margin expansion on the bottom line side. And like I said, you know we currently our aim is to kind of reach the 1.8%-2% or close to about you know 18%-20% on an adjusted margin basis.
So I'm sure as we kind of you know get closer to that or the lower range of you know that range, we'll have a better view on you know how margin expansion can kind of play out in the next few years.
Sachin Salgaonkar (Managing Director)
Got it. And last question, again, wanted to understand if there's anything specific going on at both the interest income and interest expense. Your finance income is down materially from the QoQ basis, much lower than the historical trend. And so is the finance cost, which have been much higher than the historical trend.
Mohit Kabra (Group CFO)
So this would largely also be factoring in some amount of you know forex fluctuations. So could be coming from that. Maybe Vipul can share a slightly more detailed kind of you know note on this with you you know offline.
Sachin Salgaonkar (Managing Director)
Okay, thanks.
Mohit Kabra (Group CFO)
Perfect.
Vipul Garg (VP of Investor Relations)
Thank you, Sachin.
The next question is from the line of Manish Adukia of Goldman Sachs. Manish, you may please ask your question.
Manish Adukia (Equity Research Analyst)
Thank you, Vipul. Hi, good evening, team. Thank you so much for taking my question. And again, echoing what Sachin said, congratulations on all-round performance in the quarter. Really nice to see that. My first question is actually related to that aspect of the business. I mean, growth has been really strong. Mid-20s YoY growth with Rajesh you've been calling out international remains very strong. North of 30 in Air and you know closer to 60% in Hotels. My question here is, like what can cause this number to, let's say, meaningfully come down in the foreseeable future?
I mean, in the international travel in particular, which is now sizable for your business, is there like any kind of one-off that is really driving this consistently strong growth over the last two or three quarters? And it could start tapering off, and so your overall growth may come down, or do you foresee your overall, let's say, gross booking or revenue growth sustained at these levels? Just wanted to get your thoughts and push on the pushes and pulls here and how we should think about that. That's my first question, please.
Rajesh Magow (Co-founder and Group CEO)
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Manish. No, I think it's a great question. So if you really see what we are sort of calling out, you know our consistent growth, robust growth rate performance is coming out of you know sort of two things combined. One, macro, and the other one, micro.
You know on the execution front, I think we've been able to put our best foot forward across the board, you know including sort of you know mopping up demand from various segments, various channels, you know thanks to our omnichannel strategy and so on. But it is also sort of supported by the overall macro trend where fundamentally the consumer behavior and habits are changing in terms of on the back of rising income, rising disposable income in favor of spending more you know like or rather the larger portion of disposable income in favor of travel and experiences. And it's not only travel, you know as I was trying to highlight even in the on the call early on, it's also about experiences like concerts and stuff.
You know, and again, we are also getting the sort of side benefit of the travel that is happening because of some of those events as well. So you know, so to answer your question of what could possibly go wrong, which could slow down this growth a bit, I would say it's largely macro. You know, so if, let's say, you know, for some reasons, if the you know sort of spending goes down or the consumption pattern changes with respect to spending more on travel and experience, while we do believe because we've been now seeing consistently like a you know more sort of fundamental change in the spending pattern for travel.
But let's say for some reason that changes because just the overall economy is not growing as robust or you know there is some other macro event that happens because of which the overall sort of demand gets impacted. You know, maybe that could be one of the reasons why it would relatively slow down. But you know, I the way we see it is you know that of course any macro event we can't really control. But what we are confident about is that you know whatever rate of growth that the industry will be growing at, we are confident of growing at a higher rate of growth than that for sure, you know sort of regardless of the situation.
But if there is one aspect that could potentially change the rate of growth would be just this overall macro event and you know just general slowdown in economy if that happens.
Manish Adukia (Equity Research Analyst)
Thank you, Rajesh. Extremely helpful. And my second question is regarding competition, and it has two subparts, one from the airline direct side and second on the OTA side. Now on the airline direct, we've all seen in the last few months, you know just IndiGo being slightly more competitive than what they used to be historically. But despite that, it seems to have had no impact on your numbers, your market shares up, your growth looks phenomenal, right? So one would love to you know get your thoughts as to why IndiGo, which is the largest airline in the country despite them being relatively more competitive, has had no impact on your business.
If you can just help us understand the nuances, you know, why you're still being able to maintain or grow your market share. And second, on the OTA side, we've now been in a phase for maybe almost two years or more than that where we've not seen any meaningful competition, definitely not in hotels and maybe even reducing competition in the airline side. And again, your thoughts as to why that's the case? I mean, travel seems to be doing really well. I mean, international travel, domestic travel, all-round growth is very, very strong. But despite that, from the OTA side, it looks like a very stable competitive intensity environment, maybe even declining. So again, your thoughts as to why that's the case and if you foresee that changing in the foreseeable future? Thank you.
Rajesh Magow (Co-founder and Group CEO)
Yeah, Manish.
You know on the first one, and I think I was you know sharing my thoughts even on the last quarter call. You know from our point of view, Manish, the way we see it is our focus is and it goes hand in hand, right? Not necessarily we have to take supplier direct as a direct competition. And if we start to sort of focus more on the larger pie of the market that is sort of available for the intermediaries as well, right? And you know if we, let's say, whatever might be the supplier direct share today and even if that is growing incrementally, the rest of the you know sort of portion of the pie is very, very large.
If we are able to stay focused on that and able to sort of get the lion's share of that pie, I think that is, that has been our strategy, that has been our focus. And we've been able to execute our strategies well to ensure that, you know, that continues to happen. And that is sort of consistently reflecting on our overall market share, let's say, on the domestic market holding on or incrementally improving. And on the underpenetrated market, on the international side where there's relatively more competition on the supplier ecosystem. And from an internet penetration standpoint, it is underpenetrated. We've just doubled down on improving the customer experience, you know, or sort of attacking that particular segment 360 degrees and sort of tapping into the potential.
So that has been our strategy, and that, you know, we'll continue to keep doing that. And, you know, it might happen with the more players going online is that, you know, overall online penetration overall continues to sort of grow and with because there is still, you know, sort of a lot of headroom that is left for a lot of the business that could potentially move online. So I think that's the way we've seen it, and we'll continue to keep seeing it that way. And, you know, it's sort of working out well for us. Now, as far as the second part is concerned, again, I think I would link it back to, you know, the answer that I was giving to your first question.
I think one of the factors that has also worked in our favor is to just, you know besides our B2C very strong retail segment that we've been you know sort of consistent at you know from a growth perspective, from retention perspective on the back of the experience and the innovation that we keep doing on our product side, we've also been able to very successfully execute our reach to the other customer segments, you know corporate business, for example, which is relatively a very young business for us, four, five years old. But we've significantly sort of scaled that business already in the short span of time.
And similarly, you know our travel agents, you know my partner channel, similarly our you know sort of other you know affiliate strategy with the other affiliate partners from where we've been able to sort of get the long tail demand as well. And you know penetrate deep into the market to get the new users you know on a consistent basis every quarter. So every quarter, if you really see the customers transacted on us, you know a combination of the very high repeat rate and you know very healthy new user acquisition every single quarter. Because of you know sort of this multiple channel strategy and reaching out to the new consumer segments is sort of helping us you know sort of grow our pie and get better sort of share from the market.
I think that is perhaps the single largest reason for and besides obviously relentless execution and across the board is sort of helping us, you know, stay ahead in the curve and stay ahead in the market.
Manish Adukia (Equity Research Analyst)
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Rajesh, and all the best.
Rajesh Magow (Co-founder and Group CEO)
Thank you, Manish.
Vipul Garg (VP of Investor Relations)
Thanks, Manish. The next question is from the line of Vijit Jain of Citi. Vijit, you may please ask your question.
Vijit Jain (Director)
Thanks, Vipul. Congratulations, team. I echo everyone else. Great set of results. My first question is, you know, typically this current quarter is somewhat seasonally weaker, right? Coming off after 3Q. But as you called out earlier, you know, both these events, Coldplay and Mahakumba, multiple day events in January.
And I think Indian Hotels in the call called out spillover of some New Year-end demand into the first week of January as well. So do you think generally speaking, 4Q, at least from your vantage point right now in January, seems like it's going to be less seasonal versus previous years?
Rajesh Magow (Co-founder and Group CEO)
Well, you know, Vijit, I don't think it's going to be any different from the previous, you know, years. We don't really anticipate that just from a seasonality standpoint, you know. And that is specifically, and we should keep that, you know, sort of nuance point in mind that when we call it that April, May, June, and October, November, December, a seasonal quarter for us, favorable seasonal quarter for us, that's mostly for the leisure use case.
Now in our business, we've got you know pretty much sort of addressing and reaching out to the consumers for our all kinds of use cases, including a lot of that non-leisure use cases as well. Like for example, pilgrimage tourism, you know which is sort of emerging as a new growth segment in India particularly. Now that has no season. You know that is across the year, the pilgrimage travel that happens. Similarly, business use case, business travel use case and so on, right? So and you know some of the new use cases that you know of late, that sort of have been emerging as well, like you know celebration of occasions you know linked to, let's say, staying in alternative accommodation kind of a use case.
You know, so now our business is a combination of all these use cases from a consumer demand standpoint. Therefore, you know, when we look at the seasonality aspect of it, we should just with respect to our numbers, we should keep that thing in mind. You know, sort of look at the pattern for the last historical few years and quarters for us to be able to sort of draw some pattern out of it. But specifically, this quarter, will it be significantly different on seasonality as we see coming out of October and November, December? Because this is relatively low season quarter from a leisure use case standpoint, we don't see any different sort of pattern, at least that as of now.
Vijit Jain (Director)
Correct. Thanks, Rajesh.
Raj, my second question is, so you know, while your customer inducement spends, the way you split your A&P spending, right, that has been fairly stable in that low 3% of GBV number. The brand marketing expenses or the you know, the other head marketing and sales promotion expenses are now in the upper $40 million a quarter range, right? So I guess my question, I think, is how much of those expenses are directly attributable to bookings? And if you can give a broad sense of how much are you spending on you know top-of-the-funnel type of things, what would be called a pure brand marketing, so to say? I'm just trying to get a sense of you know that what is the percent of marketing spend, which is not directly attributable to any bookings as such.
Mohit Kabra (Group CFO)
So Vijit, maybe I can take that.
You know, I would say another way to look at the overall customer acquisition cost or marketing and sales promotion would be to kind of look at the trends you know by seasonality. So it would be over this year, largely these expenses have you know kind of trended at around 4.6%-4.7% in the seasonally you know kind of lower leisure travel kind of seasonality quarters. They have trended at closer to about 4.9%-5% in the seasonally better quarters from a leisure travel demand point of view. You know, as you can imagine, we tend to kind of you know tweak these in line with seasonality because it makes so much more sense to kind of you know spend slightly more in a better seasonality.
You know, the other reason I'm kind of saying is you know if you look at it even from an absolute dollar spend on direct brand marketing, you know the size and scale of these you know kind of you know campaigns would keep evolving in line with the changing kind of you know size of the business and the emergence of kind of you know brands. So that has a you know kind of a slightly longer life cycle. So I think just looking at the trends over respective seasonalities by quarter would give you a good indication.
Vijit Jain (Director)
Okay, great. Sure. My next question is you know, just the last bit of question you did mention you know, on the GenAI side, you talked about Myra.
A lot of you know discussions that I see on GenAI seems to also suggest that one of the first things that it will be able to do end to end is travel bookings. So your thoughts on that, I guess they call it agentic AI, first use case will be in holiday bookings and travel bookings and stuff. Your thoughts on that and is that something that you guys are experimenting with?
Rajesh Magow (Co-founder and Group CEO)
Very much, Vijit. And you know as part of our GenAI strategy for the last several quarters now, you know our focus has been just picking up any potential application of this on in the context of our business. We've been just sort of you know deploying our engineering bandwidth on that and you know implementing that and going live with. And that includes what you just mentioned, using the agentic AI.
You know if you look at some of our chatbots that are already live and you know I mentioned you know recently we've gone live with our hotel and accomodation funnel as well. That is actually it is completely a new user interface, interactive user interface for hotel booking. And you're addressing all kinds of queries you know related to the hotel booking and then eventually sort of helping doing the booking as well. So you know my take on this is that this is a journey. You know while on the face of it, you know everyone is sort of so excited and passionate about GenAI in particular. But it's going to be a journey on two counts.
One, of course, and from our point of view, we are, you know, this is one of the key strategic items for us as far as overall business strategy is concerned for the last several quarters, and we'll continue to keep sort of marching ahead and try and ensure that we, you know, we sort of lead this at least from a travel use case standpoint or whatever you know promise this technology has to offer. But the other aspect which is equally important is also going to be adoption, because some of these, you know, sort of new, let's say, GenAI-based interactive front ends that you would end up sort of developing, and that has to be also adopted, you know, by the consumers, and that will, that is, always a journey.
You know, and our endeavor is to make it more and more intuitive, more and more accurate, more and more relevant, personalized, you know super convenient, etc. So that the adoption is faster. But it is also a question of, you know I'm very used to the existing interface. And then you know the other one has to be a really compelling you know sort of alternative for me to be able to make the shift. So it's always a journey because you have all kinds of consumer cohorts in our country. But from our point of view, we are like I said, that it is a core part of our strategy.
We will definitely, and we are looking at and working very closely in terms of, you know, sort of partnering with the right sort of partners both from content standpoint and technology standpoint. We are making sure that we, you know, add not only we develop and go live but also learn from it and keep making the improvements. Because there are still a lot of open-ended things that still need to be solved, whether it is latency or accuracy, etc., which is, and you know, it's also the cost, which is getting solved every alternative, you know, sort of new model that comes into the picture. We are adopting all of that, so we are absolutely sort of deep into it already.
And you know pretty much every quarter you will see you know something or the other you know on GenAI coming from MakeMyTrip.
Vijit Jain (Director)
All right, thanks, Rajesh. Those are my questions. Thank you so much.
Vipul Garg (VP of Investor Relations)
Thanks, Vijit. The next question is from the line of Gaurav Rateria of Morgan Stanley. Gaurav, you may please ask your question now. Gaurav, we are not able to hear you.
Rajesh Magow (Co-founder and Group CEO)
Gaurav is not on mute, but something wrong with his. Now he's on mute, I think. Maybe we give the opportunity to the next caller.
Vipul Garg (VP of Investor Relations)
Yes. Yeah. In the meantime, we'll take the next question. Next question is from the line of Ankur Rudra of JPMorgan. Ankur, you may please ask your question now.
Ankur Rudra (Executive Director)
Thank you. And a very strong quarter indeed. Just first question is on the demand side.
You know clearly the demand from your side looks extremely solid and extremely strong. But several sections of the consumption basket continue to point out signs of some sort of weakness including parts of your platform peers. You don't seem to be seeing this in the last quarter. A, can you confirm that is something being hidden by the strong headline numbers because of pricing? And B, in the current quarter, have you seen any signs of that in any of your customer cohorts which are seeing any impact of you know consumption slowdown?
Rajesh Magow (Co-founder and Group CEO)
No, Ankur, it's a good question. And I think it's a good observation with respect to some of the other categories as well. And you know there have been murmurs around some slowdown in some of the discretionary categories specifically.
But as far as travel and tourism, you know sort of spend from a consumption pattern is concerned, we've been lucky. You know October, as I was trying to highlight even as part of the you know the script, that October we was muted for us, but November and December, it picked up really well. So the overall seasonality for the quarter actually played out quite nicely. And there's nothing hidden. To your point on pricing, there's absolutely nothing hidden because if you see the volumes growth, that is actually quite robust as well. So part of that, as I was just responding to the earlier question as well, part of that is also from our side, obviously, you know it's just expanding our reach to different consumer segments as well.
But we haven't really seen, at least in the October, November, December quarter, which we are reporting out, you know, any sort of material signs of, you know, slowdown, if you will. Now we will have to obviously watch the situation, how it develops, let's say, for the other categories as well. Because if you look at the overall economy projections, even for the next couple of years, they continue to be robust. So I'm hoping whatever is happening to the other categories is also an aberration. But you know, having said that, we'll keep watching the space very carefully.
Ankur Rudra (Executive Director)
Thank you. And Rajesh, is there any difference in the nature of or the strength of demand you see between the budget traveler category and the more premium traveler category, perhaps by, you know, the app, Goibibo users versus MakeMyTrip users in any sense?
Rajesh Magow (Co-founder and Group CEO)
You know what, and we looked at that because you know this is quite natural for us to sort of look at different cohorts as well. And the good news is, at least for this quarter, we saw all segments growing. And I was alluding to that again in the script as well. We saw pretty much budget, mid segment, premium, et cetera, all of them growing. And premium segment growth has been, you know as we've been sort of calling out for the last few quarters as well, it's been very robust. You know. And clearly, it's a function of you know rising income, more disposable income, you know and and sort of habit changing to spend more on travel and experience, more so for premium category and higher upper middle class category.
But even for budget, you know, budget segment specifically for hotels, for example, between MakeMyTrip and Goibibo, we saw that growth sort of coming back as well. So at least for us on our platform, both brands put together, in the last quarter, we didn't really see any sort of you know particular specific cohort you know slowdown in any of those cohorts actually.
Ankur Rudra (Executive Director)
Thank you, Rajesh. Rajesh, you know we've seen a significant amount of currency volatility in the last you know few months of the quarter. I don't know whether it's happened or anything this quarter, but you know looking at past cycles, have you seen any kind of impact of this either directly or with a lag in consumer behavior when they see headline prices change for certain destinations?
Mohit Kabra (Group CFO)
Ankur, at least you know, you know in this seasonally strong quarter, we haven't seen any impact like you know Rajesh called out. You know when it comes to international flights as well as you know international hotels, you know we have continued to see strong demand. And you know particularly you know from those regions where you know visa has been made more easier or kind of you know visa relaxations have been offered, the demand continues to remain pretty strong.
Rajesh Magow (Co-founder and Group CEO)
Okay if I may just add one additional point to what Mohit just said. I mean just the historical perspective, what we've seen in the past, you know whenever there is this fluctuation, I mean it's natural for if you know rupee becomes weaker and you know some particular destination becomes more expensive.
What we've seen is that you know, we don't see change of people dropping the plans for travel. They just look for an alternative destination, you know which is relatively sort of cheaper where you know less, let's say, you know less impact on the of the currency fluctuation, whether it is overseas or domestic. But you know we haven't really seen people particularly changing the plans for travel, at least historically.
Ankur Rudra (Executive Director)
Thank you. You've called out this repeatedly that there's been a huge amount of support and growth on the B2B and the B2B2C segments and also your international business. Could you remind us you know how much of you know of your business is from there? Also, if you can estimate what sort of share MakeMyTrip has here, perhaps it's a bit lower than your traditional consumer segments.
Mohit Kabra (Group CFO)
On the international side, you know our mix of business coming in from you know outbound or inbound or international transactions per se overall, all put together, that mix has now moved to about 25%. And on coming to B2B, particularly on the corporate side, we had shared some numbers. You know, if I recall it in the first quarter of this year, we had called out that corporate bookings have kind of you know scaled up to close to about $200 million run rate on a quarterly basis. So those are the two kind of things that I could call out as indicative. Any estimate for how your share over here will be versus the rest of the business? So corporate, like Rajesh had said, is you know early stage for us.
We have been in the B2B side of you know things only for the last four, five years. And therefore, we are kind of pretty much underpenetrated to the market. Our estimate is at least you know a fourth of the market you know should be you know business driven or corporate driven, if not higher. So there's a long way to go in terms of you know trying to catch up on that ratio.
Ankur Rudra (Executive Director)
Understood. Just last question, you again spoke about events and pilgrimage. Is it possible to quantify what size of the travel market or I mean if you can estimate also for your own bookings is coming from there?
Mohit Kabra (Group CFO)
Actually, pilgrimage you know as such or some of the other you know kind of you know new emerging demand segments, like say for instance, you know all these concert related kind of you know demand that has now started coming off, our share of volume coming from you know these kind of you know travel requirements historically has been pretty low. And therefore, these are now new opportunities that we are kind of dialing up. And therefore, you know doing a full holistic kind of a you know, kind of you know improvement in these areas. So we're kind of shoring up supply very significantly you know in these cities.
And also kind of you know trying to build the right kind of you know, you know platforms or channels to be able to cater to the demand that emerges you know for these kind of specific travel requirements, both B2B and B2C. So I think this is more slightly longer term to incubate, just like on the corporate side, right now pretty nascent.
Ankur Rudra (Executive Director)
Okay, appreciate the color. Thank you so much and best of luck.
Rajesh Magow (Co-founder and Group CEO)
Thanks, thanks, thanks, Ankur.
Vipul Garg (VP of Investor Relations)
Thanks, Ankur. And we'll take the last question now from Gaurav for Morgan Stanley. Gaurav, please go ahead.
Gaurav Rateria (Executive Director)
Hi, hope I'm audible now.
Rajesh Magow (Co-founder and Group CEO)
Yes, you are.
Gaurav Rateria (Executive Director)
Yeah, happy New Year and congratulations on great set of numbers. I have a few questions.
I want to understand what's the pace of a new customer addition per quarter that we are seeing now, let's say, versus what we were seeing last year?
Rajesh Magow (Co-founder and Group CEO)
Actually, pretty robust, Gaurav, there as well, and happy New Year to you too. You know, our and just to give you maybe one data point and you can calculate that. So our repeat rate has been, you know, on a quarterly basis, has been pretty robust. It used to be about 70%-71%. Last quarter was about 73%. You know, and this is lifetime to date. You know, this is like 73% of the transactions coming from the lifetime to date customers. And our overall, you know, customer base has now, you know, lifetime to date, all three brands put together has touched about 80 million, you know, up from 77 million.
Typical contribution from new users has been in the range of between 25%-30%. Effectively, it just continues, you know, at the same scale. Every quarter, we are obviously adding more and the scale is only going up in one direction. But the ratio of new users and the repeat hasn't really changed a lot. You know, so it is 70/30, you know, going to, let's say, 73/27, 72/28, kind of. So broadly, it remains the same range.
Mohit Kabra (Group CFO)
Also, in absolute terms, Gaurav, the net new addition, you know, to the platforms generally ranges anywhere between 1.5 million-2.5 million customers during any quarter. So that is a typical kind of, you know, new addition that we see.
Gaurav Rateria (Executive Director)
Got it. So, you know, keeping this into mind and the comment that you explained about your focus on how you look at the market and, you know, beyond near-term competition issues, et cetera, why the ad spend, as percentage of gross booking in this nine months of fiscal year appears higher than the last year? What explains this increase? Is it more investment-led? Is it more defending any, you know, new competition? Just trying to understand that.
Mohit Kabra (Group CFO)
You're talking about the marketing spends, only, you know, versus say, for instance, marketing and sales promotions put together?
Gaurav Rateria (Executive Director)
Yeah, like put together. I'm looking at the number combined.
Mohit Kabra (Group CFO)
The combined number largely has kind of trended in line with, I would say, last year. And, you know, like we had said, we would want to kind of keep this at below 5% levels.
Like I was just mentioning on another, you know, question earlier, this number has trended at about 4.6% of gross bookings during, say, seasonally weaker quarters, you know, say, for instance, Q2, Q4, and generally trended at around 4.9%-5% in seasonally stronger quarters like Q1 and Q3. So there hasn't really been any kind of substantial change or increase per se.
Gaurav Rateria (Executive Director)
Okay, got it. Lastly, you know, it would be great to get some color on competition in the hotel segment, if you could layer it for different sub-segments, whether it's for premium, whether it's for budget. What would be your rough market share within the overall online market in these segments? Thank you.
Mohit Kabra (Group CFO)
Okay, a little difficult to kind of, you know, call out, you know, market shares in the hotel segment, as you know, because, you know, there's no kind of industry report, you know, unlike we kind of, you know, get it from DGCA in case of, you know, domestic flight ticketing. Our high-level estimate would be that ballpark about, you know, 18%-20% of the market would have moved online and we would possibly be about closer to about half of that. You know, that is our very high-level broad estimate, in terms of the size of the market.
Again, if you look at it in terms of, you know, competitive dynamics, comparatively kind of, you know, better in the hotels or in the accommodation space, say, versus the ticketing space because pretty much, you know, all the OTAs have a much larger kind of, you know, skew towards ticketing, compared to accommodation. And therefore, to some extent, you know, competition on the hotel side is also with the global OTAs because they tend to kind of be, you know, more focused on the accommodation space and particularly in the, I would say, mid to premium segment. But again, their larger share of, you know, their kind of volumes will be more inbound, whereas, you know, we focus a lot more on domestic and outbound.
Gaurav Rateria (Executive Director)
Got it. Thank you and all the very best.
Vipul Garg (VP of Investor Relations)
Thank you, Gaurav. This was our last question over to you, Rajesh, for your closing comments.
Rajesh Magow (Co-founder and Group CEO)
Thank you, Vipul, and thank you, everyone. You know, and great set of questions from everyone and thank you for appreciating and thank you for your patience, and we'll see you again next quarter.
Mohit Kabra (Group CFO)
Thanks. Bye.
Vipul Garg (VP of Investor Relations)
Thank you, everyone. You may now disconnect the call.