Yatra Continues To Improve Margin In Q3 FY19 With Slight Growth In Revenue

Online travel company Yatra has posted financial results for the third quarter of FY19 with a 7% improvement in its quarterly revenue and a nearly 60% yearly control on its losses.

In a statement, Dhruv Shringi, cofounder and CEO, Yatra, said that the company showed substantial progress towards its aim of breakeven EBITDA as it improved its revenue from operations by 48% and controlled EBITDA loss by 60.3%, reaching $2.2 Mn (INR 15.3 Cr).

Shringi said, “This was done on the back of proactive steps such as optimising our marketing cost, driving up our cross-sell revenues, closing some loss-making accounts in our corporate customer portfolio, outsourcing our call-center, and closing our physical retail stores — all of which should lead to better structural profitability as we continue to drive growth across all our businesses.”

The company’s financial performance highlights for Q3 FY19 include:

• The revenue reached $31.7 Mn (INR 220.47 Cr)
• The losses from operations reached $4.6Mn (INR 32.5 Cr), a 48.4% control Y-o-Y
• Adjusted revenue from Hotels and Packages reached $6.9 Mn (INR 48.3 Cr), a 5.7% Y-o-Y growth
• Adjusted revenue from Air Ticketing was $20.8 Mn (INR 144.8 Cr), a 5.7% Y-o-Y growth
• Profit for the period was $2 Mn (INR 13.5 Cr)
• The gross bookings for air ticketing increased 13.4% Y-o-Y reaching $333Mn (INR 2,318 Cr)
• The gross bookings for hotels and packages decreased 8% Y-o-Y reaching $46 Mn (INR 320.9 Cr)

On the quantitative front:

• Air passengers booked increased 7.8% Y-o-Y reaching 2.4 Mn
• Packages booked by passengers fell 36% Y-o-Y reaching 29K
• Standalone room nights booked increased 19.2% reaching 600K

“On the business travel front, we believe the recent acquisition of the corporate travel business of PL Worldways, and new customer wins like India’s third-largest bank, will enable us to continue to strengthen our market leadership position in the country. In addition, we expect the Indian travel industry to experience healthy growth in 2019 as some of the macro headwinds facing the aviation industry in mid-2018 seem to have abated,” Shringi said.

The company also reiterated its guidance of more than 20% growth in adjusted revenue for FY19 and a meaningful improvement in its Adjusted EBITDA loss for the fiscal year.

After the announcement of results, Yatra’s stock listed on NASDAQ opened with a high but failed to get a big jump.