Rajesh Magow
Analyst · Jefferies
Thanks, Deep, and greetings, everyone. I would like to begin by reminding everyone of our vision for fiscal 2020 and beyond, which is to become the travel super arc for Indian travelers when researching and planning, shopping and booking travel within or outside of India. The foundation of our super arc vision is to provide comprehensive set of travel offerings, allow greater flexibility in booking different combination of products, generate personalized selection and offer, enable affordability in payment options and ensure quality customer service. In recent quarters, we have made significant progress on this front by adding new products and services, including airport transfers; inter-city cabs; activities and experiences, both at source and destination cities; online visa booking for some key destinations; affordable payment options, like EMI or Book Now and Pay Later, et cetera. Furthermore, we have also made significant progress in expanding our customer support channels from call centers to self-service channel and chatbots on all our brands to ensure we make ourselves available to provide timely customer support and resolution at any stage of customers' journey post booking. We believe that these focused investments will help further strengthen our brands in consumers' minds, leading to growth in our business. Now I would like to share some quick highlights from our Q2 and first half financial results, which Mohit will share in greater details later. For Q2 of fiscal year 2020, MakeMyTrip group achieved gross bookings of nearly $1.5 billion, representing a constant currency growth of over 20%. This represents nearly $3.2 billion in gross bookings and constant currency growth of over 22% for the first half of fiscal 2020. Our Q2 adjusted revenue grew by nearly 14% on a constant currency basis to $181.1 million. For the first six months of this fiscal year, adjusted revenue reached $379.6 million with a constant currency growth of over 17% year-on-year. During the quarter, we also achieved a company quarterly record of nearly 7.4 million room nights in the stand-alone online hotels business even as our focus, as communicated earlier, has been to drive greater promotional spend efficiencies. From a supply standpoint, we further expanded choice and selection for customers to over 66,500 accommodation properties bookable within India, which include 16,500 alternative accommodation properties. Additionally, nearly three quarters of these hotels received active bookings from our platform, which underscores the value added to the hotel partners who participate and distribute through our platform. Our investments in alternative accommodations continued in Q2 as we focused on driving greater awareness of this fast-growing segment. Encouragingly, we are seeing strong interest from users, and we will continue to invest to drive greater adoption via a differentiated product experience for bookers and hosts. As for outbound travel, we now offer over 10,000 international properties directly contracted on our platform. This is, as reported earlier, over and above the third-party supply that we have. In Q2, we also integrated more properties via our expanded relationship with Ctrip to offer even more choice to our outbound travelers. Most importantly, we are seeing strong room nights and bookings growth despite weak outbound demand and a seasonably slow travel quarter. Now I would like to share highlights from our product enhancements that are helping deliver a best-in-class customer experience. In our hotels and alternative accommodations business, we continue to enrich our content and optimize its presentation to users. We have integrated a new location architecture to help map global hotel locations, more precisely, which will help guests reach their hotels faster. As for brand Goibibo, we introduced a new visual theme to further enhance the online shopping experience. We've also made improvements to unify our hotel supply architecture to simplify connections from multiple sources in order to provide the best data to our shoppers. Furthermore, we continue to enhance our platform by welcoming content shared by users. Our improved reviewed collection form is helping gather data from 1/3 of bookers and has resulted in 15,000 ratings, 7,000 images and 1,000 videos collected on daily basis. We are very excited by the traction seen so far and certainly believe these efforts will help drive greater differentiation of our brands and achieve higher retention on our platforms. Additionally, we have made the experience for suppliers even better with ongoing improvements to our hotel extranet system. Via this system, hotel guests and hosts can now connect directly to solve any concern during a guest stay in real time. Our system has also improved capabilities to analyze a property's performance relative to nearby competitors and enable suppliers to adjust pricing and inventory allocation more optimally. We believe empowering hotel suppliers with friendly tools and data analysis will help them to maximize their business potential, both in terms of filling out more rooms and driving better yields when working with our platform. Now I would also like to discuss on the other pillar of our super arc vision, which is to provide greater affordability to our customers, given India's relatively low credit to income ratio. We have built credit approval models, leveraging our huge base of life-to-date customer data and launch an equal monthly installment option, or EMI, with select banks to help customers purchase large-value transactions. Today, I'm pleased to share we have participation from all major banks across India, helping to facilitate travel purchases on our platform and even more excited to share that we are registering more than $50 million in bookings a month from this program. In addition, we launched Trip Money, which is our own credit offering by partnering with NBFCs or non-bank financial companies to provide instant digital travel loans within five minutes of application. This new program has launched across 60 nationwide locations and is popular for travelers making their first international trip and with families taking a domestic holiday. Now allow me to share some highlights from our flights business, which continues to outpace overall market growth. During Q2, as part of our sharper customer segmentation exercise, we introduced fares to cater to the needs of the students. This segment often requires additional services, like excess baggage, but at a more affordable price point. Our bookers today also have the option of booking a cab transfer to and from the airport all within the same transaction. Furthermore, we then sync their booked flight information with cab schedules in order to manage any delays, which enhances users' experience. Leveraging the power of machine learning, we've been successful in dynamically pricing outbound air tickets and have been able to reduce promotional spend with little impact to our conversion rates. Lastly, we have integrated the international air ticketing supply offered by Ctrip to make more content and fares available to our outbound travelers, which should make our products even more appealing to new online users. Now I would like to share some updates on our wholesale customer expense journey, particularly on chatbots, which has been a constant area of focus for us. In Q2, our chatbot usage volumes have seen a quarter-on-quarter increase of 15% on brand Goibibo. Furthermore, comprehension rates in identifying customer queries on the chatbot, including complicated travel queries, have reached 89% for MakeMyTrip and about 95% on Goibibo. These improvements were driven by our use of cutting-edge, natural language processing models. On brand Goibibo, we are able to automate more than 90% of our customer queries. On brand MakeMyTrip, we have witnessed a 25% uptick in quarter-on-quarter customer satisfaction scores. At the same time, MakeMyTrip's customers can now send us their queries via voice message in addition to text format. Lastly, our Goibibo chatbot, Gia, has been deeply integrated with our hotel extranet system to allow travelers to directly interact with the property owner before and during their stay. As we continue to scale our business, we are now well placed to seamlessly automate customer queries and further improve customer satisfaction. Now I like to share some of the accomplishments within our bus ticketing business, led by the redBus brand. In the quarter, redBus continued to achieve robust growth driven by the continued shift from off-line to online bookings as well as new supply additions from nontraditional bus markets in Southern and Western India. In addition, eight operated bus companies continue to help drive growth with new customer acquisitions and bookings, as they seek to rapidly digitize their inventory management solution. While work on the supply side has seen growth, we have continued to make the experience better for users. During Q2, we harmonized the experience across all our channels to enable faster time-to-market of new features and make the app perform better for users. Similarly, the adoption of our bus supplier facing up continues to accelerate driven by improvements that leverage machine learning. We have taken the insights from customer reviews and ratings in order to further help bus operator improve their quality of service. Lastly, we introduced an event transportation booking option for organizers to secure group ticketing and provide a network of on-demand bus boarding points to further expand our addressable customer reach. Now let me hand it over to Mohit, who will share more details of the quarter.