Rajesh Magow
Analyst · AMBIT Capital
Thank you, Deep. I hope everyone listening in today is staying healthy and safe during these tough times. On our last earnings call, based on the trends seen in January, we were quite hopeful of a continued pace of travel recovery, which we saw throughout most of February. However, by March, as COVID infections began to rise, sentiment and demand for travel began to moderate. While the current pandemic-related disruptions remain in effect and is likely to persist for some more time, I am hopeful and optimistic that this crisis will be behind us in due course as state-level restrictions, lockdowns and the gradual ramp in vaccination will be effective in controlling the second wave. In the meantime, we fall back on the playbook that we developed during the first wave to focus on user experience improvement projects on our platforms as well as keeping costs under control to navigate through the second wave. As you can see, our Q4 financial performance was quite encouraging, where travel recovery momentum quarter-on-quarter continued across travel categories. The highlights of the quarter were the recovery of all key segments on combined basis, recorded of over 70% relative to the same quarter a year ago as well as significant improvement in adjusted operating profit, both quarter and on -- both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year. Mohit will share full details in his section in a bit. Despite the pandemic effect, the scale of our company continued to increase and reached 51 million live to date customers in Q4 of fiscal year '21. At the same time, new user contribution to our brands also increased by 200 basis points since February of last year to represent 22% of the total this March. While we have been able to capture new users, our repeat rates have also remained consistently high, reaching 70% in Q4. Helping to drive this retention is also the fact that more than 2/3 of our traffic comes directly onto the platform. Now I would like to share some of the achievements made with our various businesses starting with our accommodation businesses, where we recovered more than 70% of the room nights when compared to the same quarter a year ago. During Q4, we continued to see more hotels reopen as 75% of the room inventory on our network were ready and able to take bookings at the end of the quarter. Continuing demand for short-duration getaways in the premium category hotels and pricing trends from past quarters allowed us to grow our contribution to exceed pre-pandemic levels for our premium category partners. Similarly, demand for alternative accommodations remains strong, even as hotel demand gained ground in Q4, as more than 63% of these types of socially distant possible properties were open for bookings during the quarter. While our team focused on business recovery, we also continued to make the right long-term investments back into the business. For example, we introduced a new room type shopping experience, easily allowing customers to compare between different amenities and room rates. The better content also showcase room types more effectively, helping drive sales of higher room categories as the value proposition became more apparent to shoppers. While much focus was placed on customers, we also combined the supply management functionalities onto 1 common platform across all brands. This will allow us to onboard and manage supply from all partner sources seamlessly. We integrated our supply pricing engine across all our brands, making the system react and respond faster to customer searches. Lastly, for our alternative accommodation users, our previously announced pre-booking chat function continued to gain popularity. This feature allows potential guests to get clarifications and inputs from hosts and increases the confidence of booking alternative accommodations. Now let me share the pace of recovery that we witnessed during Q4 within our air ticketing business. Before the second wave hit us in late March, air capacity recovery within the domestic market reached nearly 73% on average for the quarter versus pre-pandemic. During the quarter, our domestic passenger segments booked had recovered to nearly 84% of the levels achieved a year ago, while outbound air ticketing recovery remains muted due to the closed borders. This continued recovery momentum allowed us to maintain industry-leading market share within the domestic market, which had been improving incrementally since the pandemic began a year ago. Recovery was led by consumer's pent-up demand post the lockdowns and COVID restrictions for leisure destinations with destinations like Goa and Dehradun seeing recovery in excess of 100% during most of the quarter. Just like the quarter before, business-focused destinations like Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore continued to lag leisure travel with recovery rates in the mid 60%. During Q4, our flight team continued to deliver relevant products to bookers including price lock to give bookers an option to hold a good fare for a nominal fee. We revamped our multi-city search and booking experience, enabling users to pick and choose from optimized combination of flights, reducing time and effort needed to create and book a trip. We reduced load times further to speed up our mobile web experience, leading to a 20% increase in conversion rates via this channel. Now let me move on to share an update on our bus ticketing business, which has seen seat inventory recover in the private bus operator market in excess of 90% of pre-COVID days. This improvement in supply has enabled us to recover nearly 70% of bus ticketing seats sold when compared to Q4 a year ago. Furthermore, state road transport corporations, or SRTCs, have also greatly increased seat inventory on our distribution platform as part of their ongoing efforts to push digitization and contactless ticketing. In fact, SRTC inventory available for distribution is now 35% greater than pre-pandemic days, giving a sizable long-term headroom for growth as this bus segment is still largely underpenetrated online. During Q4, we also saw a favorable regulatory change by the Union government, lowering licensing or permit charges for the interstate bus operators which should lower prices for travelers and set the stage for longer and near bus routes to emerge going forward. In addition, as availability of all modes of transport had been affected due to the pandemic, we had seen a travel shift towards buses. As a result, we have partnered with IRCTC, or Indian Railways, to power their bus ticketing platform. In Q4, we also launched Primo, an invite-only program open only to highly rated bus services on redBus. Travelers can now book from this collection of bus service to enjoy the best possible onboard experience for the journey. The program provides operators constant feedback via data mining of customer ratings and reviews, helping to improve their operations, quality and occupancy rates. As a team, we continue be to very optimistic of this business segment's long-term growth prospects. Now I would like to share a quick update on our other ground transport business, which includes cabs and train ticketing. This ground-focused business was launched during the beginning of 2019 and continued to see solid traction, predominantly from the hinterlands of India. Furthermore, this segment also helped to capture nearly 24% of all new users onto our platform. To improve the booking experience for intercity travel on cab, we launched features to pick a specific car model, fuel type, luggage accommodations and safety. Similarly, on rail ticketing, we also rolled out free cancelations for all our rail users, which has yielded significant traction with the masses of rail users. We also launched vernacular SEO content to generate more organic growth beyond the English-speaking population residing in the colloquial Bharat. As the revival of leisure travel continued for much of Q4, we were also pleased to see a revival of our domestic corporate travel business. In fact, certain sectors like pharma, e-learning and construction had already reached over 80% of pre-COVID business travel levels. As a result, our corporate platforms of myBiz and Q2T have seen healthy recoveries of 60% and 44% when compared to the same quarter last year, partly supported by new accounts acquisition. In Q4, myBiz acquired more than 250 new key accounts and 750 more SMEs. These new accounts in the quarter also accounted for nearly 1/5 of MyBusiness revenue, highlighting the demand for a self-serve online corporate travel platform like ours. As for our enterprise-grade solution, Q2T, our team onboarded 11 new large well-recognized corporates onto the platform. In addition to our corporate endeavors, I'm also pleased to report that our platform for off-line travel agents called myPartner has continued to move forward, designed as a way to expand our reach to the off-line world in an asset-light and scalable way. We now have more than 11,000 partners on the platform with more than 1/3 actively selling. While initially launched with just our hotel products, we have now added domestic and international flights also on our platform. While it's early days, we believe this program will help us further broaden our reach going forward. Lastly, I would like to share an update on our efforts in the GCC or Middle East market, where we continue to focus on improving the user experience. We are now fully live with the Arabic language for our flights and hotel products on both desktop and mobile web. The multilingual content has helped us build vernacular SEO pages and acquire more Arabic-speaking travelers. Soon, we plan on expanding our Arabic offerings to our mobile apps and other channels. Our app downloads and new users are increasing gradually in the region. We believe our investment in this region today will help us capitalize the demand pickup as the market picks up post COVID. As you can see, MakeMyTrip has positioned itself well, both in brand and product selection and offerings before and during the pandemic as we continue to build out the country's super app of the travel. We believe, given our strong financial position, we will certainly lead the way in the recovery once we get past the current pandemic wave and deliver long-term financial value to our stakeholders. Lastly, with India's daily case infections reducing off its peak in early May and going by the experts' estimates, the second wave's intensity will continue to come down gradually from now onwards. And as that happens, travel recovery will resume gradually as well as we entered into fiscal Q2 of this year. Recently, ICRA, a local credit rating agency, anticipates that domestic air travel could return to pre-COVID levels by fiscal year 2023, predicated on mass vaccinations by year-end that would blunt any impact from a third wave of infections. This prediction is aligned with our views that recovery momentum will pick up only as domestic vaccination progress and daily recorded cases trend lower to a more manageable level in the country. With that, I would like to hand over the call to Mohit to share more color on our financial results in Q4.