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Intrinsic Value is all-important and is the only logical way to evaluate the relative attractiveness of investments and businesses.
Intrinsic Value is all-important and is the only logical way to evaluate the relative attractiveness of investments and businesses.
Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Yatra Online, Inc.'s Fiscal Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Drew, and I'll be the operator on today's call. [Operator Instructions]
At this time, I would like to turn the conference call over to Manish Hemrajani, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Drew. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Yatra's Fiscal Third Quarter 2024 Financial Results for the period ended December 31, 2023. I'm pleased to be joined on the call today by Yatra's CEO and Co-Founder, Dhruv Shringi; and CFO, Rohan Mittal.
The following discussion, including responses to your questions, reflect management views as of today, February 14, 2024. We don't take any obligation to update or revise the information.
Before we begin our formal remarks, let me remind you that certain statements made on today's call may constitute forward-looking statements, which are based on management's current expectations and beliefs and are subject to several risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For a description of these risks, please refer to our filings with the SEC and our press release filed earlier this morning. These filings are available from the SEC and also on the IR section of our website.
With that, let me turn the call over to Dhruv. Dhruv, please go ahead.
Thank you, Manish, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our second (sic) [ third ] quarter earnings call. We are proud to report strong December quarter results. Yatra's Air Passenger segment recorded a robust 26% year-over-year growth, nearly tripling the industry benchmark of 9%. This makes it the fourth quarter in a row of share gains for Yatra. In the air travel sector, our strong brand recognition and successful strategies in capturing market share has enabled us to grow both our domestic and international air business. As we move forward, we remain optimistic and committed to leveraging these positive trends to drive further growth and success.
We fortified our market leadership in the corporate travel sector by signing 26 new corporate customers in the December quarter with an annual billing potential of INR 2.2 billion, which is approximately USD 27 million. This underlines the capability and leadership of our corporate travel platform. I would like to highlight here one specific deal that we signed in the December quarter with Aramco Asia India, a wholly owned subsidiary of the global energy leader, Aramco. Yatra's user-friendly platform will facilitate effortless bookings for flights, hotels, trains and other employee services for Aramco Asia's personnel. This integrated travel solution extends to Aramco's subsidiaries in key Asian and Oceanic markets including India, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Australia. This multiproduct and multi-region deal highlights the capabilities and strength of our platform and the ability to handle any level of complexity with our cutting-edge technology.
In alignment with our commitment to shareholder returns, I'm also pleased to report the repurchase of approximately 280,000 shares under the share buyback program authorized by our Board, and we continue to be active on the buyback front in the current quarter. This move underlines our confidence in Yatra's promising future and our unwavering dedication to maximizing shareholder value.
Now let me provide some color on the macro picture. India's economic landscape remains particularly robust, buoyed by a significant public capital expenditure initiative and a strong domestic economy. The Indian economy is poised for consistent growth with projections now revised upwards estimating 7% GDP growth in FY '24. Travel, as you know, tends to be closely linked to growth in GDP. And over the past decade, in the developing economies we've seen travel growing closer to 1.5 to 2x of GDP growth.
Domestic air passenger traffic continued on its scorching growth phase in India and continues to remain the fastest-growing air market globally. December '23 saw a total of 13.8 million passengers travel domestically in India, the highest ever monthly passenger traffic number, clearly underscoring the robustness of the Indian aviation sector.
Religious travel is one of the biggest segments of tourism in India. Several popular religious centers attract annual tourists in the range of 10 million to 30 million despite the existing infrastructure bottlenecks. On this front, the government has done a significant amount of work to improve the infrastructure, and we expect that this improvement in infrastructure will continue to drive upward growth in traffic numbers to these destinations.
A recent Jefferies report highlighted that the Holy City of Ayodhya could see as many as an influx of up to 50 million visitors each year as a result of the newly built temple. As for the report, tourism in India contributed USD 194 billion to FY '19 GDP and is expected to grow at an 8% CAGR to USD 443 billion by FY '33. Tourism-to-GDP ratio in India sits at 6.8% of GDP, well below most of the large economies. For example, in comparison, China is at 11.6% of GDP. This points to significant headroom for growth in the Indian travel market.
Now let me provide you with some more details of our third quarter. For the quarter ended December 31, 2023, we reported revenues of INR 1.1 billion, which is approximately USD 13.4 million, marking a substantial increase of 23% over the last year. Our adjusted margin from Air Ticketing rose to INR 1.1 billion, which is USD 13.4 million, a 10.2% year-over-year growth. Furthermore, our adjusted EBITDA saw an improvement of 24% year-over-year. reaching INR 44.5 million or approximately USD 500,000.
Moving on to further details of the quarter. The corporate segment continues to be somewhat impacted with softness in travel spend in the IT/ITES sector. We are confident, however, of the recovery in the near term from our largest contributing sector, especially as AI-related software developments take root globally. In addition, we expect that the new business that we have won over the last few quarters is more than likely to offset the drop that we have seen on account of softness in the IT/ITES sector in the coming quarters.
On the hotel front, revenue from our Hotels and Packages business was INR 449 million, which is approximately USD 5.4 million, in the 3 months ended December 31, 2023. This reflected an increase of 17% year-over-year. The increase in revenue is attributable to a recovery in domestic travel, with a higher number of holiday packages sold as a result. From a competitive standpoint, the intensity has remained stable from the last quarter and remains manageable overall.
As some of you may recall, we had launched our Yatra Prime membership program in the middle of 2023. We are taking that a step further. And as a gratitude to our Indian shareholders, we have offered that subscription free to our shareholders in India, expanding the shareholder base and the base for our Prime customers. With the positive macro backdrop and given the ongoing recovery in corporate and leisure travel and the rise in discretionary spending and now a significantly bolstered balance sheet, we believe we are well poised for the strong FY '24 and '25.
Aside from seasonality and some softness that I touched upon earlier in the IT/ITES sector, we expect our results to benefit from accelerating growth in both our corporate business and consumer business as we continue to add to our formidable blue chip customer base and leverage the strength of our brand. Given our stronger balance sheet following the IPO, we've already begun to see early signs of improving supplier margins and expect this to gain further momentum in the quarters ahead and have a meaningful positive impact on our operating performance going forward.
With that, let me hand over to Rohan to walk you through the details of the financial performance. Rohan?
Thank you, Dhruv. I will now review our quarter 3 numbers for the quarter ended December 31, 2023.
Our gross bookings for the quarter was INR 18.6 billion, which is roughly USD 224 million, up by 18% Y-o-Y, with Air up by 22% and the Hotels and Packages up by 4% Y-o-Y. For the December quarter, our total revenue grew by 23% to INR 1.1 billion, which is roughly USD 13.4 million, on account of sustained travel demand. Adjusted margins were up across Air, Hotel and Packages and other services with the Air Ticketing business up by 10% Y-o-Y to INR 1.1 billion, while the Hotels and Packages business adjusted margin was up by 4% Y-o-Y to INR 264 million, which is roughly $3.2 million. Adjusted margin from other services was also up by 49% Y-o-Y.
Moving to the expenses. Quarter 3 marketing and sales promotion expenses including consumer promotions and loyalty program costs increased by 8% on a Y-o-Y basis to INR 884 million, which is roughly USD 10.6 million. The marketing increase lagged the overall gross bookings growth of 18%, which shows a strong brand recall of Yatra. Our personnel expenses excluding share-based payment expenses increased by 8% Y-o-Y to INR 279 million, which is roughly USD 3.4 million. Payment gateway costs as a percentage of the total gross bookings remain very strong, while other expenses increased by about 13% on Y-o-Y basis.
On an overall basis, adjusted EBITDA stands at INR 34.5 million as compared to INR 36 million in the quarter ended December '22. Lastly, as of December 31, 2023, balance of cash and cash equivalents and term deposits on our books was a little above INR 5 billion, which is roughly USD 60.7 million. Our gross debt as of December 31, '23, was INR 852 million. We've reduced this by almost 51% at the gross level on a quarter-on-quarter basis.
With this, we conclude our prepared remarks. Now I'd like to hand it over to the moderator for Q&A. Thank you.
[Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from Scott Buck from H.C. Wainwright.
First one, I may have missed it in the prepared remarks, Dhruv, but can you comment a little bit on some of those pricing headwinds that you saw in the second quarter and how they impacted the third quarter and maybe what the outlook is for the fourth quarter on those?
So in terms of pricing headwind, what we've seen is that during the quarter, the overall macro industry has remained fairly robust. But there is an expectation that on the domestic aviation side, we will see some capacity constraints and capacity being pulled out by one of the largest in India for repair of their Pratt & Whitney engines. And this withdrawal of capacity in the current quarter is likely to see a slight increase in airfares.
We would expect the airfares to go up in the mid- to high single digits compared to the same quarter last year. So there is a little bit of pricing headwind which is there, and we expect this to carry on until about the summer months. And it's only around the July, August time frame that we see the capacity beginning to come back into the ecosystem. So for the next 2 quarters, there is going to be a bit of pricing increase which we will see, and that may have a slight bit of softening -- or that may result in a slight bit of softening in demand.
Great. That's helpful. And my second, hoping you'd give us a little bit more of an update or a little more color on international travel and the trends you're seeing there. I mean, it seems like that's been a bit of a laggard versus corporate and leisure travel just in catching up since COVID.
Yes. So international travel actually improved quite meaningfully in the last quarter. It was just a little bit ahead of our weighted average growth rate of 26% that we saw. So we've seen strong recovery happening on the international side in the last quarter, and there is more capacity expansion that's happening on the international front. We've seen some of the airlines like Air India deploy more capacity on the international routes.
We've also seen some of the international airlines bring back a little bit of their capacity into the Indian market on the back of the demand which is there. So we should continue to see good momentum on international travel. So while in the first half of our fiscal year of last year, international travel lagged behind, in the last quarter which is the December quarter, international travel has gained momentum and is carrying forward that same momentum into the current quarter.
Great. That's helpful. And then last one for me. I'm just curious, given the severe dislocation between where the U.S. shares trade and where the local shares are valued, what kind of fungibility, if anything, is there between the shares? I mean, maybe you could help kind of walk us through that a little bit.
See, as of today, Scott, they are two separate entities. One is a holding company, the other is a operating company. So on account of that, these two shares today at least are not fungible. But we continue to work with our counsel to see if there is any way for us to make them fungible. But it's a bit too early to state on that categorically as to what would that -- what shape would that take.
But having said that, I think -- like you pointed out, I think there is a large arbitrage opportunity that exists today between the prices of the two indexes, right? India being the home market is trading at a very different price point compared to where the U.S. is trading. But in terms of fungibility, I think that's all unfortunately that I can share at the moment, yes.
Great. Well, I appreciate the added color, and congrats on the results, guys.
Thank you, Scott.
[Operator Instructions] We have no further questions in the queue so I'll hand back over for any closing remarks.
Thanks, Drew. Thank you, everyone, for joining the call today. And as always, we are available for follow-ups. Thank you.
That concludes today's Yatra Online, Inc's. Fiscal Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. You may now disconnect your lines.