Le Travenues Technology Limited (IXIGO) Q4 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to Lead Ravenous Technology Q4 and FY202526 Earnings Conference Call, hosted by Dan Capital Advisors Limited. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star and zero on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Anmul Garg from Dam Capital Advisors Limited. Thank you. And over to you, sir.

Thank you, Rutuja. Good evening, everyone. On behalf of Dam Capital, I welcome you all to Ixigo's Q4FI26 earnings call. We have with us Mr. Alok Bhatpai, Chairman, MD, and Group CEO of the company. Mr. Rajneesh Kumar, Director and the Group Co-CEO of the company. Mr. Saurabh Devins Singh, Group CFO of the company. Now, before I hand over the call to Alok, Saurabh, and Rajneesh, I would like to highlight the safe harbor statement on the second slide of the presentation, and it is assumed to be read and understood. I'll hand over the call to Alok. Thank you.

Thanks, Anmol. Good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our Q4 FY26 earnings call. At Ixtago, we've always believed that in the travel industry, the real test of a business is not what it looks like in ideal conditions, But how it performs when the macro environment is noisy, unpredictable, and turbulent. This year, our diversified business model and customer-first mindset helped us deliver exactly that kind of resilience and growth amidst challenges that the environment kept throwing at us. In FY26, the Exigo Group achieved 34% revenue growth and 28% adjusted EBITDA growth YOY with a gross transaction value crossing about $18,693 crores or about $2 billion U.S. dollars for the full year. Revenue from operations was 1,228 crores. Contribution margin was 4.74 crores. Adjusted EBITDA came in at about 121 crores. And cash flow from operations was a record 96 crores, a 60% growth value in operating cash flow. A profit after tax for the full year came in at 71 crores. In Q4 FY26, we continued to remain the fastest-growing OTA in India and gained market share in all key categories while continuing to demonstrate operating leverage even against a distinctly high base in Q4 because the corresponding quarter last year benefited from the Mahakum surge and despite the uncertainty that the current Middle East situation has created for travel sentiment and the air corridors starting from March this year, we continue to see resilient growth. Let me move to the headline numbers for the quarter. For Q4, we delivered 4,798 crores of GDV, 308 crores of revenue from operations, 121 crores of contribution margin, and over 30 crores of adjusted EBITDA. Our path for the quarter was the highest ever at 32 crores for the quarter. What is particularly encouraging to me is not just the absolute scale of these numbers, but the quality of the growth underneath them. Our business is becoming more diversified, more resilient, and more balanced. In Q4, flights became our largest vertical by GTV, while buses became our largest vertical by contribution margin. Trails, meanwhile, continue to remain a very large, strategic, and profitable franchise for us. That is exactly the kind of multimodal mix we have been working on for years in the past. Let me now spend a minute on each of the major lines of business because each one tells an important part of the story. Starting with buses. We were the fastest growing OTA there with 32% growth in passenger segments and 26% growth in GTV despite the high Mahakum base we saw in both volumes and fares. Buses is now our largest business by contribution margin in Q4 and we continue to see it as our fastest growing major line of business for the foreseeable future. This category still has a long runway, and our growth continues to be driven by strong execution, deep partnerships with our operators, product innovation, especially around peace-of-mind products, and deepening customer trust. On flight, this is now our largest business by GTV with 2018 growth of GTV in the quarter. Passenger segments grew year-on-year by 14%, while GTV grew 18%, despite only a 1.2% growth in the market on domestic passenger segments, And with a deep growth in the market on international flights in the overall market, despite that, we continue to give out double-digit numbers on growth. Sequentially, we have delivered a better contribution margin percentage on this business as well. So if you see, despite the external headwinds of the environment kept growing at our category on flights, we continue to gain market share. What gives us confidence is that our growth is not being driven by just one narrow lever. It is being driven by product, by trust, by better customer experience, and by a growing ability to cross-sell and monetize intelligently. On trains, Q4 saw some volume and GDP compression that reflects broader industry and policy changes rather than any company-specific issue. Despite this environment, we continued gaining OTM market share in trains, reaching 62% last quarter versus 60% a few quarters ago, while also preserving healthy margins. The quarter also faced a particularly high base due to elevated comb-related demand and additional special train supply last year, especially across North India. At the same time, Indian Railways has implemented several policy changes over recent quarters, including more restrictive time periods for Tadkal access by OTAs and agents, reduced waitlist inventory for the whole ecosystem, user re-verification for repeat users, Aadhaar verification norms, and more. These policy measures, combined with the supply constraints during peak travel periods, which were particularly acute on the second-seater or 2S side and have impacted overall ticket availability across the ecosystem, have naturally led to some demand shifting towards buses and flights. That said, we remain optimistic that some of these constraints could ease once the upgraded PRS system is rolled out later this year, and as it meant that call time window policies are revisited for OTS by the government. In hotels, we remain excited but disciplined. With the launch of our Hotels Extranet Hello, we have started onboarding hotels directly and now have a small on-the-ground team already. Though we have some confirmations emerging on our hypothesis of how we will differentiate our experience for the customer and supply side, we will start disclosing hotels separately only once we believe the business has reached the right level of product market fit, operational maturity, and meaningful scale. For us, hotels is not about chasing transaction volume before trust is earned. It is about solving the peace-of-mind problem in a category where fulfillment quality, post-book experience, and reliability matter enormously. We announced at our recent Exego Next launch event that we are no more in the OTA business. We are in the peace-of-mind business, and that is now visible in the operating metrics. In Q4, our valuated services tax attachment rate was over 31%. Our AI systems handled 4.35 million customer queries end-to-end, 81.5% of voice conversations and 91.1% of chat conversations with our customers were resolved by autonomous AI agents. Our average refund time was 3 hours and 55 minutes, and 95.7% of customer calls are being answered within 2 minutes. We disclose these numbers not because they make our slides look better, but because they reflect lower anxiety for travelers. They reflect fewer moments of friction, faster issue resolution, and a stronger reason for users to come back to us. During the quarter, we continued strengthening our ecosystem through a series of strategic partnerships, product launches, and brand initiatives across our bus and train businesses. Abibus partnered with KSRTC in Karnataka to expand digital access to government bus services and also enabled inter-city bus bookings directly on the Uber app. On the train side, Confirmed Ticket launched an AI-powered Seed Finder feature powered by Tara to simplify Confirmed Seed Discovery. While our partnership with Swiggy further scaled our food on trains delivery business to 40,000-plus restaurants and 160-plus railway stations, we are seeing good early traction on this. We launched Metro Ticketing for Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru and have also strengthened our consumer brand presence through the multi-year Exego New Delhi Metro Station branding right at the NDLS station. Finally, we are excited that Ixigo, Confirm Ticket, and Abibus are now live as native apps on ChatGPT, reflecting our continued focus on AI-led distribution and discovery. In terms of the near-term, our stance remains disciplined and opportunistic when it comes to margins and growth. We continue to see buses as a secular growth engine with higher contribution margins than the rest of our business. We continue to see flights as a business where we can gain market share through superior product and customer experience while maintaining cost discipline. Trains may continue to see some near-term headwinds until the underlying frequent policy changes stabilize or the new PRS system gets rolled out later this year. But we remain confident about our strategic position and our ability to keep taking market share. Coming to AI, we believe travel will be one of the industries most meaningfully transformed by this shift because travel is inherently high-context, deeply personal, operationally complex, and highly fragmented. Planning and managing travel involves uncertainty, changing conditions, multiple micro-decisions, real-time disruptions, fragmented information, and highly ephemeral pricing and inventory. A large part of travel supply also exists in an unstructured and non-standardized format, possibly the vertical with the most broken plumbing, making AI particularly powerful in improving discovery, decision-making, operational efficiency, and customer assistance across the journey's life cycle. Marrying the user's persona and context to the state-of-the-art intelligence available on the tab, as well as proprietary models and data, makes the experience more intuitive, preemptive, and personalized, and this is something that has never been done in our industry before. But I don't want to steal the thunder from my friend and co-CEO, Rajneesh, who will talk more about AI, Exegonext, and the way we are thinking about the next phase of our growth.

Thanks, Salouk.

Over the past year, we have been thinking deeply about what AI truly means for the future of travel, and more importantly, what it means for our company. Every major technology inflection point rewrites the rules of an industry. The PC changed how we worked. The Internet changed how we discovered information. The smartphone changed how we lived. AI is different because it fundamentally changes the nature of software itself. Software is no longer static. It is no longer just a collection of screens and workflows sitting behind buttons and forms. Software can now reason, understand intent, take actions autonomously, and continuously evolve. So this was my AI clone talking. And now, back to the real world where human beings are still manually conducting earning calls. So, yeah. So AI is different because it fundamentally changes the nature of software, as we heard. And we believe that travel will be one of the industries most transformed by this shift. Travel is inherently high context, deeply personal, highly visual, and operationally complex. Planning and managing a trip involves uncertainty, comparisons, fragmented information, changing conditions, and dozens of micro decisions across the entire journey. Historically, travel apps were built around the limitations of old user interface. Users had to kind of manually navigate forms, menus, filters, screens, and workflows that were fundamentally designed decades ago. That model is beginning to break now with AI. So today, users instinctively go to AI systems whenever they hit friction or uncertainty. Every time a user leaves an app, takes a screenshot, and asks an external AI platform for help, that app is losing engagement. It's losing context, and, you know, eventually it's risking what I call de-distribution. So, we believe this will become one of the defining challenges for every consumer and internet company over the next few years. And the solution is not slapping a chatbot to an existing product. The solution is AI-native reinvention. And that reinvention cannot happen only at the product layer. One of the biggest realizations we had internally was that you cannot build an AI-native product with a non-AI-native organization. To move at AI speed, the company itself has to become AI native first. So, over the past year, we created what we internally called NuCo inside Exigo, a small, highly focused team with a mandate to rethink the future of travel from first principles. But more importantly, we rebuilt the organization around AI. We made our systems AI readable, our APIs AI accessible, our workflows AI compatible, our internal processes AI native. Because once the factory itself is reinvented, product velocity changes dramatically. So what previously took years can now happen in months. And the result of this journey is Exegonext. Exegonext is not just a chatbot. It's not even a separate AI tab. It's not an assistant bolted onto a legacy app. It is fundamentally a new operating layer for travel. The core of Exegonext is the fusion of four things. So the first is a proprietary small language model trained on years of voice data built into the layer of voice intelligence. This is what gives Tara the ability to answer any question-related travel. And the second one is a deep traveler context built over years of user interactions, preferences, bookings, and behavioral signals built by using short-term and long-term memory that makes Tara contextually intelligent. This is the place where the app knows what you want without even you having to go to a setting and say that, you know, your home airport is Delhi or you always travel with two kids, et cetera, et cetera. The third thing is the real-time supply intelligence across flights, trains, buses, disruptions, fares, cancellations, refunds, and availability. And lastly, our proprietary intelligence staff, including pricing systems, accounting systems, defamitation systems, crowdsourced cyber intelligence, prediction models, automation over the last two decades. These systems now, they work together as one, like as one unified intelligence layer across the apps. The most important breakthrough for us, however, was rethinking the user interface itself. We realized that conversational interfaces alone are insufficient for travel because travel is highly visual. It's decision-heavy. There's comparison. At the same time, traditional point-and-click interfaces are increasingly static, rigid, and unintelligent. However, they're also extremely fast to solve certain simple problems. If you just have to apply a filter, you just click on a button, you can do that. Very easy rather than saying like a long sentence or typing a long sentence. So instead of replacing traditional interfaces, what we did is we fused them together with the conversational multimodal intelligence. Now, every screen inside the app is readable by AI, is navigable by AI, scrollable by AI, and actionable by AI. So the app understands the context, it understands the intent, it understands what the user is trying to achieve at that moment. This creates an experience that feels far more natural, personalized, and adaptive. We internally think of this architecture as a three-layer system, like the layer zero is the traditional app interface layer. Now, what we have done to this set is we have made AI ready by making sure that AI can read it, AI can navigate through it, AI can scroll through it, AI can understand its capabilities that live inside the screen. Layer 1 is the ambient intelligence that sits across the entire experience, entire app, and it understands every screen, every workflow, and every capability of the app. And then there's this layer minus one is what we call the contextual and the ephemeral UX. This doesn't always exist, but it just magically appears at the right moment whenever it's contextually relevant. This is where the app can dynamically metamorphose based on the user's journey and intent. For example, when a trip becomes active, the entire experience transforms into a real-time operating system with contextual capabilities that only surface when relevant. This is fundamentally different from how software was historically designed to work. Now, the second major pillar is memory and hyper-personalization. Historically, personalization systems were rigid and rules-based. With AI-native memory systems, the app continuously learns user preferences naturally through behavior instead of requiring manual configuration. The system understands long-term context and short-term context intent simultaneously, creating far richer personalization. And finally, the third pillar and the most powerful pillar is the agentic execution. It's not just about recommending things to users. It's also about doing that heavy listing behind the scenes for them. We believe that the biggest productivity unlocking AI that has happened in the past few quarters is not because of conversational AI. It is because of autonomous agents executing workflows on behalf of users. Inside Exego Next, agents can now autonomously handle multiple workflows such as automatically checking you in, figuring out your boarding pass, spare tracking, refund management, booking reconfirmations, trip monitoring, trip syncing, disruption handling, and even proactive travel assistance. The user no longer has to continuously manage travel manually. The system increasingly does the heavy lifting autonomously. This has profound implications, not just for user experience, but also for engagement, retention, conversion, and long-term platform defensibility. What excites us most is that we believe we are still very, very early. Over the last two decades, Exego has always focused on solving high-friction travel problems through technology. AI now allows us to rethink the entire travel stack from first principles. And while execution is becoming increasingly commoditized in the AI era, imagination, customer obsession, speed, and depth of understanding become even more important. Those are the real modes. The companies that will win in the AI era will not simply be the ones that use AI. They'll be the ones willing to completely reinvent themselves around AI. And that is the journey we have started with Execo Next. What you see live in our app is only a sneak peek of the agentic AI future we are building. And what excites me the most is we still believe we are early in the journey of reinventing our industry with AI. That is the opportunity in front of us, and that is the work we are now fully committed to. With that, I will hand over the call to our friend and group CFO, Saurabh, to take you through the details, financials, cash flow, and one-offs for the quarter.

Thanks, Rajneesh and Rajneesh AI avatar. Please join Manfumi also for the next call. Now, if I have to summarize the financial results for the quarter in one word, I would call them boring. And if I have to do it in three words, I would say boring this quarter. The quarter had a high base, which we had highlighted before, and despite a few hiccups on the way, performance broadly played out in line with our expectations and operating plan. Now, of course, expectations and operating outcomes are both subjective. And I know that you'll be far more interested in numbers than my philosophical discourse on what the quarter represents. So let me get straight to the results. As always, all numbers are in rupees crores, unless stated otherwise. Year-over-year comparisons for the quarter are Q4, FY26 versus Q4, FY25, while full-year comparisons are FY26 versus FY25. Right. So, starting with the headline numbers for the quarter, our gross transaction value stood at 4,797.7 crore, up 9% YOI.

I'm sorry to interrupt, Mr. Nathalie.

Revenue from, sorry, I lost the connection for a minute. Revenue from operations came in at 308.1 crore, a 8% YOI increase. Contribution margin was 121.4 crore, up 0.4% YOI, essentially flat, with a contribution margin percentage at 39%. Adjusted EBITDA stood at 30.3 crore compared to 29.1 crore in Q4 FY25, a growth of 4%. PACT stood at 32.1 crore versus 16.8 crore last year, up 91% YOI. Now, these numbers include some call-outs that, like always, I will discuss at the end. Now, for a full year, FY26, GTV stood at 18,692.7 crore, up 25% YOY. Revenue from operations stood at 1,228 crore, a 34% increase over FY25. Contribution margins stood at 474.3 crore, up 18% for the year, with contribution margin percentage at 39%. Adjusted EBITDA for FY36 stood at 120.9 crore versus 94.8 crore, an increase of 28%. Act for the year stood at 71.5 crore, up 19% YOL. I would also highlight my favorite, the cash flow from operations, which was up 60% for 195.7 crore. Moving on to the business segment overview, boxes continued to grow well, and there was little more to like in the results. For Q4F26, passenger segments grew 32% YOY to 7.22 million, GTV rose 26% to 696.8 crore, revenue from operations stood at 18.4 crore, up 22%. Contribution margin stood at 42.8 crore, up 7%, with contribution margin percentage at 53%. At the CM2 level, buses were the largest segment for us, contributing 35% of total CM. The numbers were equally impressive if we looked through the FY26 levels. Passenger segments stood at 26.6 million, up 44%, GTV was 2,620.7 crores, up 46%, revenues stood at 298 crores, up 51%. Contribution margin stood at 153.2 crore, up 18%, and at a 51% CM percentage. On flights, it was a difficult year for aviation in India and probably the world. A lot went wrong with the ecosystem, and in that context, the performance of our flight business was particularly admirable. For Q4F26, we booked 2.74 million flight segments, up 14% YOY. GTV stood at $2,018.6 crore, up 18%. Operating revenue came in at $95.7 crore, up 9%. Contribution margin was $38.3 crore, down 3%. Now, flights contributed 42.1% of our group GTV and 31.6% of our group's total CM. Now, for FY26, flights had been stood at $10.74 million, up 27%. Since GTV was 7,500, 14.6 crore, up 33%, revenue stood at 390.7 crore, up 54%, contribution margin stood at 160.3 crore, up 39%, at a 49% margin percentage. On trains, even though we continue to maintain our OTA market share and trains, as Alok had talked about in his section, the exceptionally high cumulat, based along with the impact of certain structural and regulatory changes, was visible in the business of this quarter. That said, it's important to also highlight that strong customer loyalty and engagement that our train app brands command continue to play a critical role in fueling the growth across our other businesses through ecosystem synergies. For Q4F26, we booked 24.18 million train segments, which was lower by 8% YOY. For FY26, crane segment stood at $104.12 million, up 8% YOI. GTV was 8,278.9 crore, up 12% YOY. Revenue was 511.3 crore, up 12% YOY. Contribution margin was 155.5 crore, up 2%, and came at a 30% contribution margin percentage. Now, as I usually do, let me highlight the key one-offs and operational call-outs during the quarter. The call-outs for Q4 F526 include share of loss from FreshBus, an associate company of $45.59 million, tax benefits amounting to $82.5 million. Actually, $8.25 crore, just to be consistent here. For Q4F525, the call-out comprised of share of loss from fresh bus of 3.299 crore. Now, I am currently a part of travel and leisure industry, and I started classifying travel and leisure as work. A month ago, this line of thinking got me to U.S. for what was supposed to be a Route 66 road trip. Now, somewhere between the endless desert highways and my growing enthusiasm for authentic retroburger, my strictly vegetarian wife staged a rebel in. The trip eventually pivoted into a drive down the Pacific Coast Highway. It was at a pit stop in Santa Cruz. While looking at sea, I noticed a bunch of people just lying around in water, doing absolutely nothing. Naturally, I asked somebody what they were doing. I was told they are surfers. Now, this was confusing to me, because what I've seen on TVs and social media, I had assumed surfing mostly involved cinematic waves, dramatic shots, people with suspiciously good hair appearing to defy physics for about 30 or so seconds. Standing there, I realized something fascinating. That's the point of surfing. Watch the water carefully. Understand the currents. Maintain balance. Preserve energy. Know where to position yourself. Ignore ways that are wrong for you. And then, when the ride can finally arise, be prepared to ride it well. In many ways, what we are doing at Exigo is the same.

With that final thought, I'll pass it on to the moderator.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and 1 on the touchstone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and 2. Participants are requested to use answers while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Pankaj Mahendriyatta from Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Thank you, management. Good evening. I have two questions. First around growth, you know, and it has two parts. When you say that you continue to see a resilient growth out there, is there any way to quantify it given that we are 50 days already into 1Q? And the related part of the question is, you know, given now where the macro is heading led by oil and some inflationary pressures, can you share some examples from your past around the user demand and impact on IGVICOS growth and margins?

Yeah, hi, Pankaj, Jalok here. See, I think while it may be difficult to give full color yet because obviously some part of the quarter is still remaining, what I can tell you is that last quarter, given that there was a large Mahakum base, right, which doesn't exist this quarter, last quarter, in fact, February last year was phenomenal in comparison to February this year. And therefore, you see that in terms of our growth also for Q4, we could have grown even better without that base effect. Having said that, right, and we are in the peak season, summer season, as we speak, we do see that demand trends continue to remain strong, at least for domestic. I think international continues to be affected somewhat, right, because of the Middle East situation as well as the fares, right? I mean, the fares have gone up significantly on many routes, and given that there have been some curtailment of routes by certain airlines, I think that's not helping that situation there. Despite that, given that we are starting off from such a low base on international flights, I think we still believe that we'll be one of the more resilient players out there on the flight side of the business. But just directionally, you know, obviously, Q1 FY27 doesn't have the same base effect as Q4 FY26, and therefore, you know, we expect that to start showing up in terms of growth. So, the second part of the question, can you just come again on that?

Can you repeat the second part of the question, please?

So it was, you know, given where the macro is heading right now, let's buy oil and some inflationary pressure. Can you share some examples from past around the user demand and impact on Agrico's growth and margins?

See, I think we have seen two things. One is substitution. So international trips being substituted into domestic because of the massive difference in fares that are now visible, At least for Europe or Far East or even US, you know, the fares have actually gone up significantly. Even for Southeast Asia, you know, we are seeing that the fares have actually moved materially up. So there could be some substitution starting to play out. The other part of that, see, because even domestic flight fares are trending higher than what they usually used to be this time of the year. We are seeing some people, you know, go into the bus funnel. We are seeing some people go into the train funnel, although train remains perennially, you know, impacted by the fact that there is less supply than demand, right? That's always been the case. Therefore, buses is the biggest beneficiary of that growth, which you also saw last quarter, right? So I think in an environment where flights are expensive and the train availability is running very low, buses naturally sort of get the benefit of that. So we continue to see that kind of a trend playing out for the last few months.

And Pankaj, on the fuel price for the last cycle versus this cycle, remember there are a couple of parts to it. One is if it starts affecting the operator in terms of the sustainability of an operator, that changes things much more. In the interim, I mean, that doesn't happen. In our different divisions, what you will see is that there is, starting with flights, there is a play which happens between the segments and GTV because flights are very sensitive to the price. A large part of fuel prices passed through. In buses, this also happens with buses because it's a pay-credit business. It's actually, in some sense, a bit more beneficial, as in while it's in the Goldilocks zone, if it doesn't cross the Goldilocks zone in that sense. So, as a business, that also plays around.

Got it. Thanks, Alok and Saurabh. And my last question, coming on Ixigo Next, how should we think about benefits being visible in financials across both revenue growth or costs being lower?

I think it will be too premature and too early to talk about the impact on financials of Ixigo Next. But like from the early results, what we can tell you is that we have extremely positive NPS and feedback from the customers who have started using it. And everything is looking green, like all the metrics, everything that we retrack and obsess about, all those metrics are up and looking great.

Thanks, Adinsh. And if, you know, we think about the overall initiatives that Exigo has been taking, you know, across user segments, following for customer pain points and things like that, is there any way to quantify that on an overall basis for the company or not really?

It's hard to quantify it, but one thing is, like, you know, the fact is that Exegon Next is basically a giant leap forward in terms of how apps were designed and how users used those apps in the past, and I think that's going to fundamentally change. I think right now, there is no discrimination between different kinds of target audiences, like people living in tier three or four cities who were more technically challenged, and their ability to use a bespoke app is substantially lower than somebody living in a tier-one city who already is tech-savvy and understands how to use the app. So that understanding of how to use the app is disappearing with AI. That's the whole power of Xeco Next because it just makes apps – it democratizes apps. I mean, anybody can use it. It's so simple to use. You can just speak to the app, and, you know, the app does stuff for you. And sometimes, you know, the agent capabilities, the app does a lot of those things even behind the scenes without you even knowing about them.

Yeah, just to add to that, Pankaj, basically, like Rajneesh said at the end, right, Like what we've launched right now is just a sneak peek of how we are imagining the future, right? So you've got to think of this as a new paradigm for travelers to engage with companies that are trying to help them, right? And for companies to actually leverage all the intelligence that's out there to create new ephemeral user interfaces that work in a multimodal way. And I think the beginning of that is with flights and hotels for us, right? But over time, you will see this play out in all the categories we play in. We started with English, Hindi, English. But, you know, obviously, we'll look at more languages eventually, right? So there's a natural path of evolution from here. And this is a very, very early sort of, you can say, sneak peek of what our road map will really look like.

Thank you so much, Alok.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Swapnail from JM Financial. Please go ahead.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for the opportunity. My first question is with respect to your air business. I would like to understand what percentage of your air business is outbound focus. The reason I'm asking is because of the recent comments from some of the government officials regarding foreign travel. So, I just wanted to get a sense as to what percentage of our business would be at risk if certain changes happen, curves are placed.

Yeah, so I don't know if I heard this right, but what you asked is what percentage of our business is focused on outbound, right, for flight. Okay, so I think for the previous quarter, we have called this out in Q3 that we were at more than 20% of GTV in that quarter. For the flights business, more than 20% was actually outbound. We haven't particularly looked at this number for this quarter in Q4, but my sense is we would not be far off from there. So, in that sense, there has not been any material change from a GDB line perspective, but of course, there has been a change in the fact that, remember, volumes have gotten impacted and the fares have gone up, right? So, that's the way to read through this, that the volumes would have been slightly more impacted on the international side, whereas the fares for the remaining volumes would have gone up to cover up for it.

So, essentially, what you're saying, Alok, is there should be no impact despite some impact on supply side?

No, there has been impact. No, because, see, the way to think about the flight business is that convenience fee forms an important part of revenue, right, as you know, and therefore volumes are as important as value in some sense, right? So I think on the international side, we would have seen some impact, obviously, on Middle East and some of the European routes, et cetera. But then domestic growth more than covered up for it. And then the remaining international, which was still happening, the value went up. And therefore, you know, the GTV contribution would have remained in the same ballpark.

Right. Just a couple of things. Remember, we as a business are much more, in our international businesses, much more short haul than long haul, as in terms of the mix. And then a significant part of our mix is around Southeast Asia or the other side of where, so it's the nature of our mix which kind of, it does affect Middle East. It affects us, but it affects us relatively less than an average market, how things are, and because vacation travel would be a larger part for us, people shift where they are traveling to.

Got it, got it. The second question is with respect to one of the comments that you made in your release. You mentioned that the bus segment should henceforth grow securely. So, I just wanted to understand what do you mean by securely over here? Do you mean growth will be in line with the industry or it will be, you know, 1.5, two times of the industry which…

Sophan, you are trying to give us a guidance again. We won't, but we should be sure that.

You would have seen that last almost three years, right, like we've delivered on the bus growth being higher than the industry as in the OTA industry bus percentage growth numbers, right, and we have consistently been able to grow the fastest in the bus OTA market. I think the reason has been the fact that, A, we are starting off a very low base ourselves, right? So, we are the number two player, and we've been catching up, obviously, year on year on that gap. But there's still a large part of the market that is continuing to remain offline, right? So, even though online penetration would have gone up from 20% to maybe about 22%, 23% as we speak, but then there is still a large part of bus bookers that are booking offline. And therefore, the addressable market remains very, very large. Secondly, you know, I think we've been very innovative on products. The bus team has definitely been forced to market with several product innovations, including, you know, the recently launched product where the assistance is provided in case there's a bus breakdown, you know, there's a cab that comes and takes you to the destination. And we were very early to the market with products like We Assured, where we have a service level guarantee, and we have 360 bus views, which means you can see the interiors of your bus, you know, whether it's a brand new bus or not. So I think many of these innovations have really helped us grow faster. And we still have a long pipeline of such innovations, you know, to execute, right? So, in that sense, we remain confident that as those things hit the market, you know, they will deliver on growth.

Just to extend that question, Alok, like earlier we had certain regions where we were not present through our bus offering, or there were certain suppliers which were not working with us. Are such any easy pickings available to us on the previous side, even now, which you can, you know, you can get the benefit you can get going forward?

I think that was the case maybe a couple of years back or maybe up to a year back. But I think as we speak today, you know, we'd be pretty much, we would be pretty much at parity with whatever's out there. We are at least the operators that matter. They are all partnered with us. You know, we have, I think, in total, 6,000 plus. In any given month, more than 4,500 would be transacting with us. You know, and I think we would be at parity with anybody else out there in terms of both services and routes. So I don't see a major inventory gap as such. In fact, we were the first to market with the Karnataka State Road Transport Inventory as well. So I think, you know, we have been making progress there, and we continue to remain confident that if there is a new operator that comes up and who wants to tap into online growth, you know, we'll be, you know, one of the two companies out there that they will call and want to partner with.

So I will also remember in BUS, now we are at the stage where we would be spending, and we've been doing that last couple of quarters, spending on branding in certain locations where we have got the back and right, and now the market share has to catch up to what our high market share is in some of the other markets. So, if you see the Tamil Nadu campaign, which we are doing, it's something on those lines where we are trying to – so, yes, it's a long-term play, and trust or brand takes time to play, but it remains the priority which will kind of – the product is there. People have started using the product. It, in our mind, is a better product than what is available outside, and then we kind of continue to get the brand and the trust right to make more people use it.

Interesting. Just the last one, Ethan. So this is related to a capitalization of certain costs, and presuming these are mainly related to tech employee costs. My question out here is like, are this related to the AI investments that you are making, or this is related to the HOTS business in particular?

So it is AI. What we have done is we have capitalized a portion of the core usable AI investment, which is related to building the foundational infrastructure, orchestration layer, and platform capabilities that we expect to deploy across the multiple use cases within the OTA ecosystem. Remember, this was for several years, and this is a policy, similar policy than which we followed in the past too, when we built the train and the other apps. Now, remember, what we are doing there is what we view as the core infrastructure, and maybe Rajneesh can talk about a bit about what we are building there in AI. And Ranish, I'll pass it on to you to just talk about the AI build over and give a sense of what we would be building over the next couple of years to the extent we can.

Yeah, I mean, AI is right now, you know, an investment focus for everybody in the world. And I think this is going to pay off in a really, really big way because we all know that we're using the worst and the most expensive AI we will ever use in our lifetimes. So I'm not going to say investing on AI because this is one investment that any company is not making. They're basically kind of risking their future existentially. We're using a lot of AI, obviously, to invest in the core infrastructure in converting our company and making the whole entire company AI native, like creating this layer of organizational operating system which will make every single person in the organization more efficient. Obviously, you know, we don't disclose token usage as of now, but with time, I think this will probably become an important area of expense to kind of, you know, show that as a line item at some point of time in the future. But the token usage for all the AI products that we are building on the infrastructure investment that we are building to convert our organization into an AI-native organization. All of that is part of the spend that you are seeing right now.

Go to Pritchett. Just to add to that, remember, this is not about capitalizing all the spend. It's the costs which are experimentation, model testing, ongoing operations that are through P&L. So it's just specific long-term costs which are being capitalized.

Just two related points are there, Saurabh. One, to be clear, there is no hotels-related capitalization that you are doing. And two, how do you amortize this cost? I mean, what would be the period of the amortization? And any specific number that you will end up spending every year towards this?

So, look, there are two parts to it. Let me start with the hotel's part and the reason why. Look, hotel, we are not. That's the first part. Secondly, on the amortization, it will be five years, and as the product, as the infrastructure layer comes up, it will be a five-year amortization.

Got it, Sarabh. Very helpful. Thanks a lot for the opportunity and all the best, please.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Anmul Ghar from Dam Capital Advisors Limited. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. Alok, you indicated that train should see some kind of headwind going ahead from that perspective, and since we have a higher base over there led by Kumbh Effect, so how should we look at the growth of train in this particular year? And beyond FI27 as well, what should be the growth rate that we should look for the trained business?

Yeah, so I think, you know, there were two things that impacted obviously the growth, and I'll just call them out again. One were a myriad of policy-related changes which affected the entire OTA ecosystem, you know, including the tatkal timings and the wait, you know, the waitlist reduction, in fact, impacted everyone, including ICTC themselves, right? I mean, in that sense, there are some things that, you know, we can't really change. And those things, because they are one-time changes, you know, those changes you have to live with on a year-on-year comparison basis, right? Because once those changes happen, you know, the subsequent quarters get impacted, at least till the point where it doesn't become the new normal, right? So, to that extent, I think there is some impact that I foresee will be there. However, having said that, you know, like I said, we are continuing to see market share gains within the OTA segment going from 60 to 62. And, you know, given, you know, all the things we have in the pipeline, hopefully, you know, that continues. Also, you know, there will be some impact from the fact that, you know, we've just acquired a new business. So there could be some impact, positive impact, in fact, coming from that. But broadly, I think, look, it's harder to guide at this point unless the fact that, you know, the new PRS system coming in August or September based on the government announcements, right? I mean, if that new PRS system comes in and some of the policy changes that were made, you know, are reversed, I think there could be more positive momentum. Also, if we see any unreserved ticketing opening up sort of a situation, right, which we keep hearing about time to time, whether unreserved ticketing gets opened up for OTAs, you know, as in when that happens, that could be positive for the business.

I think also in this part, let me put it in a very different way, right? Can I gain more market share in trains if I am focused on that? The answer is yes. Do I want to and believe that's the best way to add more shareholder value over the long run? The answer is no. So what we see in trains is us maintaining and mildly increasing market share at the level that we are. It's tough to increase from there, and we are probably three or four times the next competitor in trains. So it's that. What we do also believe, as I said, both in, as you can read that in question three, we've pointed it out and talked about it in our FAQ, but the point is, look, our train offering is premium, convenience-led, and users pay extra for the reliability, experience, and peace of mind. That's what it offers. Now, what this means is that I have probably one of the largest cohort of high intent discretionary travel users anywhere globally. The point is, we believe that there are the monetization of these users and what we can do with the trust that we have earned over decades can be much, much better used through going into adjacent categories. And that is what we have focused on with our trained business. And you'll see more of that as you go about this year. And again, at the risk of repeating myself and what Radheesh said earlier, Exigo Next and what that infra offers will be part of what this would come through.

Sure. Thanks, Saurabh Benaluk. Just one more thing. And good to see our contribution margins have inched up in this quarter. However, if I look at technology costs that have increased also in this quarter, therefore, the increase in the contribution margins haven't translated into EBITDA margin increase. So, both on contribution margin and EBITDA margin, should we expect the contribution margins to remain stable from here on and should we expect, therefore, the EBITDA margin to increase given there will be some leverage on the fixed cost for us?

Yeah, so I'll look here. I think the way to think about this is that we are in two categories where we have stated intent to pursue, you know, growth as an objective, right? And we've already mentioned that both flights and buses, you know, we were okay to push the pedals up to a certain extent, obviously within a guardrail. And if you look broadly, right, whether it's the full year picture or the last quarter picture, 30%, 40%, and 50% is around where we were hovering, right, for train, flight, and bus in terms of contribution margin. Now, there could have been quarters where we push the pedal harder, right, and therefore have more either performance marketing or a new product that we launch, which essentially, you know, has, let's say initially we want that product to be adopted and therefore, you know, we keep it at a price point that's attractive or, you know, we are willing to invest in the first one or two quarters. So we've done that in the past, right? When we launched new things, value-added services. And then there could be quarters, you know, which are more normalized, where you start seeing, obviously, that contribution margin playing out. I hope what we've been able to demonstrate over the last three, four quarters is that this is something that we can control at will. Which means if there is a quarter where we want to play more aggressively and therefore have some leeway on letting this contribution margin go because we see an opportunity to gain market share or we see some opportunity to launch a new product, we are never shy of doing that. And then there are quarters where we want to play slightly more conservatively because the environment has issues or there are, you know, performance marketing is not yielding, you know, the same upside. So I think there you will see us playing it based on what we see out there. Net-net, I think what we can expect, and remember EBITDA level, there is one more thing. There is also the hotel business we are building, which is not visible to you guys, but there is some cost obviously going and building that, right? So it doesn't show up in any other place except for the overall EBITDA for the business, right? So I think there, you can assume that there is obviously some operating leverage being eaten up by that new vertical we are building. However, the core business continues to be delivering operating leverage. That is something which hopefully is visible in the last couple of years.

Understood, Alok. I was referring to our last quarter's comment that at 36-37% is where we see our bottom of our contribution margin, and our contribution margin will not kind of dip from it. So just wanted to understand that that kind of understanding remains true as of now.

I think what matters more, and again, I'm speaking from the other side of the table, right? What matters more here are two things. Number one, can we achieve the kind of scale we desire to achieve where operating leverage, when it comes in, will be more meaningful, right? To give you an example, in the first few years when we were building the train business or the flight business, we were losing money as well, right? Or not making enough money, a very small trickle of revenue, but we did not care because we were pushing the pedal on growth. To achieve a scale where, once we swing the pendulum the other way, we start seeing the operating leverage start to play out. I think on categories like hotels, we are far away from that, right? We've just started building that out last couple of years. On flights and buses, you know, I would rather, at this point, chase market share as an objective and therefore be okay with, you know, 1% or 2% less contribution margin at times, right? I'm not really that obsessed about that. As long as the overall contribution margin at the company level, which you see has grown year on year, as long as the overall company's contribution margin absolute number continues growing, you will see that we will have operating leverage flowing in at the EBITDA level.

So, just to clarify so that there is no confusion like there was last time, we are focused on the absolute number in contribution, the rupee number for contribution margin, rupee number for EBITDA. And we believe that growth will continue happening even while we invest in new businesses like hotels.

Sure. Very clear. Thank you so much, Alok and Saurabh. That's it from mine. Thank you.

Thank you. And I think I called you, Pratik, who's the next answer. Those are more, right? Yeah, those are more.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Pratik Kumar from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Yeah, I'm reading.

I have two great questions. Firstly, is there a way to quantify the cost of Exegonet's project for you? And how do you recognize that in your P&L or balance sheet?

So, look, there are two parts of Egregonets, and I think it's the answer that we talked with, that we just had right now. So, the parts which are either experimental or already implemented, they would be passing through, and you would see that in the tech cost or the employee cost. The parts where we are building the infrastructure and which is building things which are the orchestration layer or the platform capabilities, this you will see in the capitalization. So you see it in the line on capitalization there on the balance sheet. So that's two parts of this. Now, what is being implemented and what you're seeing right now is a small sliver of what it will become. So, as things keep on coming up, as things keep on developing, coming out, or when the thing is in experimentation, both cases, we are taking it as expense. It's just that when it's in the defined development stage and the long-term identifiable benefit has been defined, it's when it's being capitalized.

And to think about it this way, right, like, I think there'll be two impacts on the PNL, if you ask me, I mean, one is top of the funnel, you know, if this becomes a new way of doing things in travel, right, because we are kind of reimagining how our industry works. If this becomes a new way of doing things in travel, then obviously it impacts the top of the funnel and the growth, right? And the second part is in efficiencies because the agentic flows fundamentally replaced, you know, the manual operational flows that used to exist in the travel industry, which were A, slow and B, expensive because it involved perhaps, you know, somebody working for several hours and being able to be following up with an airline or a supplier or a hotel to get your, you know, whatever needed to be done for you. And now, you know, if an AI agent is doing that on your behalf, obviously there is a cost efficiency element that starts coming in. So I think in that sense, you know, as and when this scales up, it starts showing up, but it's very early days to talk about those things. Like Raneesh said, it's something that over time, you know, we'll start talking more about as we see the adoption go.

Other questions on your hotel segment, where do you think, how is your progress on product market fit for the second, as we have been, of course, talking about it for some quarters, but where have we reached in this segment?

Yeah, I mean, we will eventually start reporting hotels separately, but only once we feel that, you know, we have meaningfully solved the customer problem. I know that we have been saying this for a few quarters now, but, you know, it's a hard problem to solve when it comes to solving the problem of peace of mind. We did it for flights, we did it for hotels, we did it for buses, we did it for trains. We will eventually do it for hotels as well. But, you know, the good news is that, like, we've actually started making progress on the inventory side. So, you know, we launched Hello, our AI-based extranet software, which basically is accelerating hotel onboarding on the platform. So I think a lot of rules of the game have changed. I don't think we will be going through the same process that some of the others have to go through to kind of build like a massive base of supply. I also think that there is fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. So, you know, which is sitting right inside our ecosystem of apps, and solving for them continues to be a challenging problem. And, you know, we'll make sure that, you know, that peace of mind problem that we have, we will solve it, right? Right. Also, I think Ixigo Next is an interesting step in that journey. Like, I think the way people find in book hotels is changing. Like, it's no longer that same way people used to kind of go and search for hotels and apply 20,000 filters, et cetera. Like, you could literally go and say that, you know, show me hotels in Udaipur with the views of Lake Pichola and a restaurant at the rooftop, and it should basically be able to kind of show you exactly those hotels. So fundamentally, you know, a lot of these things have changed against the rules of the games are changing, both on the supply side and on the demand side. And I think AI is doing that. And us being really at the forefront, we are saying that we should be able to kind of get to a point where we can start disclosing those numbers very soon.

Lastly, have you made progress on identifying objective of fundraisers from process last year? Okay.

We've already quantified the objectives of the fundraise, you know, at the time when we did the fundraise, you know, there were four buckets which we talked about, where, which was AI, the best, yeah.

I mean, I know about that, but more specifically, like, usage of, like, how do you plan to make use in terms of timeline?

We have time right now. As in timelines, we've still got a couple of years left for that. We don't want to rush into anything, but yes, as we said, there is a reason why we give a certain amount of time on the use of funds, and the reason is not to rush into things, which is what we intend to do.

Yeah, and some part of it is, in a way, getting utilized in the build-out of the AI stuff that Rajneesh is talking about or the AI investments that we said we will make. We already announced one of them, and then we've also made one acquisition already with Clanness, and we obviously keep evaluating several assets out there. So I think we don't want to necessarily look at it as a ticking timeline for usage, but, you know, we have enough on our plate to sort of look at in terms of investing into our future, whether that happens organically, inorganically, we keep evaluating both parts. But hotels, definitely, you know, we are expanding supply. You know, we talked about the fact that, you know, we've been onboarding hotels on the ground now for a few months. And, you know, hopefully that picks up pace. And obviously, initially, that is an investment you end up making, right? Because you build your team that goes out and gets these long tail standalone hotels. We are seeing some early signs of how, you know, that can be also solved identically and with AI that can be accelerated. So, yeah, I mean, it's still a few quarters to go when we can quantify, you know, more about how much of this has been used and how much, you know, is still something we are going to use. But, yeah, I think the path to build out hotels involves some investment. The path to build out Ixigo Next, and this is just a sneak peek, but the path to build out Ixigo Next requires further investment, and the potentiality of any further M&A always is there.

Sure. Thank you. These are my questions.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question for today. With that, I now hand the conference over to management for closing comments.

Thank you.

Thank you, everyone, for joining our call today, and we do look forward to engage with you next quarter. All of you have a great summer break, and hope you get to try out Ixigo next.

Thank you very much. On behalf of Dam Capital Advisors Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.