Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the ixigo Q1 FY25 Investors' Earnings Conference Call, hosted by Axis Capital 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, then zero on your touch-tone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Rohit Thorat. Thank you, and over to you, sir. Thank you, Laira. Good evening, everyone. On behalf of Axis Capital, I welcome you all to ixigo's Q1 FY25 Earnings Call. We have with us Mr. Aloke Bajpai, Chairman, Managing Director, and Group CEO, Mr. Rajnish Kumar, Director and Group Co-CEO, and Mr. Saurabh Devendra Singh, Group CFO. Before I hand over the call to Aloke, I would like to highlight that the safe harbor statement on the first slide of the earnings presentation is assumed to be read and understood. Over to you, Aloke. Thank you, Rohit. We welcome you all to our earnings call for the first quarter of fiscal year 2025. It has been just a month and a half since our IPO, and here we are doing our second earnings call. Our playbook of building the best customer experience for travelers and addressing the needs of the next billion user market segment continues to drive our ability to grow faster than the overall market at the GTV level. This quarter, we are pleased to share that the ixigo Group hit an all-time high on our gross transaction value, our revenue from operations, Contribution Margin, as well as our Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter. We exceeded ₹2,988 crore of total gross transaction value booked through our platform in Q1, a 27% increase year-on-year compared to the Q1 of last fiscal year, with both trains and flight business registering a 28% increase in GTV YoY. This growth has been achieved despite a higher base effect of last year, which was the first big post-COVID bounce-back summer of April to June 2023, and some impact on travel in the early part of this quarter was due to the general elections in India. For the month of June 2024, we have set a new record of ₹1,000 crore of monthly GTV, as well as grown our monthly transacting users during the quarter to over 2.78 million, registering a 22% increase in MTUs compared to Q1 of last year. Over 94% of our transactions in the quarter continue to be those with a leg of the journey in a tier- 2, tier-3, and tier-4 towns. Considering that this was a seasonally high quarter, we have maintained double-digit Adjusted EBITDA margin in the quarter, achieving a margin of 11% of our revenue from operations, with the Q1 Adjusted EBITDA coming in at over INR 20 crore for the first time ever. This was achieved on the back of the operating leverage derived from the expanded Contribution Margin in our business, with INR 86.8 crore of Contribution Margin coming in the quarter, up 22.4% versus last year. India's Union Budget had outlined substantial investments in the travel sector, particularly focused on infrastructure improvements. The announcement of three new corridors under the PM Gati Shakti initiative is expected to enhance multimodal connectivity, benefiting both rail and road travel. This development is poised to alleviate congestion in high-traffic corridors and improve the overall passenger experience, thereby stimulating demand for train and road travel. Notably, the conversion of 40,000 rail coaches to Vande Bharat standards marks a significant upgrade in rail safety and passenger comfort. The government's recently announced policy initiatives to enhance spiritual tourism are a welcome move towards growing domestic tourism among our next billion user segment. The government's PRASHAD Scheme led to a remarkable transformation in Varanasi's tourism sector, and we have witnessed a 40%-50% increase in demand for spiritual tourism in the last one year for destinations such as Ayodhya, Varanasi, Bodh Gaya, Tirupati, among others. The focus on developing tourist corridors at Vishnupad Temple and Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya, along with comprehensive initiatives for tourist infra development for Rajgir, Nalanda, and Odisha, will surely open new avenues for growth. For our trains line of business, we continue to see good momentum in growth, with 16.8% growth in train passenger segments, crossing 2.1 crore passenger segments booked in a quarter and solidifying our market leadership even further within the trains OTA market. Domestic aviation continues to suffer from supply-side constraints, though the situation is showing signs of marginal improvement as we speak. The domestic air market grew just 4.5% year-on-year for Q1. However, we managed to continue on our trajectory of beating the market pace of growth. In fact, our international flight GTV continues a strong momentum with 71% year-on-year growth during the first quarter and helped in growing our overall flight GTV by 28% YoY for the quarter. We continue to see a large opportunity over the longer term for our flight business, given the number of new flight bookers being added in India every year, and our right to win and our captive user base relies on our own distribution flywheel that allows our airline partners to tap into a unique user base of potential first-time flyers, as well as international flyers emerging from tier two and three airports. In India, we have seen airports such as Patna, Lucknow, and Kochi, where there is a spurt in demand for international travel towards airports in the Middle East. In the bus market, we've grown in line with the market with 16% growth in Q1 GTV and 13% growth in bus passenger segments in Q1 YoY. This quarter, we are expanding geographically using our distribution spend pan-India across the group, and we have signed up more airports for our AbhiBus Assured program, more operators for our AbhiBus Assured program, sorry. We also made certain experiments on our product and conversion funnels to optimize for better conversions and margins, and the results are visible in the contribution margin expansion we have seen on the bus side. However, for our strategy going forward, as we mentioned in the last call, we will shift our focus towards growth, even if it comes at the cost of a lower contribution margin percentage, given we see a large opportunity of growing first-time online bus bookers. With this, I'm now handing over our call to our Group Co-CEO, Rajnish, who will give you some interesting updates on our product technology, growth, and AI initiatives. Thanks, Aloke. Indeed, it's been a pretty decent quarter for us. We had close to 80 million MAUs this quarter, up 4% year-on-year. Over 2.65 crore passenger segments were booked with us during Q1 of 2025, and we achieved an MTU to MA ratio of nearly 3.5% in the quarter. We are proud to share that we now have 35.7 million lifetime transaction users on our platforms. Let me talk about some of our technology product and growth initiatives of this quarter. But since we already covered all of our launches since June in our last earnings call, I'll just focus on what we rolled out in the last 30 days. Last month, we launched Turbo UPI, a revolutionary new way to make one-click UPI payments from within the ixigo app without even leaving the app experience. This is an industry-first product. Conventionally, UPI involves a 4-5-step process where users get redirected into the third-party payments app where they need to accept the payment, select a bank account, and enter a PIN to make purchases, and then they need to come back to the merchant app where they need to wait for the payment status to be updated. Now, in partnership with Razorpay, we have built a one-click UPI payment process right inside our app, which cuts the time taken to pay by half and improves the customer experience by reducing drop-offs and improving the success rate and conversion rate. In July, we also co-launched the new RuPay variant of our flagship AU ixigo Credit Card along with AU Small Finance Bank and NPCI. The card retains its existing benefits, which are 10% off on flights, buses, and hotels, and zero payment gateway charges for train bookings, as well as zero forex markup and 16 lounge accesses per year across railway and airport lounges. The biggest additional benefit is that the card members can link their RuPay credit card to their favorite UPI app and make seamless credit card transactions using UPI. In addition, they can earn award points as well as benefit from all the RuPay exclusive offers across brands. The card also comes with 24/7 concierge services and a comprehensive insurance cover of up to INR 200,000, including personal assistance on accident and personal disability. Today, I'm thrilled to announce a game-changing feature that will revolutionize the way our products experience air travel. Let me introduce ixigo Flight Tracker Pro, a comprehensive suite of tools designed to empower travelers with real-time information and convenience on their day of travel. ixigo Flight Tracker Pro seamlessly integrates cutting-edge technology with our existing platforms to provide a smooth, stress-free journey from checking to baggage claim. Let me walk you through some of its features. Flight Tracker Pro provides near-pilot-grade flight status for tracking for free, giving our users the most up-to-date information available. Detailed terminal and check-in counter info is available in real time, eliminating the need to look up this information on the display boards at the airport. Real-time updates on boarding gate signs and changes, along with instant notifications on any flight delay and status changes, will keep the travelers informed every step of the way. Flight Tracker Pro also provides baggage belt information as soon as you land, streamlining the often frustrating process of luggage retrieval. But what sets the Flight Tracker Pro apart is its deep integration with operating systems. For example, in the Apple ecosystem, we are leveraging live activity and dynamic island features to provide a seamless user experience for iPhone users directly from the lock screen. So you can access everything without even unlocking your phone. And one last thing, you can also use the ixigo Flight Tracker Pro on your Apple Watch. The launch represents a significant leap forward in our mission to improve customer experience for air travelers. We believe ixigo Flight Tracker Pro will not only drive user engagement and retention, but also open up future opportunities to engage the customers during and post-trip, just like we do on trains. The only way companies can win in the long term is by building the best customer experience. Building the best customer experience requires extreme customer obsession. This customer obsession allows us to empathize with customer pain areas and, in turn, helps us identify what problems are worth solving. The art of innovation is not always about solving problems, but about finding the right problems to solve at the right time. Many times, building these products and features has no short term to make them monetization. However, these products create extreme customer delight that drives word-of-mouth, stickiness, and organic growth. Our technology and AI capabilities allow us to solve these problems more efficiently, and our vast distribution network allows us to swiftly deploy and scale these solutions to millions of travelers. Now, handing over to Saurabh now to talk about our financial highlights. Thanks, Rajnish. In Q1 FY25, our gross ticketing revenue, which includes discounts, increased by 18.2%, climbing to ₹218.3 crore from ₹184.7 crore in Q1 FY24. Our average transaction value per passenger segment has improved by 9% thanks to our ability to efficiently identify and target more affluent among the NBU users with premium offering. Now, as I mentioned in the previous call, we believe revenue from operations, which excludes discounts and includes other operating revenues, serves as a more accurate indicator of our financial health. Our revenue from operations rose by 16.2%, amounting to ₹181.9 crore, up from ₹156.6 crore in the same quarter last year. Now, this growth highlights the diversity of our revenue stream across multiple lines of business, including trains, bus, flights, and now hotels as well. This positions us to address a broader range of customer needs and capture emerging opportunities in the travel and hospitality sector. Now, at the group level, the contribution margin, which we define as revenue from operations, less direct expenses such as partner fees, payment gateways, performance marketing costs, and cancellation costs, increased to ₹86.8 crore, up from ₹70.9 crore in Q1 FY2024. Correspondingly, the contribution margin percentage as a proportion of revenue from operations rose from 45.3% to 47.7%. Now, as Aloke alluded earlier, I would reiterate here that we will not shy away from letting go of some of the contribution margin percentage in order to accelerate growth. Now, we've continued to invest in our brand for the long-term growth of the company through strategic branding and advertising initiatives. Now, despite these investments, we have successfully grown our adjusted EBITDA. Adjusted EBITDA, which we define as EBITDA excluding other income and excluding ESOP costs, rose to INR 20.3 crore in Q1 FY25, up from INR 13.7 crore in Q1 FY24, a growth of 47.7% YoY. Our profit after tax PAT for Q1 FY25 reached INR 14.9 crore compared to INR 8.4 crore in the previous fiscal year, reflecting a nearly 78% increase. Now, I should highlight here that both adjusted EBITDA and net income include one-off, which I'll discuss in the end. Now, I also want to highlight that this quarter was a seasonally strong quarter, and the industry has benefited from the rebound post-COVID in the last six to eight quarters. We continue to expect industry growth to start normalizing from this year. Let me now talk about the three core lines of business. Our trains continue to shuttle out nicely. In Q1 FY25, trains booked 2.1 crore segments, contributing 53% to our group GTV, almost flat from Q1 FY24, and about 41% of our group contribution margin down from 45% from Q1 FY24. The strength of our product offering is highlighted by our continued increase in our market share in this segment. Our bus services continue on a steady route, and the seats are filling up fast. In Q1 FY25, the bus vertical booked 3.84 million passenger segments, generating a gross transaction value of ₹376.5 crore. This represents a 13% increase in segments and a 16% higher GTV as compared to the first quarter of fiscal year 2024. The gross take rate was almost flat at 11.09% as compared to 11.15%. The contribution margin for the segment grew 25% year-over-year to INR 29.4 crore, with the contribution margin percentage increasing to 74.3%, up from 65.4% in Q1 FY24. In Q1 FY25, bus contributed 12.6% of group GTV, which was down from 13.8% in Q1 FY24, though group contribution margin share of the business increased from 33.2% to 33.9%. Our flight bookings are taking off nicely. In Q1 FY25, we crossed INR 1,000 crore of GTV. Our contribution margin in Q1 FY25 grew at a rate of 58% to INR 21.3 crore. In Q1 FY25, flights contributed 34.2% of group GTV, which was flat year-over-year, and 24.6% of group contribution margin, increasing from 19.1% of group contribution margin in the same quarter last year. Finally, as promised, let me discuss the one-offs for the quarter. Last year, our investment company, FreshBus, was a subsidiary until 13 September 2023, and therefore, in Q1 FY24, a loss of INR 1.46 crore was incorporated in our EBITDA. Post this date, the company raised additional primary funding, resulting in its classification as an associate due to decreased ownership. In Q1 FY25, our share of loss for FreshBus, accounting for INR 2 crore, is now included in Q1 FY25 as share of loss of an associate, which is below the EBITDA line. Now, if we adjust for the loss last year, our adjusted EBITDA growth would be about 33%. The tax amount was a tax credit of INR 0.05 crore for Q1 FY24, while for Q1 FY25, there is a tax expense of INR 3.17 crore due to reversal of deferred tax credit. Additionally, there were two one-off items this time: INR 5.77 crore notional gain on FreshBus on account of their recently closed investment round on account of deemed sale accounting as per Ind AS 28, and one-off expense of INR 2 crore related to our IPO, which has been taken in Q1 this year. As we continue on the initial phase of our journey as a public company, I would like to conclude with a phrase from Buzz Lightyear of the film Toy Story: "To Infinity and Beyond." This phrase encapsulates our ambition and commitment to continue to ethically strive for excellence, a commitment we intend to uphold not only in quarters like this one, where we have performed well, but also during times when we face greater challenges and our performance might not measure up as well. With that, I'll hand it back to the moderators for questions. Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touch-tone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, you will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Devesh Mehta from 3P IM. Please go ahead. When we look at this flight segment, do you think, when you mean the normalized industry growth, can you give some more context around it? Sorry, you're not audible. Can you come again? When you highlighted that the flight segment on an industry level would return to a normalized growth, can you give some more context around it? Basically, are you talking about growth? Are you talking about? Sorry, your line is not very audible, sir. Sir, can you please use your handset? I am using the handset. Is it clear now, sir? Can you please speak a little louder, sir? Hello, is it clear now? No, sir. Can you please speak a little louder? I'll try to call back. Hello? Yeah, Devyesh, could you try repeating one? I think we've lost Devyesh. Let's start with Manik. Next question is from the line of Manik Taneja from Axis Capital. Please go ahead. Hi, thank you for the opportunity. Aloke and Saurabh, I wanted to pick your brains with regards to the growth that we are seeing on the airline side. While you alluded to the strong growth on the international air GTV side, it would be great to get your perspective as to what is the proportion of our overall airline GTV that we are getting from international bookings and how that number would have moved over the course of the last 12-18 months. That's question number one. The second question was to essentially get your sense with regards to we've seen some of your competition push up the promotional expenses. Just want to get your perspective as to how do you see this play out for you as well as the industry? Yeah, so we are not giving a breakup of how much of our flight GTV comes from international. We alluded to the growth in the earnings call; it's growing way faster than domestic, but I think that's not just for us. But if you look at what's happening in the overall market, domestic flights have grown only at 4.5% last quarter, whereas international continued to grow much faster than that. But just in terms of what's happening in the market, our sense is that we are seeing that the behavior has been a lot more rational in the last quarter or two, right, in terms of competition. And I think just in terms of post-COVID normalization, right, I think things are now pretty much back on both in terms of take rate and in terms of how the overall market competition dynamics are evolving. I think things look a lot more normalized than earlier. But my sense is that, look, from our perspective, we don't really—we don't really worry too much about competition at this stage because we are very small in comparison to some of the larger players. We are not one of the top three players on the air side, right? And we are coming from a mid-single-digit market share and largely relying on our own distribution and our own large base of customers coming from next billion users tier two, three towns. And our ability to sell more flights to people coming from, let's say, a Patna, a Lucknow, or a Kochi. And it just so happens that a lot of those flights being sold there are international these days because there's more connectivity. And also, if you look at the kind of fares that are prevalent, right, it is in many cases equivalent in terms of doing a vacation in a domestic city or whether you want to fly out abroad. So I think we're seeing that dynamics play out. Having said that, look, I think we have the right to grow faster than the market for some time to come. I mean, given both the user-based dynamics and also how small a market share we are coming from. Sure. So Rajnish wants to add something here. Yeah, go ahead. Sure. Yeah, I mean, the other reason why we are growing really fast is because of this customer obsession that we have and the ability to find customer problems and then solve them with these meaningful products that we do keep doing from time to time. So the launch of these new products on the flight booking, which is the flight tracker tool which I talked about during the call, which gives users like me a pilot-grade flight status tracking along with airport terminal, check-in desk, boarding gate, baggage claim info, etc. All the Turbo UPI, which is the industry-class one-click UPI checkout experience. All of these things additionally allow us to kind of create more customer stickiness by creating customer delight and word of mouth. And additionally, we also build more distribution partnerships and improve our brand recall among some of the tier-one customers. We are seeing some national growth coming from these markets as well, not just the next billion user market. What is surprising is how much the international flight has been growing for us, like we talked about, right? We saw almost 31% GTV growth quarter-on-quarter for the first quarter of this year. And some of that growth is coming surprisingly from tier-two towns like Patna, Lucknow, Kochi, etc. So that's what sums it up, basically. Okay. And if I can ask one bookkeeping question, we announced a tie-up with PhonePe on the air and the bus side. If you could help us understand if that's already contributing or that proportion is already starting to reflect in terms of financials this quarter, and how should we be thinking about our distribution cost with this part of the business, and in some sense, in terms of what proportion of our business would be coming in via PhonePe currently? Yeah, so see, PhonePe, that deal has gone live in June. And I think for this particular quarter, the impact might be of just one month, right? And you will see the full impact coming in subsequent quarters given it's just been rolled out, and that has taken a few weeks to roll out fully. Having said that, we are not in particular sharing out the breakup on how much that's contributing. All we can say is that it's definitely a very interesting distribution channel given the reach that it has in tier 2, 3 towns. Also, from a branding perspective and advertising perspective, right, there's a lot of brand awareness creation that happens for us, especially in categories like flights and buses where we need to continue investing in brand awareness creation. We are looking at it both ways, right, as a distribution channel as well as an avenue for creating more brand awareness among new customers, first-time bookers through us. Manik, to just add on to that, and it goes to the modeling question. As you've hinted, what we will do is the distribution cost comes at the contribution margin level. We are giving you the contribution margin. What we are saying is the Contribution Margin percent that we have right now is very high for the amount or for the potential for growth that we have. So if you're modeling, then you'll see the Contribution Margin easing up a bit here. When I say Contribution Margin, I mean the Contribution Margin percentage easing up a bit here. Sure. Thank you. That helps. Thank you. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The next question is from the line of Amol Garg from DAM Capital. Please go ahead. Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. Just two questions. Firstly, there has been some reduction in the take rates from the flight side. So I understand that there are some supply challenges which are going on which might be causing this. But my question is that what can be a sustainable or normalized take rate that we can expect in this business? Yeah, so Aloke here, I'll take it. See, essentially, during COVID, the take rates on the flight side had gone up a lot for two reasons. I mean, one is obviously the supply side needed more help to fill up the seats, and also the average transaction value was much lower. So remember that take rate has a couple of components here. One is the convenience fee, which is more or less a fixed part. And then there is a variable part which depends on your supply side commissions, GDS fees, etc. Now, as the average transaction value expands, and in the last couple of years, we have seen a lot of expansion in the average transaction value on the flight side. Therefore, optically, some of the take rate compression has happened. The other reason is obviously now the market is back to normalization, like I said, which is functioning pretty much. In fact, it's the opposite that there's a supply-side constraint in the market. As a result of that, you see take rates reaching levels where they were pretty much in the pre-COVID era when there were good load factors that the airlines were seeing. If you had to think about where these will continue to be, I think in the overall market, expect them to be in the 7% sort of range. But then there's an ixigo assured element or a value-added services element on top of that which can bump it up to where it is today. Thanks. Just for my understanding, so the partnership of PhonePe and other affiliates, does this impact take rate or the cost directly comes into the distribution cost and take rate is not impacted by this? It should not impact the take rate. It's the cost, which is the distribution cost, which comes above the Contribution Margin line. Sure. And secondly, on the advertisement part, so from the last quarter itself, we have seen a good increase in the advertisement expenses. Is there some seasonality over there? It's not a mathematical seasonality. Remember, the business takes a cost. So there are two kinds of advertisements, right? One would be something that you'd be doing for the long term, the other that you'd be doing more strategically when you're seeing a demand or a peak season coming up. So the long term, there won't be a seasonality, of course. We would take cost based on where we think are the right places to put in. But what we have said is, look, on a year-long basis, what we have said is the combination of what we call the different kind of the promotion or equivalent means, which is branding plus performance plus discount. We keep between 3%-3.5%. We've always maintained that as a percentage of our GTV. But yes. Again, in a peak season and a stronger quarter, you will see a bit more strategic advertisements that we'll be doing here. On a long-term branding initiative, that will be spread out. We'll see where we want to spend our marketing branding dollars on. Sure. Sure. Thanks. That's it from my end. Congratulations, guys, on a strong quarter. Thank you. Thank you very much. The next question is from the line of Saksham Savarna from Axis Capital. Please go ahead. Hi. Good evening. Thank you for the opportunity. I just wanted to understand a little bit on the industry dynamic. You've guided that the first quarter saw some slowdown due to the elections and the rising heat. Does that maybe indicate towards a slowdown in air travel or travel overall? So actually, what I think was that there were supply-side constraints because you would have seen that several planes had been grounded because of engine troubles. But also the new additions, at least in the first half of the year, have been rather slow. I think we are expecting that to accelerate a bit in the second half of the year. But as a result of that, domestic passenger segments have grown only 4.5% for the overall market in the last quarter. Having said that, I think for us, we managed to grow our flight GTV at 28%, like I said. So we've been obviously growing much, much faster than the market. And my sense is that some of these supply-side constraints will start easing in the later half of this financial year. From next year onwards, we could have again a situation where there is enough seats to sort of go around. Perfect. Thank you. That helps. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The next question is from Rohit. Please go ahead. From Axis Capital. Please go ahead, sir. Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity. So I just wanted to ask, there has been consolidation in the number of air operators which are operating in the country. How do you see this consolidation impacting the take rates of the company? Do you expect some pressures due to it, or what's your take on it, Uncertain]? That's a good question. I think largely you have two large airlines which have most of the market today. I think if you think about how the take rate of flight business flows, right, for OTS, convenience fees is a very large chunk of the overall take. So if you think about what's coming from the supply side or the GDS, etc., it's a relatively smaller portion of the take rate, right? And that dynamic, I think, is the same everywhere in the world. So I think we are already in an environment where some of that has happened already. Rohit, if I add to what Aloke just said, look, as a 30,000-foot view, having more operators is always better in any industry, as in that's 101 of any industry. But what happens is, as the operators decrease, and in any industry, as the supply would get consolidated, the differentiation to actually grow the market share in that industry would come from the fact that how good you execute. We've shown that in trains, and we've shown how we have grown with a limited operator around it. And probably I'll ask Rajnish to add on that journey because it is something which we pride ourselves with. Rajnish, can you add to that? Yeah. I think I'm going to talk about one more component of the take rate, which is the added services that we sell, right? I mean, starting with the Assured and Flex and maybe more in the future. It's important to understand that that is also part of the entire take rate that we are disclosing. And hence, if you look at just the supplier-only take rate as a percentage of the entire take rate, it further goes down because there's a contribution from value-added services as well. So between convenience and value-added services, there's very little on the supplier side direct which is there. And so that might be something that has been declining over the years, but it's not something that is meaningfully big when it comes to take rate that impacts us. Thank you. That was very helpful. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question for today's call. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Aloke Bajpai, Group CEO of ixigo, for closing comments. Thank you for everyone who's attended our call today. We look forward to continue this conversation over the next few quarters. All of you, have a great day. Thank you. On behalf of Axis Capital Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.