MakeMyTrip Limited (MMYT) Q4 2025 Earnings – Full Coverage

Welcome to MakeMyTrip Limited's fiscal 2025 fourth quarter and full year earnings webinar, hosted by the company's leadership team comprising Rajesh Magotra, our co-founder and group chief executive officer, and Mohit Kabra, our group chief financial officer. This live event is being recorded and will be made available for replay on our IR website shortly after today's event. At the end of these prepared remarks, we will host a Q&A session. Certain statements made during today's event may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provision of the US Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to inherent uncertainties; actual results may differ materially. Additional information concerning these statements is contained in the risk factors and forward-looking statement section of the company's annual report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC on July 2nd, 2024. I would now like to turn over the call to Rajes for his remarks. Over to you, Rajes.

Thank you, Vipul, and welcome everyone to our fourth quarter and full year call for fiscal 2025. Fiscal 2025 has been a milestone year for us in more ways than one. We not only delivered record performance but we also celebrated our 25th anniversary. As we mark this milestone, the team at MMYT is filled with a deep sense of pride and gratitude. Twenty-five years ago, we began with a simple mission of making travel accessible, convenient, and transparent for Indians. Since then, we have grown into a one-stop shop that continues to evolve and push boundaries. I would like to offer huge gratitude to our long-standing industry and non-industry partners for their support over this action-packed journey. Coming to the year and quarter key highlights: we delivered a record performance during fiscal year 2025 with a robust growth rate. We recorded a gross booking value of $9.8 billion for the year with year-on-year growth of 25.9% in constant currency terms. Alongside strong GBV growth, we continued to drive operating leverage. The adjusted operating profit reached an all-time high of $167.3 million, registering year-on-year growth of 34.7%. For Q4, gross booking value growth accelerated to 30.4% year-on-year in constant currency terms on the back of strong travel demand, and adjusted operating profit for Q4 grew at a rate of 37.9% year-on-year. Our high growth rate has come from new users as well as existing customers. During the year, we added more than 9 million customers, taking the lifetime transacted user base to 82 million. A lot of the new users have come from tier 2 and tier 3 towns, signifying our brand's penetration into deeper India. Our repeat rate in a quarter continues to be very healthy at over 70%. On our GenAI journey, we are excited to share that Myra.ai, our trip planning chatbot, has evolved into a powerful interface on an agentic framework, capable of orchestrating seamless interactions across specifically built AI bots for our products like flights, hotels, ground transport, and destination discovery. Myra is now a unified interface where users can plan their trip with intelligent and personalized prompts, as well as resolve post-booking queries or make amendments to bookings. This is part of our long-term commitment to make trip discovery and booking simpler, smarter, and more enjoyable using GenAI. In parallel, we have rolled out several generative AI-powered features across key business lines, including review summaries for faster decision-making, GenAI search that understands natural language trip queries, smart collections that curate travel options based on user themes and preferences, assist mode in flights, and AI-driven support for booking changes. Together, these advancements reflect our continued investment in next-generation AI-led travel experiences. Besides, as part of executing our connected trip strategy, we introduced multiple integrated touchpoints across our app, desktop, and WhatsApp to drive seamless end-to-end trip planning. The underpenetrated international outbound market was also identified as a growth opportunity this fiscal year. We strengthened our product proposition to better serve this market and saw the desired results. For fiscal year 25, our international air ticketing revenue grew by over 33% year-on-year, outpacing industry growth. Similarly, our international hotels revenue grew by over 65% year-on-year, making this one of our fastest-growing segments. Our international business now contributes 25% to overall revenue, up from 22% during fiscal year 24. Let me now turn to the business segments. Starting with air ticketing: while airlines are navigating near-term supply challenges, particularly in the domestic air market, the good news is that domestic departures crossed pre-pandemic levels this completed year. Supply growth in the domestic market continues at about 9.5% year-on-year, while international departures grew by 18.5% year-on-year. Online penetration in international air ticketing is increasing steadily, which helped our gross booking value of the air business grow by 24.3% year-on-year in constant currency terms in Q4 fiscal year 25. We revamped the My Trip section to enhance post-sales experience, enabling customers to easily discover and adopt digital solutions like cancellations and date changes without needing to call customer care. Since its launch, customer interactions with self-serve My Trips options have increased meaningfully and calls to customer care have reduced considerably. For international travelers, we launched the initiative of offering bite-sized customized travel insurance plans during international flight booking. Our accommodation business, which includes hotels, homestays, and packages, continues to witness strong growth. Gross booking value of the hotels and packages business grew by 27.7% year-on-year in constant currency terms for Q4. The last two quarters also delivered record performance for most hotel chains, reflecting robust demand. Most major players signaled an acceleration in development activity, particularly in tier 2, 3, and 4 cities. Global hotel chains are deepening their India focus by partnering with local operators. In the last 5 years, about 42,000-plus rooms have been added by chains, with 60% of them in tier 2 cities and beyond. We now offer 89,000-plus accommodation options in 2,000-plus cities. During the last fiscal, we added over 120,000 rooms to our supply. We scaled our ratings footprint to over 600,000-plus international properties. Our homestay business continues to scale, with over 33,000 unique properties across 1,100-plus destinations, and we added over 42,000 rooms translating to 33% year-on-year growth. Spiritual tourism is emerging as a significant growth driver within India's domestic travel landscape. Pilgrimage cities volume growth this fiscal was over 95% year-on-year, including windfall gains from the once-in-144-years Maha Kumbh, leading to 147% year-on-year growth in Q4. We stood out as the only player with accommodation inventory during the peak period, particularly on the alternative accommodation and tent offerings, which were fully bookable online. Our holiday packages business continues to deliver robust performance driven by growth in destinations like Thailand, Singapore, and Maldives. We launched our standalone tours and attractions funnel, covering 215,000-plus tours and attractions across 1,390 countries. In our bus business, growth further improved in Q4 on the back of strong demand, increasing supply, and one-time tailwinds from Kumbh. Growth continues to be broad-based with all regions growing in double digits. Supply in the private bus operator segment has grown approximately 15% year-on-year. We launched connecting bus services allowing operators to connect existing services, improving occupancy and increasing choice for users on longer-distance routes. Our international bus business also continues to grow well. For our rail business, we continue to bring new users to the platform. Food on trains is expanding rapidly, with IRCTC reporting a 200% increase in orders over the past two fiscals. We tested the market through a partnership with Real Food, which has delivered promising results. For our GAPS business, we continue to scale both airport transfers and intercity cabs. We introduced express pickup for airport-to-city cabs, a program that tracks flight arrival time and ensures the cab is ready upon arrival. Our corporate travel business via both MyBiz and Quest2Travel is witnessing strong growth. Active corporate customer count on MyBiz is now over 64,000-plus, compared to 56,600 during the same quarter last year. For Quest2Travel, active customer count has reached 57 large corporates compared to 35 in the same quarter last year. Before I conclude, I want to briefly address recent developments. We had a good start to the season in April, but the unfortunate incident at Pahalgam, a popular summer tourist destination, and the subsequent escalation between India and Pakistan resulted in travel disruption, leading to a noticeable dip in bookings, particularly in the northern region of India. This negative sentiment impacted bookings for a couple of weeks, affecting both leisure and corporate travel. With the ceasefire now in place and the situation stabilizing, we are optimistic about recovering some of the lost momentum in the weeks ahead. We continue to monitor the broader geopolitical and macroeconomic landscape. With this, let me now hand over the call to Mohit for the financial highlights of the quarter.

Thanks, Mohit. Any participant who wishes to ask a question can click on the raise hand option and we will take questions one by one. The first question is from the line of Sachin Salanker of Bank of America. Sachin, you may please ask your question now.

Thanks, Vipul. Congrats management again on a great set of numbers. I have three questions. First question is on your selling and marketing expense. Clearly we've seen them in the range of 4.5% to 5% for the longest time, but with every year your scale is improving. So on that improved, higher scale, how is management thinking in terms of looking to spend? Is there a thought process to perhaps keep the absolute amount similar but as a percentage of GMV continue to reduce, or continue to spend even higher compared to previous years despite competition being low?

Got it, pretty clear. Second question is generally on the growth rate for the industry and for MakeMyTrip. Clearly for the last few years there has been strong growth driven by consumer demand. Based on your comments, one gets a sense that consumer sentiment towards travel is unchanged, and we do have certain temporary near-term issues, but we also have an air supply issue which continues to persist. So in the backdrop of all of it, how should we ideally look at the industry growth rate, and any thoughts on how one could think about a MakeMyTrip growth rate for maybe the next year or couple of years from now?

Got it. And last question is on AI. Clearly this entire GenAI is evolving in a very rapid manner, and I know Rajesh touched base on the agentic framework as well. The question here is: do we see new threats in terms of competition, because there are multiple other agentic AIs which sort of — maybe difficult to give a time frame, could be six months, could be one to two years — and how is management looking at the risk of a new threat, and how the strategy of AI should work particularly from an agentic AI and travel perspective?

Able to produce it. And two is it is going to be speed and agility that's going to matter. So I think on both fronts we feel confident. On data front we have very rich data, and this is all three brands put together, MakeMyTrip's own data and not necessarily public internet data. And when you leverage that and try to sort of combine it with the overall public internet data and then come up with a product and then combine the trip planning with the transaction together, which again, if there's someone who would have a better chance of doing it, should be us, and we are on it, is going to ultimately make the difference. So I'm not necessarily, of course, watching this space very carefully, but we're not necessarily sort of paranoid about somebody newcomer who might come in and be able to bring in some use case and then pose a competition. And if they come in, then we'll have to obviously deal with that sort of new competition accordingly. But the greater amount of focus from our point of view is to make sure that we are ahead in the game and we make sure that we leverage all of that what we have and put the right resources behind it to ensure that we end up giving a better differentiated consumer experience with a new user interface to our customers. And then there is going to be by the way adoption journey as well. So this is going to be a long journey. This is more transformational, but it is definitely going to be a journey, and we stay committed and invested in this in a big way.

Thanks Raj. Just a quick follow-up. You guys have as one of the key primary shareholders, any learnings from Trip.com from a gen AI perspective? Because I presume they are a bit ahead in terms of the game in terms of how AI is evolving in China.

Well, on the models front perhaps yes, and you would realize Sachin that all of the OTAs, all the global OTAs, not only Trip but all the other global OTAs, we watch them very carefully and look at all the sort of developments happening every part of the world, especially on this front. All the OTAs are actually all consuming technologies. They're not necessarily building foundational models if you will. And on that front, frankly, if we end up doing the benchmarking exercise even today, and we keep doing it every now and then, fairly regularly, all of us would be there and thereabouts. I don't see anyone marching or miles ahead because all these underneath fundamental models are available to everyone. Those partnerships are available to everyone, and everyone is sort of leveraging all those what is available in the market and trying to sort of come out and build your own model. Because in the travel experience use case, it is not necessarily a very simple use case of just picking up the external data and summarizing and just answering some queries with some reasonable accuracy and then getting done with it. That is a very simple use case and that is not necessarily going to cut the ice. I think the focus everybody is trying to do is to make the new interface, which is the bot, far more intuitive, far more intelligent, and for that you have to do a lot of deep work leveraging some of these foundational models. So on benchmark front, I mean, we obviously will learn not only from them but from the others as well as we keep seeing the development very closely. And not only them, even Google, Microsoft, Meta, whoever is sort of coming up with the new models, we are working with every single one very closely because everyone is really sort of open to work with you right now because it's an evolving space. But from a benchmark perspective, I don't think anyone is miles ahead right now.

Thank you for the detailed explanation, Rajesh, and all the best. Thank you.

Thanks Sachin. The next question is from the line of Manish Shadukia of Goldman Sachs. Manish, you may please ask your question now.

Thank you Vipul. Hi, good evening team. Thank you for taking my questions. My first question is on competition. And now when we look at India as a market, airline and hotel direct have not done as well as how they may have done in some of the more developed markets. Additionally, even within OTAs, MakeMyTrip probably has one of the most dominant shares in India versus some of the other OTA markets you've seen elsewhere in the world. One or maybe two questions here. One, what in your view, Rajesh and team, explains this? And second, is this just the stage of evolution or maturity where currently the structure is like it, but as the market becomes more mature, more developed, we could see competition from whether it's airline direct, hotel direct, maybe even more? Just want to get your thoughts because we are right now in a very benign competition environment for quite some time now. Want to get your thoughts as to what in your view could change it. That would be my first question, please.

Sure Manish. Firstly, I would say we have to look at it a little bit more holistically, and not necessarily when we look at just competition from that lens, not necessarily only the digital sort of competition. Because the market is huge, Manish. India market is really, really huge. The overall travel and tourism market is huge, and the online penetration, barring domestic flights, is still quite underpenetrated. So therefore, overall holistically if you would look at it, there will be competition in this travel and tourism market from all the existing traditional conventional players depending upon which segment you talk about. You go on the packages segment, you will have tour operators, there are regional tour operators, there are pan-India focus tour operators, there are consolidators in the air market for international flights. There are traditional travel agents across the board. There are global OTAs on the online world. There are local OTAs, and then like you said, there are direct bookings happening as well. Although my view on direct bookings is that, and I've said that in the past, we never see our partners as competition, you know, because the pie is so big. It is just a question of having more sort of customer touch points from every principal standpoint for them to be able to get the maximum sort of demand in their favor. So first, I think it is very important to understand that yes, in the OTA space maybe we would be the leading market player today. But when I look at the overall total market, I think there's a significant amount of headroom, and for different travel segments we compete with different players. So will it evolve over the period? Have we seen them evolving over the last 25 years that we've been in business? The answer is yes. Will it further continue to keep evolving and we might see different nature of competition potentially? Maybe the answer is yes as well. I think the more important point is how do we, from our point of view, stay focused on executing our own strategies. How do we continue to keep evolving on our own, not only business strategy but also execution roadmaps. How do we stay ahead pretty much across the board, given that we are following a vision of one-stop shop which means multiple products and services, and from an execution standpoint, it's not easy. It is challenging but it definitely presents a moat to you. Over the period we've been able to build our brands on the back of consumer experience and some of those fundamental things besides the consistent product and technology innovation, scale-up, supply. We gave the example of a proactive approach on pilgrimage destinations like Mahakumbh, and so there are many things that you have to continuously and consistently do for you to be able to stay ahead in the market, and which is what our focus will be. We've been able to so far execute it well. The track record suggests that. But going forward also, we would make sure that we continue to stay focused, keep watching the world, but stay focused on what we need to do so that we stay ahead of the curve.

Thank you, very helpful. But would it be safe to summarize that at least from a near-term perspective, competition is not something you're losing sleep over?

That is something for you to say. I'm not losing sleep over competition either now or even in the past, because competition is competition. I think we should lose sleep over what is our own business strategy and execution roadmap, that definitely one is very focused and one is very stretched on.

Thank you Raj, helpful. Second question, maybe directed towards Mohit now. I mean when we look at margin guidance, Mohit, medium-term 1.8 to 2%, you're already at the lower end of that guidance and of course directionally you are improving that number. In the last 12 months alone you've added like 15-20 basis points on that number, and there is like you said in the past some operating leverage in the business. So while we understand your point on marketing spend and you're not wanting to bring that down below maybe like 5% or thereabouts, but everything else from a cost perspective should naturally drive some operating leverage, and if you keep following the same trajectory in 12 months you'll probably be at the higher end of your guidance. So what really stops the margin number to exceed the top end of your guidance in maybe about 2 years? And would you like consciously try to keep it within the 2% band and reinvest whatever you get in growth, or is there a different way we should think about it?

Understood, clear. And maybe just the last question on this buyback number, where the quarter you did about $21 million. Just like how should we think about the number? I know you've called out a certain number, I don't know what the maximum number could be of $114 million buyback, but like is the $20 million number like a new baseline number in terms of how much you can do minimum every quarter? Or like how should we think about what percentage of free cash flow you can potentially start doing buyback? Any color that would be helpful.

Thank you. Very helpful. All the best.

Thank you, Manish.

Thanks Manish. The next question is from the line of Vijit Jain of Citi. Vijit, you may please ask your question now.

Thanks, and congratulations to all of you on the 25th anniversary. My first question is, Airbnb launched a significant product upgrade yesterday, right? Significant expansion into experiences. I think they said 19 categories, thousand cities and agentic AI plans, etc. So I would like to maybe get your thoughts on experiences as a category for your business. I know at some point of time in the past, I think you believed it was a bit early for this in India. But any incremental thoughts on that would be great to know.

Sure Vijit. No, that's a good observation, and we went through that as well. A quick update on tours and experiences is that we've actually gone live already with that. We just need to scale it up to the complete traffic, expose it to 100% traffic. Slowly and gradually it's getting ramped up already. And I've called that out also as part of the script. There was one player dedicated to that in the coverage and the kind of experiences that are going to be there on our platform and the number of cities etc. So we will have a very wide and broad coverage as well. And this is right now focused predominantly on international destinations. But we will also continue to keep ramping up even the domestic experiences where the APIs would be available and offer that to our customers as well. So we also do believe that this is going to be an additional high-potential service from this market as well, given that there is a lot of growth that is happening on international travel. You all know that the recovery post-COVID was led by the domestic market; after that, after the lag effect, international is now growing very handsomely as well. And this added service will definitely be a good addition. We definitely see good potential in it, but from a consumer point of view it will also be on MakeMyTrip one more service that they will also get.

Got it. Thanks Rajesh. Raj, building on top of that, so in general looking at the kind of inorganic opportunities you might pursue, I'm wondering if there are two areas that I can probably think of where it would probably make sense. One is obviously in this experiences category where I don't know if there's anything like a Klook or those kinds of services, similar to those kinds of services that you could probably look to acquire. Your thoughts on that. And the second avenue is as you look at Gen AI and you talked about leveraging your own data and everything, is there anything on the travel media or travel content side which probably makes sense for you from an acquisition point of view? So really questions around whether within experiences or within media, specific areas where you're interested in.

Well, listen, like I said, we've just embarked on the organic journey to build. We've just built a platform, we already have those services, we have the supply on our platform already, and our strategy is going to be to build as much as possible direct supply already. And we already have a lot of traffic on our platform. So frankly, given that we already have the traffic, we are just going to add more service. We have so much international traffic already on our platform, and we have already built a platform as well as scaled up the supply. So we will go down this path and organically scale this up. On M&A, as Mohit is highlighting, our strategy, as you would have noticed from the past track record as well, has been on looking at just niche segments and seeing if there is going to be a potential option in the ancillary segments which could be aggregative or adding any sort of product expansion capabilities. Like HackFur was a good example of that. It'll continue to be that. And here in any case we've started our journey organically. And on even the content side, on the media or content, there are plenty of even the marketing side tools available. Even for our content strategy, there are many tools that we are already starting to leverage, whether we do various digital campaigns or for our own platform content strategy, the videos and potentially there are plans around coming up with rich video content, reels, etc., leveraging all these GenAI tools that are available. So I'm not sure there is an inorganic opportunity there because a lot of it is just accessible and available, and we just need to build on that. Having said that, we'll keep watching the space. If there's always an opportunity which makes sense and falls into our overall inorganic expansion criteria, we would be very happy as always to evaluate. But so far, I think we have not really seen that as an opportunity.

Got it. Raj, my last question. Any one-off costs associated with the developments in the last two weeks in North India that you called out?

Not really, not really, Vijit. I think the last couple weeks has only seen a dip in the overall travel sentiment, and therefore travel overall has been impacted, but nothing that we've called out as a one-off or exceptional cost.

Got it. Thank you so much. Those are my questions.

Thanks. The next question is from the line of Manik Tan of Access Capital. Manik, you may please ask your question now.

Hi, thank you for the opportunity. I hope I'm audible. While my question around possible operating leverage is essentially already answered, I had a couple of clarification questions. One is with regards to how much of the growth on the bus side in the current quarter could be driven by the change in the recognition policy. That's question number one. And then a couple of bookkeeping questions in terms of how should we be thinking about our ESOP expenses as well as tax rates going forward. That would be it from my end.

The two more bookkeeping questions. In terms of, could you help us understand how should we be thinking about your ESOP charges as well as tax rates going forward.

All right. Thank you and all the best for the future.

Thanks Manik. The next question is from the line of Ankur Rudra of JP Morgan. Ankur, you may please ask a question now.

Hey, thank you. Just want to take a step back and talk a bit about demand. In the current quarter, before the conflict began, what have been the early indications of the 1Q bookings? The broader economic environment has been somewhat soft on the consumption side. Was wondering if you've seen any evidence of that before the recent conflict.

Thank you. And the impact on travel sentiment, has it been almost equal on both the international outgoing and on the domestic side?

Thank you. Just one more question. I think you addressed a lot on how you're thinking about AI, but I had a question asked in a different way. One of the differentiators for MakeMyTrip has been the accessible contact center that you have versus competition, especially versus international competition. In that context, how are you thinking about using AI to manage cost without losing that differentiation you have and maintaining customer experience?

Yeah, good question, Ankur. And I was covering that as part of my earlier response under the customer experience, because that has been one of the very important focus areas for us, and like you called out, perhaps differentiated from the market as well. And we will not dilute that by any stretch of imagination. We are obviously leveraging the technology to the hilt as much as possible. And there, our focus is without compromising the customer experience. If you sort of either do the automation or move the customer from one channel to the other channel, in fact, our internal goal always is to better that experience. So this journey for us now, before GenAI, this self-service automated journey started much earlier, in fact, right after COVID, in the middle of COVID, because that was one of the areas that we ended up focusing, and we had resources and we doubled down on that. And our experience on the MakeMyTrip self-service, even without the GenAI intervention, has been very, very good, very well received. We measure our CSAT, we measure our NPS on that, and we continue to keep improving that experience because the device is already there. Everybody is familiar with the device. If we end up providing the experience which is better than a call center experience, because sometimes call center experience also has to go through IVR and the flow can be a little irritating, even if at the end of the day we end up doing with all the service levels and the promise there, we definitely end up providing a better experience on self-service as well. So we will continue to be focused, improve the experience, and then in the process if we get the productivity gains, that would be our strategy.

Appreciate it. Thank you, understood.

Thank you. Thanks Ankur. We are almost out of time. This was our last question. Over to you Rajesh for your closing remarks.

Well, thank you Vipul, and thank you everyone for your time and for all the questions. Like we said, yes, there were recent developments, but thankfully after the ceasefire we seem to be on our way from a consumer sentiment standpoint, and hopefully looking forward to the normalcy soon and a normal quarter.

Thank you so much. Thank you Rajesh. Everyone, thank you for joining. You may now disconnect the call. Thank you.