About the Company
RateGain Travel Technologies Ltd is the leading distribution technology company globally and the largest Software as a Service (SaaS) provider in the travel and hospitality industry in both domestic and international travel markets. The firm offers travel and hospitality services across different verticals like hotels, airlines, online travel agents, meta-search companies, package providers, car rentals, cruises, and ferries.
Q4 FY23 Updates
Financial Results & Highlights
Detailed Results:
- Q4 FY23 Revenue grew 70% YoY.
- Annual recurring revenue stood at 565 Crs.
- Gross Revenue retention: 90.1% for FY23 | Recurring Revenue: 75%.
- EBITDA stood at 17.6%.
- Revenue Breakup by Segment FY23 – MarTech: 209 Cr | DaaS: 161.8 Cr | Distribution: 194.3 Cr.
- Revenue Breakup by Engagement – Subscription: 32.5% | Transaction: 25% | Hybrid: 42.5%
- Revenue Breakup by Geography – North America: 56.1%| Europe: 30.1% | Asia-Pacific: 11% | Others: 2.9%.
- Top 10 Customers Revenue Share: 32.2%
- Employee Count: 713 | Employee Attrition: 21.1%
- Cash Flow from Operating Activities FY23: Rs.84.6cr.
- The company’s cash and cash equivalent balance at the end of quarter was INR 341.3 crores, but it have deployed around INR 120 crores post the quarter for recent Adara acquisition in Q3.
Investor Conference Call Highlights
- The management states that margin improvement has been strong at 17.6% EBITDA margin in Q4 and 15% for the full year, ahead of the guidance given at the time of the IPO of 200 to 300 basis points expansion from the 8.3% margin reported last year.
- The management states that it had best quarter ever in terms of new contract wins and added a record 543 customers over the course of the year.
- The company has completed the acquisition of Adara, the fourth acquisition in the past five years to build the world’s most comprehensive travel intent and pricing data platform to help the travel industry improve their marketing ROI.
- The management reports that the initial integration has gone off very smoothly with the Adara team pumped up with another great quarter of new business closings for them.
- The company launched certain virtual concierge services the past year, the equivalent of chat gpt, which is called Engage AI to help its hotel partners to have an easier communication medium with their guests.
- The company is exploring the use of generative AI to drive operational efficiencies within the organization to help solve for customer queries, extract data more efficiently and also specifically enhance certain products around brand engagement.
- The company generated three times free cash flows as opposed to the previous year, with the free cash flow for the year being at INR 52 Cr.
- The company posted another quarter of healthy growth across all three verticals front with an operating margin of 17.6% on the back of operating leverage and some cost optimization measure taken to drive healthier performance across business lines.
- The management states that DaaS and Distribution, the high margin businesses, continue to witness good volume growth with existing clients, steady travel demand and continued monetization of new logos added in the past quarters.
- RateGain has been at the forefront of using AI for the last decade and a half, using it for driving operational efficiency in products and engineering teams and to enhance outcomes for our customers.
- Across DaaS distribution and MarTech business units, RateGain has been using AI to give actionable insights instantly from millions of rates to automatically recommending demand partners on our connectivity platforms, as well as tracking real-time travel intent for leading brands.
- The management states that the key differentiator for the success of generative AI would be the quality of data it has to access for training its model. RateGain has a huge advantage over its peers as it has huge data lake with billions of price points that gives it an advantageous position.
- The company was awarded the SaaS Startup of the Year by SaaS Boomi amongst 10,000 SaaS companies in India. SaaSBOOMi is an equivalent of NASSCOM for SaaS companies.
- The new acquisition, Adara, which was loss-making before the acquisition, registered a 10.35% EBITDA for the quarter due to a successful integration that was completed in 75 days.
- The managements guidance for the turnaround of the Adara business is 15% growth at a 15% EBITDA margin.
- The management give a guidance of the effective tax rate being 16% to 17% for FY24.
- The management gives a growth guidance for DaaS at 30%, Distribution at 15%, MarTech at 20% and expects Adara to grow by 55-56% next year.
- In Pre-COVID, Adara was a $100 million business. The management sees it as a low-hanging fruit and plans to accelerate the growth numbers to bring it back to the 100 million number.
Analyst’s View
RateGain Travel Tech has a lot of growth ahead of it which is evident from its recent quarter where revenues grew by 70% coupled with tremendous operating leverage playing out resulting in EBITDA margins rising to 17.5%. The company recently acquired ADARA at a very attractive valuation & is expected to bolster its PDM offering. Access to data helps it derive deep insights and serve customers with more optimized solutions, be it in rate parity, bookings, or marketing. As it expands the business, this moat can be expected to widen. Apart from that there is customer stickiness as well with 7 of the Top 7 customers being with them for more than 10 years, which makes one believe that they might be doing something right there. It can also be an attractive acquisition target for a large global SaaS player looking to expand in the Travel space. The company is highly correlated with the travel industry, so its performance is largely dependent on how Hospitality and Travel Industries perform like most tech companies, RateGain also faces the risk of competition in developing better tech products in a constantly evolving space.
Q3 FY23 Updates
Financial Results & Highlights
Detailed Results:
- Q3 FY23 Revenue grew 40% YoY.
- Annual recurring revenue stood at 553.7 Crs.
- Gross Revenue retention: 90.4% for 9M | Recurring Revenue: 98.7%.
- EBITDA stood at 16.6%.
- Revenue Breakup by Segment 9M – Martech: 37.5% | DaaS: 26.1% | Distribution: 36.4%
- Revenue Breakup by Engagement – Subscription: 33.7% | Transaction: 23.5% | Hybrid: 42.8%
- Revenue Breakup by Geography – North America: 55.2%| Europe: 31.1% | Asia-Pacific: 10.6% | Others: 3.1%
- Top 10 Customers Revenue Share: 34.6%
- Employee Count: 640 | Employee Attrition: 23.7%
- Cash Flow from Operating Activities 9M: Rs.29.2cr.
- The company’s cash and cash equivalent balance at the end of quarter was INR 432.8 crores, but it have deployed around INR 120 crores post the quarter for recent Adara acquisition.
Investor Conference Call Highlights
- On a run rate basis, annual recurring revenue exceeded its pre-COVID ARR by 27%.
- The management states that RateGain is performing very well on the rule of 40 which is a benchmark for SaaS businesses. It is currently at 57%, which is an aggregate of the 17% EBITDA-plus 40% growth.
- Talking about its ADARA acquisition strategy & plans, the management said It fits in perfectly with the vision of RateGain to build an integrated RevMax platform and allows its customers to do guest acquisition, guest engagement and retention and wallet share expansion. The initial integration plan is well underway, and the focus is to make this business EBITDA positive in the next couple of quarters and map out the GTM road map, first capturing the low-hanging fruit, which is to recapture and reactivate the existing one lost relationships.
- The company had the best ever quarter in the history of RateGain with new contract wins recorded at over INR49.3 crores, a 22% growth over Q3 of last year.
- In the distribution segment, it witnessed healthy volume growth in the past quarter with demand across OTA channels and the midsized hotel chain segment.
- In Martech, continues to make inroads into the APAC and Middle East region and has onboarded multiple properties with innovative brand engagement and paid distributor solutions.
- The DaaS business unit grew at a strong pace on the back of increased volume demand and expansion with our existing enterprise customers.
- The company is seeing tremendous operating leverage wherein, operating cost grew by 29% leading to EBITDA rising from 9.76% to 16.58%.
- Other income was reduced by INR 6 crores this quarter, primarily due to an unrealized forex loss of INR 4.5 crores.
- At the start of the year, the management had given a guidance of 30% growth and 12.5% EBITDA margins, and it is well on course to beat the guidance by a good margin.
- In terms of guidance for Q4, it will be able to consolidate Adara financials for this quarter for two months and 20 days as it completed the transaction around the 10th of January & expects 5% EBITDA in the quarter.
- Due to the opening of China, cross-border travel is expected to grow strongly by 50%.
- Due to the company’s substantial ability to cross-selling, a decent chunk of new order wins, were with some of its existing customers buying some of the new products.
- In terms of deal wins for this quarter, 63% came out of distribution around 25% from DaaS, and 12% from Martech.
- The company is seeing good Cashflows which will fund its existing operations while its treasury balance will be utilized solely from an M&A perspective.
- The LTV to CAC was very high for Q3 at 22.8 since distribution contributed a major chunk, which has got less retention and a high gross margin.
- The company’s Martech offering involves s brand management, brand monitoring, and engagement and Paid Digital Media for Luxurious hotels on Social media domains.
- The QoQ growth in Martech was lower owing to the pruning of lower-margin hotel accounts signed during the covid period.
- The guidance for Q4 is 30% revenue growth YoY & 18-19% EBITDA margins.
- The company has a dedicated team similar to a VC for M&A & it has the policy to pay only 1.5-2X sales multiple for any acquisition.
- The first release of the company’s platform is out & the company is seeing good traction.
- The amortization costs are expected to remain at the current levels for the next 2-3 years.
- The company recently elevated its prices & thus doesn’t expects to clock revenue growth of 50% levels.
Analyst’s View
RateGain Travel Tech has a lot of growth ahead of it which is evident from its recent quarter where revenues grew by 40% coupled with tremendous operating leverage playing out resulting in EBITDA margins rising from 10% to 16%. The company recently acquired ADARA at a very attractive valuation & is expected to bolster its PDM offering. Access to data helps it derive deep insights and serve customers with more optimized solutions, be it in rate parity, bookings, or marketing. As it expands the business, this moat can be expected to widen. Apart from that there is customer stickiness as well with 7 of the Top 7 customers being with them for more than 10 years, which makes one believe that they might be doing something right there. It can also be an attractive acquisition target for a large global SaaS player looking to expand in the Travel space. The company is highly correlated with the travel industry, so its performance is largely dependent on how Hospitality and Travel Industries perform like most tech companies, RateGain also faces the risk of competition in developing better tech products in a constantly evolving space.
Q2 FY23 Updates
Financial Results & Highlights
Standalone Financials (in Crs) | ||||||||
Q2FY23 | Q2FY22 | YoY % | Q1FY23 | QoQ % | FY22 | FY21 | YoY% | |
Sales | 32.3 | 24.2 | 33.47% | 30.9 | 4.53% | 73 | 93 | -21.57% |
PBT | 2.6 | 0.7 | 261.11% | 3.4 | -22.39% | 3 | -6 | – |
PAT | 1.9 | 0.4 | 382.50% | 2.3 | -14.22% | 2 | -6 | – |
Consolidated Financials (in Crs) | ||||||||
Q2FY23 | Q2FY22 | YoY % | Q1FY23 | QoQ % | FY22 | FY21 | YoY% | |
Sales | 131.4 | 87.7 | 49.83% | 127.0 | 3.46% | 367 | 251 | 46.13% |
PBT | 15.6 | -1.3 | 1100.00% | 11.0 | 41.82% | 11 | -25 | – |
PAT | 12.9 | -1.8 | 616.67% | 8.4 | 53.39% | 8 | -29 | – |
Detailed Results:
- The company had a good quarter with revenue growing by 49% and profits are almost 600% up.
- Out of revenue growth of 49%, organic is around 33%, rest is inorganic.
- The growth in the H1 of FY23 stands at 52.7% with the company posting a total revenue of 243.9 Crores in H1 for this year
- The company has posted its highest adjusted EBITDA margin of 15.2% in the past few years against 8.4% in Q2 FY22.
- Adjusted EBITDA margin to 12.8% in the first half of FY23
- The adjusted EBITDA for the quarter grew at an impressive 170% to 18.9 Crores against 7 Crores posted in the same quarter last year.
- The adjusted PAT has grown 5.3 times to 19.6 Crores in Q2 FY23 compared to 3.7 Crores in Q2 FY22. The adjusted PAT for H1 stands at 34.4 Crores.
- The distribution segment accounted for 35% of total revenue with a recurring revenue of 99.2%.
- MarTech business has recurring revenue of 99% contributing 38% of overall revenue for Q2.
- The recurring revenue for DaaS business was 98.3% and contributed to 27% of the revenue in the second quarter.
- Annual recurring revenue stands at 483.4 Crores almost 20% above the pre-COVID levels.
- Recurring revenues for the quarter stood at 99% and 76% revenues were in subscription in nature.
- Gross revenue retention and net revenue retention stood at 90% and 105% respectively.
- New contract wins posted healthy year-over-year growth of 12.5% and came in at 21.2 Crores and with that the company saw an improvement in LTV to CAC which remained at 12.2 for H1, the marked improvement over 8.9 reported in Q1.
- Employee headcount was flat sequentially with the revenue per employee saw 12% increase over last year at 78 lakhs.
- Pipeline increased by 10% to 314 Crores as compared to last year.
- Cash from operations saw a marked improvement in H1, generated 1.4x of cash generated in the entire fiscal year of 2022.
- Attritions are currently around 22% to 24%. The average tenure of employees in is more than four years.
Investor Conference Call Highlights
- The management stated the standout for the company this quarter is the operating leverage kicking in with expansion in our operating margins to a 10-quarter high of 15.2%
- The management announced the launch of our latest AI-powered offering developed in-house at RG Labs called Engage AI. This is a virtual concierge tool that will be available to hotel guests on their preferred messaging app like WhatsApp right from the time of booking to the culmination of their stay. This tool will assess them with virtual check-in and checkout, answer their simple queries about making reservations at a restaurant or a spa of their choice and get personalized recommendations for shopping and tours, and activities thus enabling the hotels to engage better with their audience and also grab a share of all their travel spends. The company already live in some properties and in talks with some large clients.
- Industry highlights given by the management
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- In terms of global travel trends, they continue to see that the demand remains strong despite growing concerns on macro headwinds.
- Volumes in reservations continue to remain strong with a strong holiday season coming up in key destinations globally.
- The global health travel index released by Skift continues to hold steady and many geographies are at or above pre-COVID levels now.
- The management stated their big customers like the big OTAs, the biggest car rental companies, and hotel companies have reported record Q2 performance in terms of revenue and profit, and given the need for digitization and record profits, we continue to see robust demand for our products.
- The company built up a healthy pipeline of 315 Crores.
- Distribution segment
- . Volume growth continues to be strong on the back of robust recovery across the mid-size hotel chain segment and pickup in GDS business which is a parameter of business travel.
- The company closed some good deals this quarter in terms of pairings between popular OTAs and large hotel chains and some of the parings from previous quarters are scaling out well.
- The company will continue to invest and scale new products like Content AI that will enable it to position distribution vertical with a 10x differentiator.
- MarTech business
- . Growth within this segment continues to be driven by an increase in existing engagements as customers are looking to include our metasearch product.
- DaaS business
- . The company’s new adjacent sub-vertical within the travel space which is vacation rentals has been seeing some good traction and is a promising new growth segment.
- One of the company’s new products on the DaaS which is Rev AI continues to perform well and has seen strong traction within the car rental space and it has recently completed integrations with some of the largest CRS systems on large car rental companies which will allow it to make further inroads with these franchises of these car rental companies.
- The management stated on M&A they have a robust pipeline and they are looking to consummate if the value is right. These opportunities spread across strengthening existing business lines of DaaS, Martech and Distribution.
- The management expects to continue the company’s growth at around 30% year-over-year and the margins level would be similar to Q2.
- The management stated the net retention rate will continue to see improvement as their Q4 is the highest quarter and the volumes are pretty high in Q4, so they continue to see improvement from Q2 to Q4.
- The management stated Q3 and Q4 are sort of the big quarters for us so H2 is bigger than H1
- On the employee expense front, the management stated it should remain flat at least in Q3, Q4 might see a slight increase but not materially.
- The management stated tech markets, especially in the US have crashed it has created some very interesting opportunities for RateGain so when they look at our pipeline since the beginning of the year it has been pretty robust.
- The company is in a conversation with various opportunities since the valuation has also kind of tapered off and is actively looking for inorganic growth, and it would be over and above this 30% revenue CAGR guideline organically.
- Going forward the management expects between 200 to 300 basis points expansion in margins every year, getting to about 20% to 25% by FY25.
- The majority of the company’s clients are one year, it is an auto-renewal clause like one can terminate the service at the end of the year if you do not do then you are auto-renewed for another year, which is the subscription nature of the contract.
- The management stated attrition will go back to 16% to 18% attrition rate in the coming quarters, then the average cost of employees will also reduce.
- At the end of Q1, the company was sitting at about 2300 customers and added about 200 customers, and lost about 50 so the net addition was about 150 customers; so customer addition was roughly about 6%, 7%, and quarterly revenue growth it is similar sort of 4% to 5%.
- The management stated everything that they do is basically targeted to the same midmarket and enterprise market level of hotels, that is over a million hotels but the key market is the 3,00,000 hotels that are part of this midmarket in the enterprise segment, and in that sense, the TAM is large but the company is still at sort of initial days and it just launched this product Engage AI.
- Q3 in terms of new bookings have some very good momentum and in terms of new booking, this should be a very strong quarter for the company as per the management.
- The management sees the 15% EBITDA margin for the Q3 quarter and exceeding that in Q4 as well.
- The company has a volume-based pricing model, like more rooms connected to more channels means more transactions, and as the number of bookings or transactions increases, it gets a higher realization as a result. Similarly in DaaS business, information enables the customer to be more competitive so the more data that they get from the company, the more it is able to charge.
- A lot of the growth in business is not really from cross-sell, a lot of it is upsell. Upsell for net retention rate is 110%.
- From the IPO, the inorganic expansion will be utilized. The strategic investment into AI-led products that utilization has already started and general purpose will utilize as part of the M&A or the organic investment into the AI-led products.
Analyst’s View
RateGain Travel Tech has a lot of growth ahead of it. Access to data helps it derive deep insights and serve customers with more optimized solutions, be it in rate parity, bookings, or marketing. As it expands the business, this moat can be expected to widen. Apart from that, there is customer stickiness as well with 7 of the Top 7 customers being with them for more than 10 years, which makes one believe that they might be doing something right there. It can also be an attractive acquisition target for a large global SaaS player looking to expand in the Travel space. The company got operating leverage kick-in and margin expansion during the Q2. The company is highly correlated with the travel industry, so its performance is largely dependent on how Hospitality and Travel Industries perform, and like most tech companies, RateGain also faces the risk of competition in developing better tech products in a constantly evolving space.
Q1 FY23 Updates
Financial Results & Highlights
Standalone Financials (in Crs) | ||||||||
Q1FY23 | Q1FY22 | YoY % | Q4FY22 | QoQ % | FY22 | FY21 | YoY% | |
Sales | 24.9 | 17.4 | 43% | 18.9 | 31% | 72.7 | 92.7 | -21% |
PBT | 3.3 | 1.5 | 120% | 1.1 | 200% | 2.8 | (6.1) | |
PAT | 2.2 | 1 | 120% | 0.7 | 214% | 1.8 | (6.2) | |
Consolidated Financials (in Crs) | ||||||||
Q1FY23 | Q1FY22 | YoY % | Q4FY22 | QoQ % | FY22 | FY21 | YoY% | |
Sales | 119.3 | 74.9 | 59.2% | 107.9 | 10.6% | 366.5 | 250.8 | 46.2 |
PBT | 11 | -0.56 | 12.3 | -11% | 10.8 | -24.6 | ||
PAT | 8.4 | -1.4 | 11.6 | -27.5% | 8.42 | -28.5 |
Detailed Results:
- Q1 FY23 Revenue grew 59% YoY to Rs.119.3 crores.
- Annual Recurring Revenue: Rs.477cr (20% higher than pre-covid levels)
- Gross Revenue retention: 90% | Recurring Revenue: 99%
- US Hotel and Rental Occupancy at pre-covid levels.
- Gross Margins saw a small dip to 75%.
- Revenue Breakup by Segment – Martech: 41.7% | DaaS : 24.7% | Distribution: 33.6%
- Revenue Breakup by Engagement – Subscription: 34% | Transaction: 23% | Hybrid: 43%
- Revenue Breakup by Geography – North America: 54%| Europe: 33% | Asia-Pacific: 10% | Others: 3%
- Top 10 Customers Revenue Share: 34%
- Employee Count: 625 [3% Q-oQ increase] | Employee Attrition: 22.3%
- Revenue per Employee: Rs.0.77cr [ ARR/Employee Count]
- Cash Flow from Operating Activities: Rs.0.48cr
Investor Conference Call Highlights
- Labour shortage in Travel industry has accelerated the path towards digitization and RateGain is well positioned to capture this opportunity.
- Expect little or no impact due to inflation, higher interest rates or Russia-Ukraine conflict.
- Demand for Metasearch and marketing products driven by customers looking to optimize their spends in increasing cost environment.
- Distribution business is sticky and company has pricing power in this segment. For Daas and Martech product, the pricing for most customer contracts are back to pre-covid levels.
- EBITDA guidance of 20-25% in 3-4 year timeline.
- Money raised from IPO utilised to pay debt of Rs.85 cr, Rs. 170 cr yet to be spent on M&A, Data Centre related Capex and R&D.
- New products are present in no or less intense space, will be able to generate gross margins of 90+%
- Positive surprise in business travel, expected 60% of pre-covid levels, experienced 80% of pre-covid levels.
- Operating Leverage can be expected to come into play post crossing Rs.800cr mark [$100M].
- Most of the competitors are point-solution providers and do not provide a comprehensive solution including both social and data/digital offering.
- Closed contracts with smaller retail customers which were not profitable. Focusing more on the Enterprise contracts.
- DSO improved from 80 days to 70 days. Targeting DSO of 60 days. Larger players have DSO of 75 days.
- Working on products that capture increasing share of traveller spends, Eg: engaging with the traveller to reduce friction in organising the day, booking cabs, finding right restaurant and so on.
- Segment Margins- Daas: 75% | Distribution: ~90% | Martech: ~60%
- GDS – OTA Break-up – 20-80% respectively.
Analyst’s View
RateGain Travel Tech has a lot of growth ahead of it. Access to data helps it derive deep insights and serve customers with more optimized solutions, be it in rate parity, bookings or marketing. As it expands the business, this moat can be expected to widen. Apart from that there is customer stickiness as well with 7 of the Top 7 customers being with them for more than 10 years, makes one believe that they might be doing something right there. It can also be an attractive acquisition target of a large global SaaS player looking to expand in Travel space. The company is highly correlated with the travel industry, so its performance is largely dependent on how Hospitality and Travel Industry performs and like most tech companies, RateGain also faces risk of competition developing better tech products in a constantly evolving space.
Q3 FY22 Updates
Financial Results & Highlights
Standalone Financials (In Crs) | ||||||||
Q3FY22 | Q3FY21 | YoY % | Q2FY22 | QoQ % | 9MFY22 | 9MFY21 | YoY% | |
Sales | 26 | 25 | 4.0% | 24 | 8.3% | 77 | 62 | 24.2% |
PBT | -0.5 | 2.56 | -119.5% | 0.7 | -171.4% | 1.7 | 5 | -66.0% |
PAT | -0.44 | 2.3 | -119.1% | 0.4 | -210.0% | 1 | 4 | -75.0% |
Consolidated Financials (In Crs) | ||||||||
Q3FY22 | Q3FY21 | YoY % | Q2FY22 | QoQ % | 9MFY22 | 9MFY21 | YoY% | |
Sales | 100 | 65 | 53.8% | 88 | 13.6% | 269 | 186 | 44.6% |
PBT | 0.4 | -11 | 103.6% | -1.4 | 128.6% | -1.5 | -22 | 93.2% |
PAT | 0.085 | -11 | 100.8% | -2 | 104.3% | -3 | -23 | 87.0% |
Detailed Results
- The company showed good recovery with a 53% YoY rise in revenues and coming back to profitability vs a loss after tax of Rs 11 Cr last year.
- 9M numbers were similarly encouraging with the company posting a 45% YoY rise in revenues and reduction of loss from Rs 23 Cr last year to Rs 3 Cr currently in 9MFY22.
- The company has seen 75% of revenues in 9M come from subscriptions and 98% from recurring revenues.
- The company also has a net cash of Rs 420 Cr with zero debt.
- The Martech product line saw revenue contribution at 34% in 9M with 136 new clients added so far.
- The DaaS product line saw revenue contribution at 36% in 9M with 67 new clients added so far. it also saw 160% growth in BI subscriptions, 161% growth in AirGain revenues and OTA processing was at 120% of precovid levels.
- The distribution line saw revenue contribution of 30% and 81 clients added in the year so far.
- Rategain saw gross margin for 9M at 79%. Cash generated from operations in the same period was Rs 179 Cr.
- The revenue distribution by geography was :
- North America: 64%
- Asia Pacific: 11%
- Europe: 21%
- Others 4%
Investor Conference Call Highlights
- The company saw a demand rise of 10-14% in travel in key cities like New York, London, Barcelona, Delhi through its product Demand AI.
- The management states that the company’s acquisition of Myhotelshop in Germany completes its MarTech offering as an end-to-end platform for digital customer acquisition.
- The company has on-boarded Budget Rent A Car from Las Vegas for its REV AI product.
- The gross margin in the distribution business has improved to 92%.
- In Q3, 75% revenues came from subscriptions while 25% came from transactions.
- The company added 182 new employees in Q3.
- The gross revenue retention is at 92%, while the net revenue retention stands at 120% for Rategain.
- The management explains that the revenue share of North America is higher than the actual operations in the region because sales from multinational clients based out of the region are also counted as North America Sales no matter which part of the world the service or product is being used.
- The company is also seeing a high attrition rate of above 20% like the rest of the IT industry.
- The company is targeting to follow the rule of 40 as many SaaS companies are. The rule of 40 states that the sum of revenue growth and EBITDA margin should equal to 40.
- Despite having more clients than before the pandemic, the revenue figures for 9M are still below pre-covid levels. The management states that this is because the charges across the travel industry and for rategain are still not back to pre-covid levels as there is still discounting everywhere to promote the sector growth.
- Most of the contracts are now back on pre-covid levels as of Q3.
- The net contract value of the clients added in Q3 were at $ 4.9 million annually which comes out to Rs 40 Cr currently.
- Currently only 25% of DaaS customers use the distribution services and vice versa. Thus there is still a cross sell opportunity for 75% of the customers in both segments.
- Without the addition of myHotelshop, the organic growth in revenues in 9M was at 35% YoY.
- The company added 778 customers in Q3 of which 600 came from MHS (MyHotelShop).
- The amortization on the 3 acquisitions done by rategain was at 4% of revenues.
- The management expects the revenue share of the Martech business to rise from current levels in the future.
- The addressable market for Martech solutions is over 1 Lac hotels to but only 400 are using these solutions currently. Rategain’s immediate focus is to increase this number to 1000.
- DaaS is the most profitable business for Rategain followed by distribution. Martech has the lowest margin profile currently but should rise in the future according to the management.
Analyst’s Views
RateGain is one of the leading travel technology companies in India. The company has done well to provide tech solutions to most of the travel booking industry. It has seen good recovery in FY22 so far with new client additions in all segments and 3 acquisitions. The company has a big cross sell opportunity among its operating segments and is sitting on a cash chest of Rs 420 Cr and an asset light model which indicates that there can be further new acquisitions in the near future. The Martech segment is expected to be the growth driver for the company as travel demand rises across the industry. It remains to be seen whether the global travel demand is slowed down by the new uncertainty around the geopolitical tensions around the world and how fast can the company scale back to profitability despite multiple hurdles like the Russia-Ukraine war, new strains of COVID and others. Nonetheless, given the large variety of solutions tailored to the travel industry and the rising demand in travel and tourism, RateGain is a pivotal stock to watch out for, as it can act as a rough proxy of the travel industry.
Disclaimer
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