Ixigo financial in FY18: Incurs Rs 41 Cr loss for Rs 69 Cr revenue

Travel meta search platform ixigo has recorded 189 per cent spike in revenue to Rs 69.19 crore in the financial year 2017-18, reveals latest RoC filings with MCA. Last fiscal, it had reported a revenue of Rs 24.07 crore.

The SAIF Partners-backed 11-year-old firm’s losses also jumped by 108.9 per cent to Rs 41.34 crore as compared to FY17.

Meanwhile, the expenses of the Gurugram-based company ballooned by over 2.5 times to Rs 110.53 crore in FY18 from Rs 43.86 crore in the previous fiscal. The figure has been controlled in the sense that the cost of earning a single rupee has decreased from Rs 1.8 to 1.6.

Advertising expense has been the largest expenditure on ixigo in FY18. It alone accounted Rs 73.86 for the 12 months period ending March 2018. Within the same, the company has incurred a cost of Rs 29.5 crore for its loyalty programme, ixigo Money.

Launched in November 2017, ixigo Money - a virtual travel currency and loyalty programme recently claimed to have saved Rs 100 crore in last 12 months. While we don’t know how much ixigo had spent post the end of March 2018 on ixigo Money, the company burnt an enormous amount on it during the 5 month period since the launch in November 2017 and end of FY18.

Let's assume that during the five months period - ixigo Money had saved Rs 50 crore (between Nov and March) for travellers and spent approximately Rs 30 crore. Implying, it had funded about 60 per cent subsidy provided to the customers.

So far, the company has raised over $26 million from the likes of OTA behemoth MakeMyTrip, Sequoia Capital and Fosun Kinzon Capital amongst others. Last year, Sequoia had led a $15 million round in ixigo.

Of late, Aloke Bajpai, CEO and Co-founder has been reiterating that ixigo’s next set of growth will be driven by train ticket. He claimed that the train app has about 60 million downloads across the Android and iOS.

The company had recently introduced an offline mode for its trains app on Android where users can check train running status, booking info and search trains amongst several other services. However, traffic originating from train travellers is very hard to monetise.

While the RoC filings hints slight improvement in its financial health, it still a dismal performance of the company which is an 11 year old entity. It remains to be seen how ixigo gets rid of losses and heads toward break even.