ixigo claims to be most downloaded travel app in India in FY19; revenue spikes by 64%

One of the popular OTA platforms, ixigo, has revealed a part of its financial results and performance stats for FY19, and this data throws a quite positive light on the firm’s growth chart.

The revenue has grown 64% from Rs 69.19 crore in FY18 to Rs 113.5 crore in FY19, and while this is a positive development, that is the only angle the company has given on its financial performance in the recently ended fiscal.

The expense and loss figures that give a deeper insight into how this revenue was improved upon and help identify the nature of this growth were missing from the press release.

The angle that was given to substantiate the revenue figure was of the performance stats - Gross Transaction Value (GTV) of Rs 1,584 crore in FY19 and a current annual GTV run rate of over Rs 2,000 crore.

As per the Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar led company’s claim, this GTV is brought in by 30 million monthly active users (MAUs), 3 million daily active users (DAUs), and about 130 million apps downloads in the past fiscal.

This is double the numbers around the same time last year. These users spend approximately an average of 2.5 hours on the application in a month.

About 60% of this traffic comes from tier II and III cities for ixigo and the firm is hence confident in its plans of tapping into the next billion users. ixigo’s booking data reveals that tier II cities such as Indore, Lucknow, Bhubaneshwar, Surat, Patna, Jaipur and Pune use the ixigo trains app for their travel needs and the penetration level is above 50% of the city population in many of these cities.

The firm uses Sensor Tower data to reflect that ixigo trains is the most downloaded travel app in India and 6th in the world.

The meta-search marketplace and OTA application aims at 50 million MAUs by the end of FY20. And it banks on its multilingual app available in 8 Indian languages and the lightweight app that also works offline.

Further, counting on all this, Bharat, and its train application, the company eyes a scale that would lead to profitability for the firm in FY20. But much can’t be said about these metrics until the audited results for ixigo’s FY19 are released.