MakeMyTrip (MMYT) reported a profit of $3.001 million on gross booking of $237 million for the quarter ending December 31st 2011. Details of the results here. We’re on the earnings conference call:

6:06 PM: Signed up over 7500 hotel properties on makemytrip.com. The new hotels page is now available as the default site for customers, and the company is expecting further conversions. In Q3, two domestic partners faced financial issues, which impacted transaction growth in the air segment. With negotiated rates earned better net margins through favorable deals.

6:08 PM: MyTrip Rewards has been performing well,a nd has enrolled over 23000 members in the program, with 1/3rd of members active and engaged on MMYT.

The MMYT Android app is in the final stages of beta testing. The Blackberry application has registered more than 150,000 downloads to date. The mobile website has nearly 60,000 unique visitors each month. The iOS application is also under development,

6:12: Financials being shared

6:15 PM: Internet users in India recently surpassed 121 million users (Ed: where did Deep Kalra get this number from?)

6:16 PM: why are air transactions down when the holiday season should be the highest? The reason is that the travel agents b2b network, we were using air transactions as a low hanging fruit, and our aim was to use it to push our hotels and packages business. In this quarter, we used it to focus on better deals and for higher margins, and we took a conscious call not to push tranasaction growth through B2b channel. Sequentially, it went down 11%. The B2B channel is a low yield channel, and not a preferred channel. We took a strategic call to focus on B2C for air deals.

6:22 PM: The hotel bookings mix is part changing in favor of standalone bookings. Transaction value for every quarter and every season, and the mix would stabilize. It’s not that the packages are growing as well, since we had a robust growth in packages too. ASP was around $400 by the end of this quarter.

6:26 PM: Changes in pricing terms from the suppliers? We’re quite happy to have special arrangements with the suppliers. Their real allergy is to the long tail of agents who are getting a large percentage, where they get a large percentage on international tickets for little work done. The full service carriers, their direct business through the Internet is very low, around the 10% mark or lower. We believe that we will continue to get the deals, as will the large agents.
On the sharp growth in standalone hotel growth – the unbranded properties and two and three star hotels are getting a fair degree of traction. People are seeing more options. It also has to do with customer demands and habits. Earlier people would be double checking on rates and the less discreet hotels would be undercutting. We now do mystery calls and this has reduced. The customers have also become more comfortable with transacting on the web.
6:30 PM: We’ve also added more modes of payment, and for a large transaction, they can make part payment, making it easier for people to use.
6:32 PM: Beyond 7500 hotels, the growth might not be at the same pace. We’ll see between 700-1000 hotels coming in, but we’ll be careful about the hotels we add on.
6:33 PM: Thomas cook is a well established brand name, and the Indian subsidiary is on the block because of the pressures faced by the business in the UK. It remains to be seen how it changes things out there, and it is a distraction for the management and confusion for the customer, and it is an opportunity for holiday players like us.
6:35 PM: Our (air business) margins will contract, and our best estimate is that it will be between 6-6.5% in the long term. It will continue to be growth in transactions, and that we keep getting the performance linked deals, and try to see that it doesn’t have a big impact on our air business.
6:44 PM: Call ends

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