Tour and travel firm Cox & Kings’ quarterly earnings numbers are down. The Q1 consolidated net profit has dipped about 24 per cent to ₹108.07 crore for the first quarter ended June 30. The consolidated total income from operations has also declined to ₹2,065.12 crore as against ₹2,131.80 crore for the same period of 2015-16. Margins have contracted slightly, but have held steady at about 15.3 per cent. BTVI spoke to Anil Khandelwal, CFO, Cox & Kings. Excerpts:

Please run us through the highlights of the quarter. What has led to the slide in profits as well as some kind of contractions in top-line?

If you look at the continuing operations — from an EBITDA perspective, net revenues perspective and profitability perspective — the company has demonstrated a growth of 9-10 per cent. The figures which you see in the quarterly results also include the operations we had in the Q1 of FY16 which had the super-break results which was sold off last March. And hence the results are not comparable to that extent. But if I just take the like-to-like comparison both from an EBITDA perspective and net revenues perspective, the improvement has been around 10 per cent.

Do you expect this kind of performance to continue on a sequential basis?

Q1 has been a relatively stronger quarter for our India business, education business and the hybrid hotel business. The education and the hybrid hotel businesses are predominantly in the UK and Europe. So despite the factors that have been affecting the growth in European markets, we have been able to demonstrate steady performance in both in education and hybrid hotel, which from a constant currency growth has seen an increase of 6-8 per cent. We are relatively cautiously optimistic about these two businesses. Barring the unforeseen external events, we definitely expect this performance to improve in the coming quarters and years.

How is the effect of Brexit likely to pan out for your European business?

If you see the data coming from the UK market, specially in the past few months, the consumer confidence is back, the spending has returned. Brexit is officially yet to happen. It is not really a phenomena which is going to pan out in a couple of months. I think it is going to take a year or two.

A lot of it remains to be seen as far as the impact of consumer confidence is concerned. But going by the trend of bookings and going by the order-book position, specially in the education business, we would fairly remain cautiously optimistic in the business.

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