The Nasdaq listing and the growth years
The listing on 17 September 2010 was the moment an Indian travel portal became a public company with American institutional shareholders, and it changed how the business was run.[4] A Nasdaq listed company reports quarterly, is valued on bookings and margin rather than on growth alone, and answers to shareholders who compare it with global online travel agencies.[4] For Kalra it also created the currency, in the form of a listed stock, that made the acquisitions of the next decade possible.[4]
The acquisition spree started a year after the listing. In 2011 the company bought Luxury Tours and Travel in Singapore, the travel business of the ITC Group, and the ETB Group, which extended it into parts of Southeast Asia and Europe.[4] In 2012 it launched RoutePlanner for domestic route searches, and in September 2014 it set up a 15 million dollar innovation fund to invest in travel startups, using it for deals such as MyGola in April 2015 and a stake of about 30 per cent in the review site HolidayIQ later that year.[4]
The structural change came in 2016. Ctrip, the Chinese travel group, agreed in January to invest 180 million dollars, and later that year MakeMyTrip agreed to merge with the Ibibo Group, which brought Goibibo and the bus ticketing platform redBus into the same company and made Naspers the largest shareholder.[4] The merger is what made MakeMyTrip the largest online travel agency in India by a distance, since it removed its most serious domestic competitor from the market and gave it the bus segment as well.[4]
Ctrip's involvement deepened in 2019, when it took its stake to about 49 per cent by acquiring shares from Naspers in a swap that left Naspers holding a small position in Ctrip itself.[4] The company kept buying in the same period, taking over the corporate travel manager Quest2Travel in 2019 and launching myPartner for travel agents in 2020.[4]
The financial picture from the December 2021 quarter, given at the time Kalra moved to chairman, shows what the group looked like as it came out of the pandemic: gross bookings up about 93 per cent year on year and 57 per cent quarter on quarter, air ticketing up about 61 per cent, hotel room nights up about 77 per cent, adjusted operating profit of 13.2 million dollars against 5.2 million dollars a year earlier, and corporate travel back to about 122 per cent of pre pandemic levels.[5]
