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Inbound tourism is yet to achieve pre-Covid level numbers, says Rajni Hasija, Chairman and Managing Director of IRCTC — the ticketing and catering company under the Indian Railways. However, the company is already witnessing a strong uptrend in bookings with most of the segments “coming out of Covid” already.
“We have done consistently well. Internet-based ticket booking is doing fine, as are some of the other segments. The Covid impact has almost gone, except on some verticals, like the inbound tourism segment,” Hasija told businessline on the sidelines of an event here.
Other segment revenues have improved significantly, as most of them are out of impact of Covid, the CMD said. Revenue generation verticals for IRCTC include catering, internet ticketing, Rail Neer and tourism.
In Q3, the ticketing growth remained flat q-o-q due to the omission of 2S (lowest seating category) segment. As per documents submitted to bourses, IRCTC saw 11.3 lakh tickets being booked per day versus 11.45 lakh in FY21.
Addition of new trains — under the Bharat Gaurav scheme, Tejas and so on — would see IRCTC run trains up to 250 days in a year, as against the previous 150 days, thereby giving “a substantial boost to revenues.” At least eight new rakes have been added to the existing two for ramping up services.
Push for Rail Neer
Hasija said, IRCTC was planning to ramp up production of Rail Neer — the packaged water sold by the company — with two new plants likely to be operational soon.
The Bhusawal plant (in Jalgaon district in Maharashtra) is “almost ready” to be commissioned while in Vishakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh) “certain tests” are being carried out after which the plant will be made operational.
According to Hasija, capacity utilisation across Rail Neer’s plants have now improved by 80 per cent and as the summer approaches it will be taken up to “100 per cent or more”.
Till Q3FY23, Rail Neer’s capacity utilisation was 75 per cent; while for January it was 70 per cent.
In Q3FY23, sales from Rail Neer stood at ₹75 crore, up 4 per cent q-o-q while it improved 50 per cent y-o-y. Profitability for the quarter was impacted by higher PET preform costs. However, the prices are observing some softness.
“Resin costs impacted profitability in the segment. But as PET perform costs stabilise, we will return back to better margins in the segment,” she said.
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