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The government-owned Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), which books more rail tickets a day than all the airline tickets in the world put together, has kicked off the process of its valuation. The move, seen as the first step to raise public funds, comes in the backdrop of e-commerce companies seeing eye-popping valuations.
The IRCTC portal sells ₹250 crore worth of tickets a day, but still books only about 54-58 per cent of the total train tickets and sees huge growth opportunities. Citing these figures, IRCTC’s Chairman and Managing Director (CMD) AK Manocha hoped the valuation will be higher than the ₹6,000-₹14,000 crore evaluated by experts on BusinessLine’s request last year.
“We have 3.1 crore customer data, get over two million hits a day, and book 5.5-6 lakh tickets a day,” he said, apart from hitting a high of 13.45 lakh bookings on April 1.
On valuation, Manocha told BusinessLine that “we (IRCTC, CRIS, Railways’ Finance official) had a meeting with ICICI Chairman KV Kamath last December on this issue.”
He said IRCTC has appointed Microsoft to do proof of concept, and engage officials with big data knowledge to increase the company’s revenue streams.
A company release said ICICI Securities has been appointed as in-house advisor to assist in the valuation exercise/processes by coordinating and evaluating strategies and presentations by various advisors/bankers of IRCTC.
The advisor’s opinion can also be sought for effective investment of cash reserves and raising funds from the market. “We will invite bids for detailed valuation,” Manocha said.
He, however, accepted that at times IRCTC is unable to take the demand load.
“Between 10-10:30 a.m., over 14,000 tickets are issued per minute, while the system has a capacity of 7,200 tickets.
“Of the ₹180 crore to be spent for IT upgradation, the organisation has spent about ₹100 crore so far.”
Passengers may face some problems, as there is a limited load of queries that the back-end can take, and CRIS has recently limited the number of queries a passenger can seek after one log-in.
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