We don’t search for targets but rather go for opportunistic acquisitions: Madhavan Menon, Thomas Cook

Industry: Financial services, Travel & Tourism 2016-07-06

In a chat with ET Now, Madhavan Menon, Chairman, and Managing Director, Thomas CookBSE 1.09 %, says as far as business is concerned, we have come to expect all sorts of problems that hit us on a daily basis. Edited excerpts

ET Now: You recently entered into a strategic alliance with Western Union and DCB. Walk us through the contours of this deal and what really does it mean for the company? What does it bring on the table for you?

Madhavan Menon: In the foreign exchange business, we constantly endeavour to expand the product offerings that we give the market. This was one more opportunity for us to tie up with Western Union and DCB to offer trade remittances in the SME segment which we are fairly present in as an organisation. We saw the alignment in this primarily because of a lot of these organisations already avail a foreign exchange as well as their travel requirements from us and therefore we thought this would just extend our offering to them. In terms of business, you will appreciate these initial stages where the volumes are relatively small but our expectation is that given our network as well as the reach and penetration that we have in this segment we will actually be able to grow this significantly over the next couple of years. I do not want to get into estimating what it will add to our revenue line at the moment because it is not very significant. However, I expect that this will grow as a new product offering as we have done in the past. For example, the online foreign exchange has grown year on year for us and continues to grow. So my expectation is that this will also grow.

ET Now: Let us talk about your big business which is the inbound and outbound business. I was looking at Thomas Cook international numbers and they indicated that because of problems in Europe, their business has suffered at Thomas Cook IndiaBSE 1.43 %. What has been your experience? On one side, there is currency fluctuation and on the other hand, there is Brexit. Then there is fear of terrorism in Europe. So are you feeling the heat or is it business as usual?

Madhavan Menon: As a business manager, I would always love status quo and that is what I would have thought would have happened. But in reality, we have come to expect all sorts of problems that hit us on a daily basis. So let me give you the impact — first off all Paris, Brussels, Orlando now Bangladesh does not help the outbound business, especially in Europe where we have seen some impact in terms of customers getting a little worried about their safety and rightfully so. As far as foreign exchange fluctuation is concerned, Brexit was a much talked about the event and therefore as a practice, Thomas Cook normally squares up at the end of every day. We do not carry out any speculative trades and therefore we came into that Friday totally square. We did take additional care as to how we traded on Friday but as I have always said, markets find their equilibrium very quickly and on Monday we were back to normal trading. Now I think an interesting trend from all this has been the strengthening of the rupee from its level slightly above south of 68.50 against the US dollar to its current level north of 67.5. So my expectation is that the rupee will in the near term will strengthen a little more and stabilise and that is where we would like to see the markets.

ET Now: Tell us a little bit more about the kind of M&A pipeline that you currently have, considering you have been pretty aggressive when it comes to acquisitions of late?

Madhavan Menon: I go back to 2012 when I told you that Fairfax’s philosophy is not to go out and search for acquisition targets but look for opportunistic acquisitions as and when they surface. So my answer is first of all whatever we have acquired in the last three years — be it Quess which we helped incubate with Ajit and his management team; they have just come out with a very successful IPO for about 10 per cent which is equivalent of Rs 400 crore.

Then we have got Sterling Holiday ResortsBSE 2.20 % which was an organisation that went through several years of turmoil and we are now assisting Ramesh Ramanathan and the management team to nurse it back to health.

The third set of acquisitions which we did was Kuoni India’s entire operation. These are early stages. We are barely six months into the acquisition and we are currently busy integrating the backend. My expectation is that while the numbers will add up in the current year in terms of the Kuoni numbers coming into the Thomas Cook numbers. My expectation is that savings will actually start appearing next year and 2017 will see the flow of savings as it will do in 2018. So I expect far better growth from the Thomas Cook’s numbers and the savings in 2017 which we are targeting which will also improve the Thomas Cook’s numbers.

ET Now: I was looking at Fairfax’s annual report 2014 and there is a strong mention of Thomas Cook. We are discussing what is two years old but there is also a mention which says that Thomas Cook will remain or Thomas Cook will only buy assets which are in related businesses which means the fear of unnecessary diversification which have haunted your stock a couple of years ago, is not there and that has been the stated policy of Fairfax whatever acquisitions they have done which are which are non-core in nature they have not been part of Thomas Cook, so can I assume that it is status quo whatever acquisitions you will do they would be in related businesses, they would be associated with the travel industry?

Madhavan Menon: So if you look at our acquisition so far I do not think either Quess or Sterling Holiday Resorts will fit a narrow definition of a related industry. So let me try and sort of put a slightly different definition to this is that we focused on the service industry, we will remain in this service industry and yes if you look at Kuoni it was related and it helped us consolidated ourselves into the largest travel company in India and amongst the top 10 travel companies in Asia but having said that if opportunities do come up in the service industry we will examine it.

ET Now: Analysts are confident that the company is expected to achieve better earnings growth in the coming years what is your own sense on how FY17 is going to turn out for your balance sheet in particular?

Madhavan Menon: So if you look at our balance sheet, we have a fairly solid balance sheet despite these acquisitions. You will note that our gearing is very low, we will continue to keep it that way. We are a cash generating business and we will continue to generate cash. So from a balance sheet point of view, my expectation is that we will reduce our debt over the next couple of years. In fact, if it was not for the long-term debt that we carry on our books, you will actually see that we are negative working capital at this point of time, investing in liquid mutual funds. So that trend is going to continue. We will pay off our debt over the next three years and my expectation is that unless there is something significant that comes up on the radar, you may not see any further borrowings.

ET Now: I am going to ask you a very simple question as travels, as holiday seekers we tend to use the online method a lot. I frankly do not remember last time I went to a office and booked my holiday. So what is your understanding on this online versus traditional way of selling holidays, where do you stand on that and at a time when I am doing all my purchases on smartphone and app, do you think that is a disruptive trend for you?

Madhavan Menon: Look it depends on exactly what travel you are undertaking. If you are undertaking point to point travel or you are looking just for a hotel, yes, you could go online but there are limitations and constraints around this. For example, the minute you travel outside an LCC, there are multiple classes of bookings and those fares are not necessarily available to the person who goes online, so that is one point. Hotel bookings yes a little more advanced and I think the experience of the world have contributed to this development. Now as far as Thomas Cook is concerned, we continue to believe that as long as we sell packaged holidays — be it into groups or to individuals — where there is multicity travel as well as hotel and surfaced transportation requirements, which are fairly complicated, the traveller will take the assistance of a player like Thomas Cook. Having said that, let me also mention that we are not just looking at our bricks and mortar network to service our requirements, we are online, we sell all our domestic holidays through our online portal Thomascook.in as well as through our call centre. We also sell overseas holidays online and through the call centre. So it is not as if Thomas Cook is just purely a legacy player with the bricks and mortar network. We are building our online capability as well.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/expert-view/we-dont-search-for-targets-but-rather-go-for-opportunistic-acquisitions-madhavan-menon-thomas-cook/articleshow/53040860.cms

Source: Economic Times

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