Indian Hotels Company saw a subdued topline growth on the back of a seasonally muted quarter for the hotel industry. Puneet Chhatwal, MD & CEO of the company, spoke about the results and shared outlook for FY20.

“Revenue growth has been driven by our market share development; we have increased market share in 1/3rd of our portfolio and in Q1 US and UK with our property in London have come in quite strong for us,” said Chhatwal.

“There has been a dip because of Jet (Jet Airways) in some of the domestic destinations. There has also been a dip in our revenue share with our flight kitchen business with TajSATS, but London performed strongly and helped us to mitigate those dips in revenue,” he added.

Talking about the margins, Chhatwal said, “Operationally the margins have expanded by around 130 bps and we have monetization of non-core assets which helped us to get to 304 bps.”

“All that is a part of our strategy, all that is a part of our margin expansion theory and we will continue to do this. The growth will come by increasing our market share,” he said.

On the debt reduction front, the MD & CEO said, “We are still at around Rs 2,000 crore of debt and the management remains focused and driven to reduce debt.”

“We have been able to bring down our debt to equity, which was a couple of years ago at 6.5, to at 2.1 and hopefully below 2 as a few more quarters go by, definitely before the end of the year,” added Chhatwal.