Mondee Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:MOND) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Tom White: Great. And any color on kind of free cash flow conversion?

Dan Figenshu: Sorry. Yes, Tom. So for 2023, we anticipate that the improvement on the free cash flow conversion compared to 2022. In 2022, obviously we had a significant number of one-time events as being part of a business that we going public, which obviously impact in distorted some of our free cash flow as well as a business in 2022 that was in recovery. Remember the early part of the year included the impacts of Omicron war in Europe, and our business was continuing to really ramp back up to pre-pandemic levels. Obviously we’ve been able to eclipse that, which is obviously terrific news. But as we continue to grow and expand our business in 2023, we’ll see a more healthy return to our conversion between EBITDA and free cash flow.

Tom White: Okay. That’s helpful. One more if I could. The — I think the Slide 4 in the deck kind of the different bar charts on the different regions, it looks like North America on a transaction basis, I presume those charts are transactions, not revenues, but looks like North America still a bit behind versus kind of comparable period of 2019. Can you talk a little bit about, maybe what’s happening there, what needs to happen for you guys to kind of start recovering more meaningfully in North America?

Dan Figenshu: Yes, those are not absolute numbers. Those are percentage of our total revenues, you see. So now that we have gained market share in other geographies, it’s only natural mathematically that the percentage of the U.S. is less you see. So this is, if you add everything together in that slide, it does 200%. So the fact that North America is less, it doesn’t mean that we have less revenues in North America, it just means that we have more revenues from other geographies. Exactly. So it’s normalizing.

Tom White: I see. This is just — this is your mix basically.

Dan Figenshu: Exactly correct.

Tom White: Revenue mix. Okay. And then just last one, if I could hotel business, maybe just talk a little bit about your expectations for that in ’23. I don’t know if you give us a sense of like what percentage of the business maybe it will be when ’23 is over, and I don’t know I was hoping maybe, I know Expedia plays in kind of that wholesale rate distribution for hotels, they’ve been getting into that a little bit more meaningfully. Can you maybe just kind of compare, contrast what you guys do versus maybe that particular competitor?

Prasad Gundumogula: Historically we have been an air player, and we have a great headroom into the hotel space. And the — our strength here compared with any other player in the market is our distribution. So we have this distribution to the close user groups as well as a private channels through which that we would like to distribute our products and where there’s a huge demand for hotels. So we are expecting that to be north of 15% to 20% is our overall hotel thing. However, this includes the packages and other aspects that we include in our trips, which may have both air, hotel and other products into it.

Jim Dullum: Yes, so for sure, hotel is a — it’s a big opportunity, especially given the very low base, where we are coming from. I mean, there is potential for expansion both organically and inorganically, right? So if you look at that, at most of the acquisition that we have announced and many of the others were working on, a unifying feature is that they have a by far higher mix of hotels, right? So that’s improving a lot, the product that we have to offer and the pricing on the hotel side. Like Prasad mentioned, our strength in the hotel space is not in the direct connectivity with the hotels, but in the distribution, and because we have a very differentiated distribution, you mentioned Expedia partner solution, that’s effectively a bed bank with a direct connectivity, with a number of suppliers globally.