By Syna Dehnugara Mar 13, 2019 6:33:48 AM IST (Updated)
Aditya Ghosh, chief executive officer, OYO India and South Asia, is a lawyer by education. At the age of 28, he was the general counsel of InterGlobe Group and president of IndiGo at 32. Under Ghosh’s leadership, IndiGo became the most successful Indian airline, commanding a market share of 42.5 percent, as of January 2019. After Ghosh left IndiGo, he became a member of the advisory board of Fireside Ventures and joined Tata Trusts as a senior advisor, who will advise the management on cancer care initiatives. Launching Collection O, a mid-market business hotel brand for millennials, Ghosh said OYO's estimated losses would go down to 10.4 percent in 2018-19. The company said its losses declined to 20.3 percent in 2017-18.
Edited Excerpts
Q: About 100 odd days, almost to the date.
A: 125 almost to the date. Feels like longer though in a good way.
Q: Your global revenue rate which is a sort of Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV. For hotels, if you want to draw a parallel to ecommerce stood at about $1.8 billion. India accounts for $1.2 billion of that realised revenue run rate. When we spoke last time, Ritesh Agarwal called China the new home market and if you look at the number of rooms, China almost has the number of rooms that Indian does. Tell us about the India story for Oyo?
A: We actually treat both India and China as our two home markets. China actually exceeds India in the sheer number of rooms that it has today. India is a very supply constraint market. Almost in any business, product, service you look at the moment, you are able to improve the quality of service or improve the quality of the product that you are putting out there, make it more consistent. Also, we are making it more affordable when the market suddenly expands. This year again we hope to more than double in size in India.