Tata group's hospitality arm Indian Hotels Company (IHCL) today posted 70.42 per cent rise in consolidated net profit at Rs 79.30 crore during the March quarter, due to improvement in EBITDA margins and optimisation measures.
Total income grew by 8 per cent to Rs 1,154.02 crore, compared with Rs 1,069.23 crore.
"The strong performance is a result of our focus on margin enhancement through optimisation measures within an environment of growing demand," IHCL managing director and chief executive officer Puneet Chhatwal told PTI here.
The EBITDA margins in the quarter improved by 4.6 per cent, he said.
The company's revenue per available room (RevPar) growth has been positive almost everywhere except Chennai and Gurugram due to oversupply, according to Chhatwal.
"Chennai and Gurugram have been witnessing oversupply, however, other markets have been seeing strong growth. This will help us in achieving our five-year business strategy, Aspiration 2022," he added.
Going forward, the company will witness more growth in number of hotels under its Ginger brand, compared with Taj or Vivanta, he said.
"We have 44 Ginger hotels in operations and another 10 in the pipeline. We have identified 80 cities for Ginger, of which 10 have the potential of multiple presence of the brand," Chatwal said.
Vivanta has huge potential, both in India as well as overseas, he said, adding Taj will continue to grow selectively overseas and in India.
For financial year 2017-18, the company reported a net profit of Rs 103.52 crore, against a loss of Rs 45.80 crore in the previous year.
Total income increased to Rs 4,165.28 crore, against Rs 4,075.51 crore.
During the year, Chatwal said, the company opened 10 hotels, with a total of 697 keys, including a Taj hotel in Andamans and nine Ginger hotels.
IHCL signed five new hotels across its brands in the last financial year a Taj hotel at Vikhroli in Mumbai, Vivanta in Bhopal and three Ginger hotels in Lucknow, Vadodara and Goa.
Meanwhile, in a separate filing, the company today declared a dividend of 40 paise per share.
Its scrip ended flat at Rs 137.10 on the BSE today, against 0.76 per cent rise in the benchmark.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)