ebookers on course for the black in 2003

Tuesday, 13 Aug, 2002 0

Ebookers has reported a 46% growth in sales for the second quarter of this year.

Despite the boost from sales, which reached £71 million for the quarter, the company reported a loss of £3.5 million after tax, up from £8.6 million for the same quarter last year. For the half-year, loss was £7.0m compared to £17.2m in 2001.

Ebookers chief executive Dinesh Dhamija told TravelMole: “Our improved performance has come from good marketing and improved technology. We no longer have a patchwork of technology. It is a seamless system that requires fewer staff”.

Ebookers plans to reduce costs further through re-locating its activities. Chief financial officer, Nigel Addison Smith, said: “Not only are we building a low cost back office centre in India, we are also developing Dublin as a second multi-lingual customer service centre. These assets give us excellent low cost scalability and allow us to easily strip costs out of future acquisitions.”

The company now employs 350 staff in Delhi, where functions include email sales and overflow telesales, customer service, ticketing, air and land product support, accounting, competitor pricing analysis, and IT development. These services may also be sold to other travel companies in the future.

Locating the customer service centre to Dublin has been an effective cost cutting measure, thanks to development grants from the Irish government. However, Mr Dhamija told TravelMole: “Cost reductions made from the Dublin and Delhi centres will make more impact on third and fourth quarter profits”. He added: “Although I cannot make forward predictions, analysts say that we should by making profits by 2003”.

The online travel agency plans further aquisitions to help it reach a medium-term sales target of £1 billion. Mr Dhamija said: “We plan to make more acquisitions of large offline companies, as they are cheaper. Having successfully integrated a number of offline companies to online, we feel confident in this method of growth”.

Three new appointments have been made at ebookers over the last four months: Nigel Addison Smith from First Choice, Air 2000 and KPMG, as chief financial officer, and John Donaldson, former chief executive of Thomas Cook as non-executive director. Additionally ebookers made the non-board appointment of Philip Dale to chief information officer. Previously he was chief technology officer of Priceline.com in Europe. Mr Dhamija said of the appointments: “We are taking on the management with enough breadth and depth to run a larger company”.

Read our previous stories:
12-June-2002 ebookers and Tiscover partner online
5-June-2002 ebookers strengthens management team
14-May-2002 ebookers reports strong Q1 results