On behalf of the Board I am pleased to present you with the annual report for the financial year ended 30 September 2008. I am pleased to announce that the Group has once again made progress for its performance.
FY 2008 has been a challenging year for the Group; it started with the sub-prime crisis in 2007 which led on to the financial turmoil and economic downturn that worsened during the fourth quarter. Economic impact aside, the travel industry in Asia is also beleaguered by several negative incidents in the likes of the snowstorm in Southern China, the earthquake in Sichuan, visa restrictions on travel to China during the Olympics, political instability in Malaysia, and political upheaval in Thailand.
Despite all these negative factors, the Group still managed to post 22% growth in both revenue and profit. The Group booked record sales, and net profit attributable to shareholders, of 85.7 million and S$5.5 million respectively.
The Group’s remarkable growth in such challenging times can be attributed to the expansion strategy that the Group embarked upon this past year. The Group’s efforts to expand its hotel destinations footprint and its transformation from a niche online hotel reservation service provider to a total online travel service provider have enabled the Group to gain new customers and improve booking conversion.
The Group now offers flight bookings with discounted airfares for all major airlines departing from 11 countries in Asia, namely Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, China, Sri Lanka and UAE. These flights can be booked on an instant confirmation basis. Soon flights departing from other countries in Asia will be added.
The Group’s hotel portfolio has expanded to worldwide destinations of over 50,000 hotels. All these hotels can be booked on a last minute instant confirmation basis, including bookings with same-day check-in.
Another factor that helped the Group weather the economic slowdown and negative events this past year is the resilience of the online travel channel. We believe the online travel channel will continue to be resilient and the shift from the offline to online channel for travel and hotel reservations will pick up pace further as more travelers go online for convenience and to search for bargains.
The Group is confident that it is in a strong position to ride out the economic slowdown and any negative events that may surface during the new financial year.
Outlook & Strategy
The global economic slowdown will continue to dampen the tourism and travel industry. In this difficult environment, we expect airfares and hotel rates to weaken further and this will spur more traveling which will reduce the overall impact of our business from the global economic slowdown.
The Group is on track in its transformation from a niche online hotel reservation service provider to a total online travel service provider. Our main task going forward would be to continue to enhance on our strengths in our current position and focus on the demand side of our growth strategies.
The Group will tie up with notable partners with high traffic websites to reach new customers and markets. This strategy is risk-free as we work with our partners on profit sharing of successful bookings. As such we do not need to incur high advertising costs to acquire new customers.
In the past year, the Group has entered into over 50 such partnerships. Some of the notable partnerships include Maybank, Pomoho.com and Yahoo!.
The Group will be launching multi-language websites to reach customers from different language backgrounds, expanding our reach to more potential and local customers. We had launched Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Thai language websites Indonesian, Arabic, Korean and Japanese language websites are in the pipeline and will be launched in the next few months.
With the above strategies, the Group is confident that it is in a strong position to ride out the economic slowdown and any negative events that may surface during the new financial year.
The Group is optimistic in working towards maintaining positive growth in both revenue and profit in FY 2009.
Appreciation
On behalf of the Board of Directors, I would like to take this opportunity to highlight the untiring contributions of the Group’s management and staff, and most especially to their commitment and drive in partnering our vision and achieving the goals we set to produce in the successful year 2008. I would also like to thank all our shareholders, our customers, hotels, airlines and travel partners for their continuous confidence and support.
