Thomas Cook India : Transcript of the 45th Annual General Meeting of Thomas Cook (India) Limited held on 28th September 2022.

Transcript of the 45th Annual General Meeting of Thomas Cook (India) Limited held on 28th September, 2022 at 3.30 pm through Video Conferencing / Other Audio Visual Means.

Mr. Madhavan Menon,

"Ladies and Gentlemen and our dear shareholders, Greetings from Thomas Cook (India) Limited. It is 3.30 p.m. and with your permission I call the meeting to order."

It is my privilege to extend to you, our dear shareholders, a very warm welcome to our 45th Annual General Meeting. In the absence of Mrs. Kishori Udeshi, our Non- Executive Chairperson and Independent Director due to personal reasons, I, Madhavan Menon, with the concurrence of the Board members will preside over and conduct today's meeting. Before we commence the proceedings, I would like to introduce my colleagues on Board.

1. Mr. Mahesh Iyer, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of Thomas Cook (India) Limited
2. Mr. Nilesh Vikamsey, Non-Executive Independent Director and Chairman of the Audit Committee
3. Mr. Sunil Mathur, Non-Executive Independent Director and Chairman of the Nomination and Remuneration Committee

1. Mr. Pravir Vohra, Non-Executive Independent Director and Chairman of the Risk Management Committee and the Stakeholders' Relationship Committee
2. Mrs. Sharmila A. Karve, Non-Executive Independent Director
3. Mr. Gopalakrishnan Soundarajan, Non-Executive Director
4. Mr. Sumit Maheshwari, Non-Executive Director
5. Mr. Chandran Ratnaswami, Non-Executive Director, who is unable to attend this meeting due to personal reasons.

Mr. Bhavik Dhupelia from M/s. B S R & Co. LLP - our Statutory Auditor is also present.

I have also been informed that we have the requisite quorum present and I declare this Annual General Meeting (AGM) open.

With your permission, I take the Notice convening this meeting, the Directors' Report, the Auditors' Report and Audited Financial Statements, having already been circulated to you, as read.

Members may note that statutory registers and documents required to be made available for members' inspection at the AGM are available for inspection through the electronic media/mode by the members during the AGM.

I will now commence my Speech:

It has been another busy and productive year for the Thomas Cook Group. A year ago, we spoke of the importance of strengthening the fundamentals of the business, whilst driving our reimagine journey. This was a wide, overarching programme designed to transform ourselves, strengthen operational capability and competitiveness to only emerge stronger and with 'Customer Centricity' reinforced as our priority.

The global economy started with a rebound in CY 2021, on the trail of effective vaccination drives across the world and support from central banks to their economies. However, the second wave known as the Delta Wave proved challenging, thus dampening sentiments towards the second quarter of the CY 2021.

In India, FY22 witnessed continued revival, sustaining the downside risks from the second wave. The acclaimed mega-scale vaccination drive accelerated recovery, together with favorable government policies and programs that sustained economic activity during this difficult periods. The measures enabled an 8.7% growth in GDP for the Financial Year ended 2022.

As far as the Travel & Tourism industry is concerned, the post pandemic rebound is evident and the travel market is projected to reach $125 billion by FY27. India's tourism industry in 2020 accounted for 31.8 million jobs, which is likely to grow to 53 million jobs by 2029 and international tourist arrivals are expected to touch 30.5 billion by 2028. Over the next decade, India's travel and tourism GDP is expected to grow at an annualized rate of 7.8%.

When I look back at FY22, I can say with conviction that it was significantly better than 2021. The global economy recovered and travel and tourism returned to the big stage. The year ended with significant top and bottom-line improvements and thus marked a successful start of the Group's new strategic cycle.

Our strategy aimed to drive rapid digitization across teams and businesses for speed, scalability and quality. This would lead to improved efficiency via higher productivity and reduced costs.

Both these will help us drive our ultimate goal of Customer Centricity with an omnichannel presence, wider choice, better speed, convenience, and competitive pricing.

As I would like to emphasize on our drive to customer centricity and value addition. I can confidently say this is embedded within every single person in our business. For us it is all about creating a culture of customer-focus and agility to exceed the customer's expectations at every interaction, in order to gain their loyalty. And we are cognizant of the criticality now; with radical changes in preferences and with little resemblance to the customers we served a decade ago.

Thus the essence of our omnichannel strategy is that we are reducing the distance between ourselves and our customers through technology-enabled processes & systems, our primary goal is to ensure that we deliver a seamless customer experience.

Cumulatively, this has enabled us to guide both our customers and our employees more intensively towards success.

To summarise-

We implemented a plan that was based on innovation, amplifying the use of technology, reducing complexity, focusing on customer excellence and streamlining costs. And the results of the work showed what is possible as we delivered some key milestones.

• During the year, we grew our income from operations by 138% to touch Rs 18,882 million and nearly halved our operating level losses. We turned in an operating profit of Rs 239 million in Q4FY22, signaling sequential profit recovery going forward too.

• Key drives of the performance in FY 22 were our Foreign Exchange segment, Business Travel, Sterling Holidays, our destination management specialist subsidiary Desert Adventures in the Middle East and DEI -our Digital Imaging Solutions subsidiary.

I would like to now take you through the key highlights of our businesses and the strong recovery story each of them is witnessing:

Let me begin with our foreign exchange segment. This business was one of the segments to spring back swiftly into action and saw its leadership position further strengthening with a stellar recovery through FY22. Revenue from operations touched Rs 1,104 million, with volumes surging compared to year- ago levels. Exiting the year, the segment reported recoveries of 56% in Q4 FY22 compared to pre-pandemiclevels across retail, corporate and wholesale segments. This then progressively improved and saw recoveries at 66% in Q1FY23, which is the quarter ended June 2022. To highlight some of the innovations and technology driven initiative- the business launched "FX-Now"a pioneering corporate self booking tool that reduces dependency on implants. With a strong recovery and an aggressive leadership marketing campaign the business is positioning itself for growth, and uses the well known tagline "India ka Forex Specialist."

In the travel segment, as the Travel businesses restarted, the focus has been to constantly improve the quality of service delivery while accelerating the pace of growth - enabled by technology.

Let me start by first addressing the B2B corporate travel segment - In corporate travel the surge in positive corporate sentiment has taken us to an 87% recovery (in June 2022 quarter) from pre-pandemiclevels. Key corporate sectors like IT, consultancy and advisory firms, banking & finance and SMEs are fueling demand for international and domestic business travel.