Goal to acquire full 100% stake in Prama by year-end
Prama generated over $8.5 million in sales and cash flow positive for year-ended March 31, 2019
TripBorn’s ‘offline-to-online’ reservation system expected to drive rapid growth in Prama’s hotel bookings
PRINCETON, NJ, April 30, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- TripBorn, Inc. ("TripBorn" or the "Company") ( TRRB), an emerging Indian last mile Commerce and Connectivity aggregator, announced today that the Company has entered into an agreement for TripBorn to partner with Prama and acquire an initial 51% stake in Prama Hotels and Resorts Limited (“Prama”) to complement its Offline-to-Online and Online-to-Offline (O2O) reservation system in India.
Prama is engaged in the business of investing in, owning, managing and operating hotels and related activities, such as food services, under the APODIS brand across India. Prama, through its wholly owned subsidiaries APODIS and Intellistay, owns emerging and leading budget hotel brands including Mango Hotels, Mango Select, Mango Suites, IStay Hotels and APODIS Collection, which are presently spread across 21 cities in India under its Intellistay Hotels vertical. Subject to additional closing conditions, TripBorn intends to increase its equity interest in Prama to 100% by or before the end of calendar year end 2019.
The Prama acquisition is expected to be synergistic with TripBorn’s O2O business model by providing TripBorn instant access to a large and growing inventory of hotel rooms for online booking, which is complementary to TripBorn’s existing rail and bus ticket booking client base. The transaction is also expected to add immediate scale to the business within India’s growing hospitality segment. Prama generated approximately $8.5 million in revenues for the year ended March 31, 2019 and generated positive cash flow from operations.
“This is a transformational opportunity for our Company,” commented Deepak Sharma, Chief Executive Officer of TripBorn. “The addition of the Prama team, and their rapidly scaling hotel platform is an incredibly unique opportunity to quickly penetrate a massive and growing market. There are over 650 million young people in India driving demand for affordable, quality, branded hotel experiences. Prama is extremely well positioned as one of the first operators in India to recognize the power and value of an asset light business operating model with branded middle-market hotels that delivers a consistent, pleasing hotel experience at an attractive price to the domestic market.”
Mr. Sharma continued, “Our plan is to leverage the TripBorn technology platform to drive rapid growth in bookings in new emerging user markets and help meet the growing demand of this market. We are optimistic that this acquisition could drive annual revenue growth in excess of 100% each year over the next 2-3 years alone,” Mr. Sharma concluded.
Mahesh Gandhi, Founder and Managing Director of Prama, noted, “Having invested in the Indian hospitality space over the last 8 years, along with our investment partners who supported us in building our platform, we have witnessed the hospitality sector in India grow at a sustained, rapid pace and expect to see this trend continue for a long time. Intellistay will continue to add new hotel properties under its hotel brands, as well as convert both existing and new properties. We believe the timing is ideal given India’s substantial and expanding consolidation opportunities, as well as the favorable arbitrage between private and public multiples in the space.”
Mr. Gandhi concluded, “Travelers in India are also demanding better hotel experiences, that provide consistency and value from recognized brands. We chose to partner with TripBorn, as we were drawn to their robust India strategy, which could help further establish our brand and accelerate our already rapid growth. TripBorn’s O2O strategy will help broaden our reach in over 200 markets within India. In addition, we look forward to benefiting from greater access to the U.S. capital markets in order to accelerate both our organic growth as well as our M&A strategy through highly accretive acquisitions and value-added partnerships. Overall, we believe we are extremely well positioned at the forefront of the industry and look forward to establishing a dominant position in the market.”
About TripBorn, Inc.
We are Last Mile Commerce and Connectivity aggregator that delivers the digital micro services to offline consumer using service agent network in India through our website, www.tripborn.com. Currently, we operate as a business to business, or B2B, Last Mile Commerce platform that serves business agents and companies based in India in providing travel and financial services products for their offline customers. Through our internet-based platform, our business or travel agents can search and book domestic and international air tickets, hotels, vacation packages, rail tickets and bus tickets, as well as ancillary travel-related services and financial services including money transfer bill payment, and Micro ATM products. We serve approximately 9000+ business agents across India. We plan to expand our presence throughout pan-India as opportunities present, with an immediate focus on the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Delhi, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, and Madya Pradesh and South India.
FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
This press release contains forward-looking statements as defined within Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. These statements relate to future events, including our ability to raise capital, or to our future financial performance, and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements since they involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which are, in some cases, beyond our control and which could, and likely will, materially affect actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements. Any forward-looking statement reflects our current views with respect to future events and is subject to these and other risks, uncertainties and assumptions relating to our operations, results of operations, growth strategy and liquidity. We assume no obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements for any reason, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.
For a discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please see our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Our public filings with the SEC are available from commercial document retrieval services and at the website maintained by the SEC at http://www.sec.gov.
