China OTA Tongcheng-Elong Holdings reported 57.8% year-to-year growth in the average MAUs from 148.4 million in the same period of 2020 to 234.2 million.
83.0% of its average MAUs was attributed to Tencent-based platforms with the majority of the traffic coming from WeChat Pay portal and the dropdown list of users’ favorite or most frequently used mini-programs.
The average MPUs increased by 84.5% year-to-year from 14.8 million in the same period of 2020 to 27.3 million, mainly attributable to its stable traffic on WeChat channels. Read our WeChat Mini Programs Insights 2021.
Paying users for the 12-month period ended March 31, 2021, increased by 12.9% year-on-year from 149.9 million in the same twelve-month period of 2020 to 169.3 million. And, Tongcheng Elong’s paying ratio recovered to 11.7% for Q1 2021.
Revenues increased by 60.6% year-to-year to RMB1,613.8 million from RMB1,005.1 million in the same period of 2020.
Compared with Q1 2019, it has achieved 45.0% growth in its domestic room nights sold, with more than 70.0% growth in lower-tier cities, around 20.0% increase in domestic air ticketing volume, and nearly 150.0% increase in bus ticketing volume.
Its total GMV increased by 83.0% year-on-year to RMB33.3 billion.
The adjusted EBITDA increased by 162.7% year-to-year to RMB417.4 million from RMB158.9 million in the same period of 2020. Adjusted EBITDA margin increased from 15.8% in the same period of 2020 to 25.9%.
The adjusted profit for the period increased by 279.5% year-to-year to RMB296.3 million from RMB78.1 million in the same period of 2020. The adjusted net margin increased from 7.8% in the same period of 2020 to 18.4%.
Tongcheng-Elong cooperated with short video platforms to promote its hotel and tourist attraction products. Besides, it has commenced cooperation with a leading e-commerce platform in China by providing its travel-related products and services on the platform, to explore new traffic sources and further penetrate into lower-tier cities market.
It also cooperated with hotels to set up QR code scanning function to convert traffic from offline to its WeChat mini-program.