Mondee Holdings, Inc. (MOND) Presents at 26th Annual Needham Growth Conference, NYC Transcript

Mondee Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:MOND) 26th Annual Needham Growth Conference, NYC January 19, 2024 1:30 PM ET

Company Participants

Orestes Fintiklis – Executive Vice Chairman

Conference Call Participants

Bernie McTernan – Needham & Company

Bernie McTernan

Great, hello everyone. I am Bernie McTernan on the Equity Research Team at Needham & Company covering Internet stocks. My pleasure to introduce Mondee. It’s an AI travel-tech company and marketplace providing discounted travel through intermediaries as well as AI travel assistant.

Today with me is Orestes Fintiklis, Mondee’s Executive Vice Chairman. So he is going to do a brief, do a presentation, provide a product demo. And then I’m going to come back later for Q&A. So if you have any questions, you can either email me at bmcternan@needhamco.com or just type them into the portal and we’ll be sure to get to them.

But Orestes, the floor is yours. Thank you.

Orestes Fintiklis

Thank you, Bernie, and thank you very much for the invitation to participate in the conference.

So I will start with a short presentation of the main concepts around Mondee. Then I will give you a demo of our tech platform, which is currently used by 65,000 travel experts. And then in the end, we’ll revert for a Q&A.

So what is Mondee? Mondee is a $3 billion travel marketplace and travel technology company as well as an AI platform. Most of investors and travelers, they are aware of the online travel agents. This is a very different type of marketplace. The online travel agents, they sell full-priced flights and hotels. Mondee sells discounted flights, hotels, car rentals and cruises. The online travel agents sell directly to the consumer on a website in a B2C strategy. What Mondee does? It sells travel B2B2C. So we sell through 65,000 intermediaries, who can be anything from traditional travel agents all the way to freelancers, concierge and recently social media influencers.

The OTAs, they work on a technology, which is mostly a website from the 90s. Mondee has cutting-edge technology, including what is generally accepted to be the most advanced AI-powered travel assistant in the market. And last but not least, online travel agents compete directly with airlines and the hotels, because the website of say aa.com or delta.com is competing directly with the expedia.com, booking.com, et cetera. So one more flight on Expedia is one less flight on delta.com.

Mondee, by contrast, is working collaboratively with airlines and the hotels because we are helping the suppliers sell their excess capacity in a way that does not compete. And we do not compete with airlines and the hotels because we are selling B2B2C. We are selling through intermediaries, not through a website that is accessible to the whole world.

So Mondee is connected directly to 500 plus, which are nearly all the airlines in the world, and as well as one million hotel and vacation recommendations. And we sell through 65,000 of our customers to 125 million travelers. We are the largest player in North America in what we do, and 80% of what we sell is international travel and leisure in nature. We are based in Austin, Texas. We have more than a dozen offices around the world, 1,300 employees. We have been around since 2011.

And just to give you a sense of the size of the company, last year in 2022, we did $2 billion of gross revenues, $159 million of net revenues and $11 million of EBITDA. This year, we did $3 billion approximately of gross revenues, $217 million of reported net revenues, and approximately $20 million of EBITDA reported 2025 if you per forma for a sale that we did, and even more than that if you per forma certain M&A that we did during the year.

Now, we explained already how our ecosystem is very different to the self-service players, the online travel agents, the websites of the airlines and the hotels. We just want to highlight here that the segment of the market in which Mondee operates is actually — even though it’s lesser known to the consumer, it’s actually even bigger than the self-service OTA direct consumer world, and it’s also growing faster.

Now what problems did Mondee solve, and for whom to become a $3 billion profitable marketplace? So I’ll discuss that by reference to our first customers. Our first customers were the travel agents. So if you were a travel agent back in 2011 before Mondee, you had two main issues. The first one was that the technology available to you was not up to speed with the modern reality. So they were mostly command-based systems, not real time. You could only pay by credit card, no mobile app.

So what Mondee did, invested about $200 million, and it created, as you can see in the screen, the first modern graphics-based system for this space of the market, which is akin to the transition from MS-DOS to Windows.

The second issue that you had if you’re a travel agent, travel advisor, in 2011 was that you would buy the content typically at the same price. You’d buy the flight and the hotel at the same price as your online competitors. So you could only offer to your clients a better service, but not a better price. So Mondee solved that issue as well by acquiring the six largest air wholesalers in 2011 and 2012 in the U.S. So we gave access to the travel agency community, not only to a better technology, but also lower-priced inventory that they could buy, mark it up, and sell it on to their customers.

So by doing that, we became the by far largest player in the space with 65,000 intermediaries, about half of whom are travel agents, and then the other half are, what we call a modern era distribution that we’ll go in more detail in a later slide.

From the perspective of the airline and the hotel, you may ask why are they giving us their inventory at a discount. So in the hotel and the flight space, there is always excess capacity. So the airline or the hotel, they have two choices. They can either let that excess capacity perish, or they can sell it at a discount. They are not going to sell it at a discount on their own website, because they would be cannibalizing their own deals. They are not going to give it to the OTAs at a discount either, because then they would be giving to a competing channel a better price. So if the price says lower on booking.com than the website of the hotel, nobody would buy from the website of the hotel.

So the airline and the hotel is looking for an alternative or paid channel to sell their excess capacity. And this is what Mondee does. And Mondee does that in a very technologically efficient way, because unlike the old wholesaler model of the wholesaler taking inventory risk and pre-purchasing a number of seats ahead of time, what Mondee does is link real time to the revenue management systems of the airlines and the hotels, so it receives the right amount of inventory at the right discount to maximize the yield of the airline.

And we do that very efficiently because not only is the airline selling their excess capacity without cannibalizing its own deal, but it avoids all the customer acquisition costs when it’s selling through a channel like Mondee and all the servicing costs, as Mondee takes over the servicing or the booking from the moment that it’s made. So these are the issues that we solve for the entire industry, both our suppliers and our customers. And that’s why within a decade, we became the largest player in this segment of the market, starting from a few thousand of these intermediaries all the way to now 65,000 travel experts.

How do we make money? An important metric to discuss about Mondee is the take rate. So take rate is what we take as net revenues compared to the transaction volume that we sell. So say, we sell $1 billion worth of flights and we make $40 million in net revenue, that’s our take rate, 40 divided by billion, 4%. Our take rate is growing. And as you can see, it doubled from the pre-COVID levels to 7.4% last year. This year is actually 9%.

And this is growing because of two reasons. The first one, we are selling more content. For the first decade of our lives, Mondee has only been selling flights. Then during the pandemic, we added hotels. Hotels is a by far higher take rate because there is more excess capacity and more fragmentation in the space. In addition to hotels, we have added a number of other solutions for our customers. We added the FinTech products that our customers need, travel insurance, fraud protection tools, payment platforms. So we provide a comprehensive solution. So if anybody wants to become a travel expert, a travel agent, a concierge, whichever way you want to define, the only thing they need is Mondee.

The platform Mondee provides a comprehensive solution, which over time is allowing us to increase the take rate, with the take rate being the percentage we take from our gross revenues as net revenues because we are diversifying our product, and we are diversifying the services that we are offering. Again, we went from 4% take rate to 7% last year, and this year 9%. And in the next few years, we’re anticipating to be in the double-digits.

Now we have discussed the growth of the company in terms of growing market share and in terms of selling more products. Going from just selling flights to selling flights and hotels, then flights, hotels, car rentals and now also cruises. So one obvious way to grow the business, which is what has been happening in the last 13 years is that we add more and more products. So that’s on the supply side.

Now on the distribution side, the way that Mondee is growing is that we are adding more and more customers, more and more intermediaries. Like we discussed, our first customer was the travel agent. Then what we saw later on in the process was home-based agents. We saw individuals basically either leaving the big agencies or being fired, and the trend accelerated by COVID. So they start working from home. What do they need? Just the Mondee system to carry on their trade.

So Mondee went from having just travel agents to having home-based agents. Then what we saw was the advent of the gig economy. We saw people that have multiple jobs, multiple gigs, like an Uber driver, a teacher, a ski instructor, a yoga instructor, a concierge. Amongst the many gigs that they do, they just download the Mondee app and they also say you are a real estate agent, you’re in houses, you download Mondee and to the same customers that you have, you can help them book their summer holidays. So what we saw was the advent of the gig economy.

Now what we are seeing today — and this is very important because this is how travel is now consumed, the principal player now, the majority of travel is consumed by the millennials and the Gen Z. So for the millennials and the Gen Z, the internet, which is what led to the boom of the 90s and the OTAs and all that stuff, which is the biggest disruption that happened in travel was that — was when the boomers, the baby boomers, realized that they didn’t need to call a travel agent. They could just go online and book on their own.

So for the modern consumer, the internet is no longer innovation. For the millennial, the Gen Z, it’s all about social media, it’s all about conversational commerce. It’s all about AI. And there is currently no platform out there, either B2B or B2C that is fully addressing the needs of the modern traveler. So the next evolution in the story of Mondee is that now in the same way that we have converted every potential individual in the gig economy into a travel expert.

Now we’re converting social media influencers into travel agents, for lack of a better word. So say you are a social media influencer. Every content you create is about travel. You go to Bali, you take a picture, you put it on your Instagram account. The way you make money now, you are not selling any travel. What you do, you go to the hotel and you tell them, I’m going to take a picture of myself in your swimming pool and give me $1,000. Now what Mondee is doing is revolutionizing this space as well.

So if you’re a social media influencer now, just like there is Uber, has a version for the passenger and a version for the driver, Mondee has an app for the intermediary, the influencer, the travel agent, whichever persona is intermediating, and one for the traveler. So if you’re an influencer, you go to Bali, you take the picture, you put it there, you put a magic link and you say to your followers, if you want to book this trip, click here.

You click on the link and then you download the traveler version of the Mondee app. So now you as a traveler you can book on your own and every time that you book, the influencer is making money as if he was a travel agent. So basically what Mondee is doing is basically in the same way that Uber or Lyft have democratized transport, we are giving the opportunity and we are converting everyone into a travel expert. That is why we have, out of our 65,000 travel experts, we have about 30,000, which are professional travel agents — and by the way, that number is approximately half of all of the travel agents globally that are accredited — but we also have 35,000 of this new era distribution.

Now how does the AI come into the picture? So if we just remember a bit the evolution of Mondee that I just went through, the theme is that what Mondee is doing is empowering everybody to become a travel agent, a travel expert, whichever term you would like to use. So if you download Mondee, you have all the tools that you need. You have the operating system, the booking engine; you have access to the discounted hotel and flight inventory and cruises; you have your payment platform; your CRM to manage your customer; you have everything. The only thing that you are missing is the expertise.

So if you at this very moment in time, you decide amongst your many gigs to also sell travel, what you are missing is the expertise relative to a person that has been selling safaris to Africa for the last 20 years. So AI was the missing piece in the puzzle to empower the individuals to also have the expertise. So Mondee now, through the AI is not only giving a complete set of operational and functional tools, but it’s also giving you the expertise that you need.

And also in the context of the influencer example that we just mentioned, the big difference between a traditional travel agent and an influencer, if the influencer decides to sell travel, is that the influencer is not going to call their follower and help them make a booking. So you need somebody or something else to facilitate this process. And this is where the AI comes into the picture.

So now the platform Mondee includes a fully automated AI-powered travel assistant, which now I’m going to go and show you a quick demo. So I will stop sharing my screen and I will log in into our tech platform. So say you are a follower of an influencer that just took a trip to a destination of your choice. And now you decide to download the traveler version of the app and make a booking. So there is an app and there is also a desktop. So I’m showing you the demo now on the desktop.

So you can make the booking in the exact same way that you’re used to with these booking bars here or you can talk to the AI, which is called Abhi. The AI platform Mondee is called Abhi. So we start the discussion by saluting Abhi and starting a new conversation. So say, for example, you like museums, which is the city in Europe that has the largest museums. You ask the AI travel assistant. And the AI travel assistant responds, the Louvre in Paris, et cetera, et cetera. So I like the Louvre. Please book me a three day trip to Paris.

So now, as you can see, it’s going straight into the booking path. And the first question is, where are you going from? I am going from Miami, say. The natural question is, when are you going to take this trip and what do you like doing? So I like museums; I like sightseeing; I like shopping; I like restaurants. So now what the AI is doing is creating for you, based on what you said that you like, a customized itinerary. And in the itinerary, it’s including the flight that you can book and the hotel. And you can just click, book and the system will book it for you. Or you can add it to the trip and return at a later stage.

But the bottom line is that you may want to experience a trip, because travel is all about experiences. You may want to experience a trip even before you take it. So you click here on experience trip and what AI is doing is creating a customized travel guide based on the interest and the purpose of your travel. So you see the little plane going from Miami all the way to Paris, you ask for a three day trip, day one, day two, day three.

You can use this functionality to either experiment with many destinations until you decide which one and which trip you would like to take. Or if you decide to take the trip, you can actually take this with you and then you have a travel guide with you, you have an interactive map, you have all the details about every single site that you are going to visit. You have travel tips. I mean there are 50 million searches a day on our platform, just to highlight, Mondee’s a fairly large company with $3 billion of gross revenues. So there is a lot of expertise and a lot of data that comes from our transaction-based platform.

So you experience a trip and you decide that you want to book. So you go back to Abhi and you say, I’m going to book. You can book the Peninsula Hotel, for example. This is an AI. It knows that I like luxury hotels, so it’s recommending to me a luxury hotel. But I may not want the Peninsula. So I may want another hotel. So now what the AI is doing for the specific three day trip that I chose, it is basically scanning the entire Internet to find all hotels in Paris. And it’s going to do two things. Number one, it’s going to go and find the lowest possible price that you can find anywhere on the Internet, which is published, and compare it with the price that you get in Mondee.

So you can actually choose if you want only five star hotels, you have the typical filters. So if you want five star hotels, look, I mean you have real discounts, 10%, 20%, 30%. So what the AI has done, it has curated the trip for you. Look at the Peninsula. You’re saving $500 a day, for example, in this hotel. Not only it has curated the trip for you, but it has also given you access to discounted inventory that you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to find.

So now you experience the trip, you book the trip, you book the flight, you book the hotel. Now you say, you know what, I want to book the activities. You just click here on best activities. And what Abhi is going to do for you is going to identify all the activities in Paris and basically show them for you and you can book them, the day tour of the Paris, the night tour, the photography tour, all the tours that are available. You just click here and you book your tours in addition to your flights and the hotels.

Now what is left to do? Eat. So you click on best restaurants, and then the AI ask you, what type of cuisine do you like? I like Italian cuisine. And now it will bring all the Italian restaurants for you in Paris with their menu, their location, their rating, based on all the rating that’s available on the Internet, as well as the rating of our users.

So as you can see, this is a pretty sophisticated AI travel assistant, which arguably is even more sophisticated than the average travel advisor. For sure, it can perform the functions much faster. And this platform continues to evolve. So our AI is not just something that we came into recently, because like I mentioned before, the thesis of giving instant expertise was fundamental to converting everybody into a travel expert. So we have been developing this for four years now, and every day is becoming more powerful. Why? Because it looks at all the trips that are being booked, the 50 million searches every day, and on the basis of that is learning.

So I’m just going to show you here, because what we have gone through now in the demo is a very simple itinerary. These are the dates, this is the time, this is where I want to go. So Abhi is capable for much more than that. Abhi is evolving to give you answers to very nuanced questions.

So let’s start a new conversation. So what is the best beach club in Mykonos if you are 30 years old and like house music? This is not a generic question. If you ask this to ChatGPT or Google Bard, or any other generic AI platform, it will give you a list of 10 beach clubs or 20 beach clubs. Abhi is giving you a very specific answer. He’s saying, if you like, 30 years old and you like house music, the best place to be is Cavo Paradiso. And if you have been to Mykonos, you will know that this is the right answer.

Now let’s ask the same question, but with more nuances. Which is the best beach club in Mykonos if you are 50? You are 50 years old and like luxury. So now, as you can see, Abhi will give you a different answer, will give you Scorpios. So again, if you have been to Mykonos, you will know that this is amongst the best beach clubs for that age demographic and that taste of luxury. So this is just some of the functionalities of Abhi. I could spend a lot of time showing you more and more features, but you get a taste of what Abhi is all about. And it should be apparent to anybody in the travel industry that this is today the most advanced AI-powered travel assistant in the market.

So what we just did is a live demo of a product that is now in the market, which is in the market through the intermediary community. So the only way for you to get access to this platform is either if you are an intermediary yourself or your travel agent, your concierge, your ski instructor, your influencer has given it to you. So now we’ll give an end to the demo and we will go back to do some Q&A.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q – Bernie McTernan

Great, great presentation. Loved the live demo. Maybe just starting on that, I mean, what’s the competition like for products like this in the market? Obviously, a lot of the companies that we cover, there’s ChatGPT plugins, lots of things. I mean, this seems pretty sophisticated. So how do you view your kind of like moat and technology and what’s — how do you keep leaning in on this advantage?

Orestes Fintiklis

Yes. So effectively, the platforms that you have mentioned, there are generic LLM models, some of which we are also using as part of our ecosystem, our AI ecosystem. But as you know, AI is all about data and how the data is structured and how the data is applied. So today Mondee is the only AI travel company that has its own private LLM, which of course, has some basis on someone their — on the large language models that you mentioned, ChatGPT, Google Bard, some open ones like Bison of Google, et cetera, IBM Watson.

So the point here is that Mondee is only about travel. So it has been the dedicated AI that is learning based on data. And the point here again is data. So a startup, an AI startup can potentially recreate the technology that we have, but it’s not going to have $3 billion of revenues and 50 million of searches on which to apply the data. So basically Mondee is in the unique position to not only have the technology, but to have the data. And it’s on this data that Mondee is training its private LLMs.

And on top of that, somebody can make the argument, oh, go to one of the big OTAs, book Expedia, whatever, they will tell you they have 200 million searches a day, not 50 million searches a day. But what matters in AI, in training an AI model is the structure of the data. So the data of Mondee is human travel assistants booking trips for human travelers. So what is the best data to train an artificial travel assistant than actually the data of a human travel assistant interacting with another human to create a trip?

So this is the advantage of Mondee. A dedicated team of 150 in-house developers, more than 50 of whom are AI-driven for the last four years. And number two, having not only the variety, the plethora and the volume of the data, but the data structured in the exact same way that you need it to train an AI travel assistant. So to your point, if it’s possible in a year, half a year, two years, people will try to attempt to replicate this. But by that point in time this AI would have learned from the daily 50 million searches, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s going to be in a completely different level.

So this is the competitive edge that Mondee has the technology and the data volume and structure in order to create this very specific, very industry specific application of AI.

Bernie McTernan

Right, interesting. So theoretically, if we’re doing those searches for the Mykonos Beach Club a year from now, we’re going to get different responses than we are now. And so what would be driving that? Is it just the searches? Is it learning like how things are trending on Google reviews or what some of the — how should these expect models be impacted?

Orestes Fintiklis

It’s everything that is available on the internet as well as the specific searches and the curation of the trips by each — for example, we have 65,000 travel advisors. Those people are booking trips for actual human beings. So every time that a trip is booked, the AI is taking the package. So basically, if next year the AI realizes that more people went to Nammos than Scorpios, it’s going to give you a different answer. And again, it’s because it’s getting the data through the curation of a human interaction, a human professional travel agent.

And then of course, on top of that, the other element, which is already part of the first version of Abhi, and is evolving over time, is what is best for you. Because if you do — if you download this app now and you do the search, it may show you a different beach club because it knows what you like. It’s all about AI. It’s all about customization. Just like when I did the search for Paris, it showed me the Peninsula and not the Courtyard, because I’m actually using — this is the platform that I’m using for my personal travel. So it knows that I stay in five star hotels.

So what is a matter of taste and what is a matter of purpose is entirely subjective. And this is the edge of the AI. So not only it has infinite processing power and much more data than one individual travel advisor, but it knows exactly what you like because you have used it. So that is why this is so powerful.

Bernie McTernan

Yes. Understood, great. Maybe moving over to the financials. Looks like EBITDA is set to double from 2020 to 2023 even more than that on a pro forma basis. What’s driving this? How sustainable is this kind of growth?

Orestes Fintiklis

So let’s go and start from the top and go all the way to the bottom because it’s important to understand the economics of Mondee. Like we said on the top line, we have the gross transaction volume. Say we sold $3 billion of flights and hotels this year. Then from that $3 billion of transaction volume, we take in our pocket as net revenue, the markups we discussed, over rights [ph]. We make money in a number of ways on each transaction. That is the take rate. So once you go from the $3 billion to the $217 million that 8%, 9% is the take rate.

Now what is happening with Mondee? Not only the topline is increasing, just like last year we had $2 billion of gross, this year we have $3 billion. Also the take rate is increasing. So already the impact on your net revenues is exponentially higher.

Now this slide shows how you go from the net revenues to the EBITDA. And as you can see, the biggest expense is sales and marketing. Now our sales and marketing is very different to the sales and marketing of the online travel agents. The online travel agents, what they do is mostly pro forma marketing. So they pay Google effectively to buy transactions.

So what we do is very different. Most of our sales and marketing is credits. So if you are a travel advisor, an influencer, name it, and you are about to use the Mondee platform, Mondee is giving you a credit, say of a $1,000 that you can use against your first 50 transactions. Why is this very powerful? Because number one, if you do take the credit and download our system, you upload your customers, you link it to the bank accounts. This is a professional tool. It’s an intermediary tool. Then you are very unlikely going to use another platform. So what we just bought is not a transaction, but a lifetime customer.

The second element is that if somebody downloads the app and never uses it, they will never get the credit. So I only incur the sales and marketing expenses if I get the business, if I get the revenues. And over time, what is happening, as you can see here, even though the sales and marketing revenue increases in absolute terms, because of course our business is growing, as a percentage of revenue, sales and marketing is dropping, because you don’t have to keep giving the same credits once you capture an individual. You may give him a lower credit next year to boost the business or activate or reactivate the business.

But ultimately what is happening is that not only your topline is increasing, not only your revenue is increasing exponentially because your take rate is increasing, but also from the net revenue to go to the EBITDA, your biggest expense as a percentage of revenues is being reduced. Then the rest of the expenses are overheads and fixed, personnel, G&A, information technology, et cetera. So basically those remain fixed. So as your net revenue increases, what drops to the bottom line increases disproportionately higher.

That is why last year we had $11 million of EBITDA with $160 million of net revenues. And this year with a 60% increase in the net revenues the EBITDA more than doubled. And this is sustainable because this same dynamic continues. So — and the interesting part here is that Mondee has been growing before the pandemic 40% organically, 60% inorganically. Last year we grew 60%, the year before 70%. But for our EBITDA to become $50 million, $100 million, $200 million I don’t even need to grow at those levels anymore because I have reached the critical mass to cover my overheads. My sales and marketing spend is more efficient as a percentage of revenues, and then my net revenue are increasing exponentially.

So it is very sustainable and this is why Mondee is such an attractive proposition from a profitability perspective as well, not just growth.

Bernie McTernan

Great. And we talked about competition on the technology front. But what if we just think about just barriers to entry for other players just coming into your space in general?

Orestes Fintiklis

Yes. Like we discussed we are not a direct B2C player. So just to remind you we sell through a network of intermediaries. So we’re a B2B2C model. So to replicate what Mondee has achieved, you need to replicate three things. First, you have to go to the suppliers, the airlines and the hotels and to convince them to give you access to discounted content. Without volume you don’t get the contracts, unless you are a big hotel, which in case you’re competing with airline hotel, which again you don’t get the contracts. So the first barrier is that it’s very difficult to get these relationships that Mondee has had for decades, and these evergreen contracts with the suppliers.

Even if you are able to replicate the contracts with the airlines and the hotels, you will still need to build the technology. We spent more than $200 million building this technology since inception. So you would have to spend $200 million, gather developers, spend 10 years, 12 years, 15 years and sign all the contracts with the airlines and the hotels. And even if you were able to do that, you still have to sign up, one by one our 65,000 customers that took us 13 years to sign up.

So the bottom line is that there are very high barriers to entry. Yes, can you surmount them? Of course, if you spend a few billion dollars, you can replicate anything. But Mondee’s valuation now is not $1 billion [ph], Mondee’s valuation is $200 million. So you can — to even replicate our competitive energy, even if you were able to achieve it over a decade, and even if you had the capital to put in place, it would cost you 5, 6, 10 times more than the current valuation of the company. And that is why we believe there are so much — the barriers to entry are so high.

Bernie McTernan

Yeah. And so maybe that’s a good jumping off point. I mean, everything you’re talking about the financials kind of going up and to the right and the stock going the other way. What do you think has been pressuring the stock over the past few months here?

Orestes Fintiklis

Yes. So Mondee went public in July 2022 and for the first years or the first-year or so of going public we were trading between $9 and $13. So a market cap of $1 billion to $1.2 billion, $1.3 billion. And today our market cap is just shy of $200 million. So there are a number of things that have happened which have not much to do with the performance of the company. Like we said, last year we had $2 billion of gross revenues, a $160 million of net and $10 million of EBITDA, and with those numbers we five times more in market cap.

So it’s not the performance of the company that is necessarily driving this reduction in the price. It’s a number of variables. The first one is general interest rate environment. In the last six, seven months small caps have generally been hit more than the big caps. There are seven companies driving the growth of the stock market. Again, that dynamic, we hope that it will reverse at some point next year. But it’s beyond this discussion and beyond Mondee itself.

The second reason is that there is generally a fear by investors that discretionary spending may dry up if the economy softens. And this is putting pressure in generally on all the travel small caps. Again remember that what Mondee is selling is discounted travel, and we are selling excess capacity. So actually in a soft environment, this is where our business model thrives even more. So this point, I think is misunderstood by the market.

And then the third reason, which I believe is, what has been the predominant driving force in the last few months, is a lot of speculation around a small cap. So just to give you an indication, I mean, there were a few trades done by hedge fund around the indexing. We were added to the S&P, we were added to the Russell Index. But if you look at the stock today, almost one-third of the free float is short. The short interest now on this stock is more than 25% of its free float.

So this just indicates a lot of speculation on Mondee, which is beyond the fundamentals and the growth and the profitability of the company. And frankly, I mean I don’t even know how these people will come out of their position, because if you look at the current volume, the current trading volume of the stock, it’s next to impossible to come out of 5 million shares short without causing the stock to skyrocket. But again, we’ll leave that to the future. But our opinion is that the performance of the stock is totally detached from the fundamentals of the company, the growth of the company, the profitability of the company, and ultimately is driven by speculation.

Bernie McTernan

Understood. But one question we got from the audience on debt refi, I believe there might be some requirements by the end of the month, on just how the efforts are going to refi the debt?

Orestes Fintiklis

Yes. So the refinancing of the debt, let me mention a few things about the debt before we go into the refinancing. Mondee has about $160 million of debt, of gross debt, and on a net basis, $110 million to $120 million, depending on how you do the math. This is about three, four times the EBITDA of next year and maybe four, four and a half times the EBITDA of last year. So that on its own is not a very high level of debt.

Now a big part of the speculation, the shorting that I mentioned before, is driven by some sort of misguided perception that the company will not be able to refinance its loan. Based on the fundamentals of the company, we believe that we should be able to refinance our loan. But even if we are not, let’s take devil’s advocate. Let’s see who looks, who owns the debt. So the debt of the company belongs to TCW and Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley is the second largest shareholder of the company.

If you look at the history of this loan, this loan was originally a credit line, which has been extended and modified 12 times. So even in the worst case scenario where we are not able to obtain better refinancing terms to refinance this loan, I don’t see why the current loan will not be extended if it has been modified already 12 times. So again, this is a relevant question that you have asked. We believe that as the profitability increases, the natural deleveraging of the company is occurring, and it may have well has been a trigger on this speculative short trade, which now at some point in time, one way or another will have to be rewind.

Bernie McTernan

And just for clarification, we’re wrapping up here, but I just wanted to mention too that the doubling of EBITDA for 2023 that I was mentioning, that was just off street consensus. Obviously, you guys haven’t reported numbers yet, so didn’t want to be misleading there.

Orestes Fintiklis

Correct. We have reported all the way to Q3. So it’s based out of Q3 and the guidance for the rest of the year, but yes.

Bernie McTernan

Right. Perfect. All right, well, great. Let’s leave it there. Thank you so much for the time. Really appreciate it. Thanks for everyone who joined on the webcast and hope to see you again soon.

Orestes Fintiklis

Thank you, guys. Bye.