IRCTC Revenues Jump to Record $3 Billion, Posts INR 130 Crore Profits!

While we keep talking about eCommerce sites on regular basis, and their sales and traffic, the state operated Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corp (IRCTC) has quietly raked up revenues from their online portal that nearly twice as much of Flipkart, India’s largest online retailer.

IRCTC registered revenues of Rs. 20,620 crore (just over $3 Billion) through online ticket sales in the last financial year. This is a whopping 34 percent jump over the revenues from an year ago, when Rs. 15,410 crore worth of tickets were sold reports Economic Times.

And, the best part is – IRCTC is making decent profits (unlike most of our ecommerce sites) – IRCTC posted profits after tax of Rs. 130 crore, nearly 90 percent higher than Rs. 72 crore that it posted an year earlier.

IRCTC’s income from service charges on tickets, sales of Rail Neer water, onboard catering services and licence fees increased by 19 percent to Rs. 1,141 crore. Its combined income from commissions on ticketing, travel and tourism was Rs 670 crore.

Here is how IRCTC e-ticketing Revenues have grown over last 5 years.

IRCTC has made many positive changes over past couple of years. First and foremost, they have increased the capacity of booking tickets to a large extent. Previously, at peak, maximum of 2,000 tickets could be booked per minute, this capacity has now been increased to 7,200 tickets per minute. While we do not have any exact numbers, the rate of failure in ticket bookings also seem to have come down to large extent.

According to Sandip Dutta, PR manager at IRCTC, 55 percent of all tickets are now booked online.

In 2014, on March 19th, IRCTC had created a record of booking 5.8 lakh tickets on a single day – this year they bettered that record by more than double. According to Dutta, in April of this year, IRCTC booked 13.4 lakh etickets on a single day.

Major announcements by IRCTC over past 12 months

– IRCTC has decided to gradually phase out Pantry cars from the trains and instead push for e-Catering and Takeaways with third party tie-ups.

– IRCTC recently partnered with FoodPanda, KFC, Dominos Pizza and many other third party Food delivery services to provide food to passengers directly on trains.

– IRCTC has now partnered with Spicejet and GoAir. They will now allow waitlisted passengers to upgrade to flights as well.

– IRCTC has increased introduced many new payment channels including mobile wallets. They have partnered with Paytm and M-Pesa and have launched their own wallet as well.

– Now, Passenger can buy tickets online and get it delivered at their doorstep with Cash on Delivery facility. Not only that passengers can also buy tickets on installments from IRCTC website!