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Informist, Thursday, Aug. 14, 2025

By Ashutosh Pati and Anand JC

MUMBAI/NEW DELHI – Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corp. Ltd., which recently received an in-principle authorisation from the Reserve Bank of India for its wholly-owned subsidiary IRCTC Payments Ltd. to operate as an online payment aggregator, said it will take them somewhere between 12 to 18 months to acquire the license and start operations.

The company has been given six months to submit the required documents to RBI, following which "it will take around six to eight months in getting a license," the company's management said at a call with analysts and investors Thursday. A payment aggregator is a third-party service provider that acts as an intermediary, allowing businesses to accept various online payment methods on a single platform. RBI's approval is mandatory for a company to commence the payment services by a third party.

IRCTC reported a net profit of INR 3.30 billion for the June quarter, up over 7% on year but down nearly 8% on a sequential basis. The company's net sales for the quarter rose nearly 4% on year but fell around 9% on quarter to INR 11.60 billion. The public sector company's earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation rose nearly 6% on year to INR 3.97 billion in the quarter ended June, driven by operational efficiency, the management said.

Growth in segments such as tourism and internet ticketing drove the company's revenues during the quarter. Around 88% of the total reserved tickets on Indian Railways are booked through the IRCTC internet ticketing portal and the segment is the most profitable one for the company, the management said. In the quarter ended June, 126.3 million tickets were booked through the IRCTC portal, out of which 64 million were tickets for the air-conditioned classes.

In the internet ticketing segment, around two-thirds of the revenue comes from convenience fees and one-third from non-convenience fees, the company's management said. The growth in the margins for this segment was because of non-convenience fees, they said. The revenue from this segment, which accounts for around 31% of IRCTC's total revenue, rose over 9% on year to INR 3.6 billion in the June quarter. 

Another major segment for the company is the catering business, which saw an over 2% on-year fall in revenue to INR 5.47 billion in the June quarter. The fall was due to a high base in the year-ago quarter, when the company had run election specials. IRCTC's Rail Neer plant in Bilaspur, which is currently not operational due to a dispute with the state government over water extraction, is expected to restart operations in this quarter, the management said.

The company plans to add another rake to the Bharat Gaurav train in 2025-26 (Apr-Mar) and is "very hopeful to get a very good business in tourism." Thursday, shares of IRCTC closed 0.4% lower at INR 724.80 on the National Stock Exchange.  End

IST, or Indian Standard Time, is five-and-a-half hours ahead of GMT

Edited by Saji George Titus

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