Skyscanner’s global and mobile growth accelerates in 2015
2015 was another strong year for Skyscanner, showing solid progress in our strategy of expansion beyond our home market, into mobile and beyond flights.
Gareth Williams, Skyscanner CEO and co-founder.
KUALA LUMPUR: Skyscanner, whose global and mobile growth accelerated in 2015, has announced its financial results for the year ending December 31, 2015.
Skyscaner’s revenues were 120 million pounds (US$183 million), up 28 per cent compared to the prior year.
Excluding the unfavourable impact of currency exchange rates, the group’s revenues grew 34 per cent, gaining momentum in the second half of the year in which they grew 36 per cent.
Meanwhile, Skyscanner’s normalised earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) before statutory adjustments was 22 million pounds (US$34 million), up five per cent compared to last year.
The group’s gross bookings for the year were US$11.2 billion, up 49 per cent compared to the prior year.
“2015 was another strong year for Skyscanner, showing solid progress in our strategy of expansion beyond our home market, into mobile and beyond flights,” said Gareth Williams, Skyscanner chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder.
“Our first-half focus on investing in our product drove momentum for the business in the second half. We also saw excellent growth in travellers planning their trips on Skyscanner all around the world, especially on mobile and in the important regions of Asia Pacific and the US. Skyscanner’s global coverage, our direct relationships with partners and travellers and the self-built technology that underpins our success, account for our solid performance in 2015.”
Key milestones in 2015 included visitors to Skyscanner in 2015 growing 48 per cent over the prior year, with a record 50 million monthly visitors.
Mobile visitors grew 60 per cent and now represent 59 per cent of total visitors, up seven per centage points in just twelve months. Increasingly, travellers are looking not just to plan, but also to book from a Skyscanner mobile platform - mobile web bookings grew by 24 per cent year on year, comprising 42 per cent of all conversions.
The Asia Pacific region continued to show strong growth, with visitors increasing 48 per cent last year.
Mobile visitors grew 62 per cent year over year. This includes Japan, the third larg- est travel market in the world where Skyscanner and Yahoo! JAPAN established a new joint venture, Skyscanner Japan, in July.
In China, a focus for Skyscanner since the acquisition of Youbibi in 2014, visitors grew 67 per cent and mobile visitors nearly doubled.
The US region saw 55 per cent growth in visitors last year, more than doubling in the US Mobile visitors in the region nearly doubled. The company also launched in Mexico.
Other key milestones included visitors in Europe growing 42 per cent, with mobile visitors growing 55 per cent and Skyscanner’s award-winning apps being downloaded more than 40 million times in total.
In addition, beyond Skyscan- ner’s Flights business, Skyscanner for Business, the company’s B2B arm, saw revenue double.
During the year, Skyscanner for Business launched its own Car Hire white label product and increased partners 75 per cent to 400,including major brands such as MSN. Revenue from Skyscanner’s Car Hire product grew by 71 per cent in 2015.
Skyscanner took important steps in 2015 to improve its product for travellers and partners and to bolster further the pool of talent that builds the product and takes it to market.
Skyscanner opened two new offices last year, engineering hubs in London and Sofia, in addition to the expansion of existing spaces in Budapest and Miami.
The company took on over 280 new hires in 2015 – technical talent now makes up half of Skyscanner’s 770 strong team across the world.
Skyscanner also marked up several industry firsts for the company in 2015, including an artificial intelligence voice search tool for Amazon’s Alexa and the first ticket sold using new NDC capabilities with British Airways.
The company also introduced a facilitated booking service with a number of partners, including Air Canada.