In DealStreetAsia’s third webinar on June 18, 2020 – OYO and the bed it made – the founder of the hospitality unicorn Ritesh Agarwal talked about how the SoftBank-backed budget hotel player will weather the COVID-19 storm that has severely impacted the travel and hospitality related sectors.
The 26-year-old Agarwal maintains that OYO has a $1-billion war chest that would give it a runway for more than three years. OYO raised a little over $3 billion over the last four years.
In the financial year ended March 2019, OYO recorded a loss of $350 million in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) on gross revenue of $951 million. Before the pandemic, Agarwal expected revenue for the fiscal year ended in March 2020 to be three times higher or around $2.8 billion.
In conversation with DealStreetAsia editor-in-chief Joji Thomas Philip, OYO founder Agarwal touches upon a range of issues related to its dizzying global expansion, current context, corporate governance and parallels drawn to WeWork.
This webinar transcript was edited for brevity and clarity.
