The revenue from online ticketing generated on IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corp) surpassed the Rs 20,000 crore milestone till March 2015. This is almost double the turnover of the country’s largest e-commerce retail Flipkart. In the last fiscal year, IRCTC generated revenue of Rs 20,620 crore (appox $3 billion) via its online ticket sales. This is a 34 percent increase in the same in comparison to the previous year when it sold tickets worth Rs 15,410 crore online.
Unlike the loss making marketplaces, IRCTC has posted a profit after tax totaling to Rs 130 crore, which is an increase from Rs 72 crore that was posted in the previous year. The bulk sales on the platform may be attributed to the rapid growth in e-ticketing on IRCTC that has been due to the setting up of a robust process and the interface.
The capacity enhancement was carried out in order to book 7,200 tickets per minute. In the existing system, the ticket booking capacity was 2,000 tickets per minute, claimed the Public Relations Manager, Sandip Dutta at IRCTC. In April, the platform created a record by booking 13.4 lakh etickets on one day. When the service began in 2002, it booked just 27 tickets a day. Now, 55 percent of the overall rail tickets are sold online.
IRCTC owned by the government posted a 19 percent increase in its income at Rs 1,141 crore. This mainly includes the service charges on the rickets, claimed the Rail Neer water, the onboard catering services as well as license fees from the outsourced catering vendors.
This is similar to the sales increase of the online marketplaces that do not include the actual goods that were sold but the count commission obtained from the sellers and revenue from the ads on the sites. The combined income from the commissions on the ticketing, travel as well as tourism totaled to Rs 670 crore. This is a little higher than the turnover of Rs 659 crore of Flipkart that was earned on selling commission and shipping fees on its portal.
