Why Cox & Kings Sold UK Arm Explore Worldwide
Cox & Kings Group on Tuesday said it has sold 100 per cent shares in Explore Worldwide to Hotelplan UK Group for 25.8 million pounds. Cox & Kings sold the issued and outstanding shares of Explore Worldwide through its Holidaybreak Plc subsidiary.
Cox & Kings management spoke to NDTV and explained why it decided to sell the company.
The proceeds from the sale will be used to reduce debt at the Holidaybreak, Anil Khandelwal, CFO, Cox & Kings, said. The motivation of the sale was rebalancing of the international leisure portfolio which the company has been undertaking for a while now, he said.
"In this particular space of the adventure travel business there is a lot of consolidation that is happening which means effectively that the large players are buying out mid-level and small size adventure travel players.
"So we had a choice in terms of investing more into this business or we wanted to basically focus on other areas of our business."
Cox & Kings' strategy is to exit from non-core operations and focus on key verticals like the India leisure business which is around 23 per cent of the company's consolidated revenues, the education travel business which contributes around 30 per cent of its net revenues and the Meininger Hostels business which is around 17 per cent of the net revenue, Mr Khandelwal explained.
Explore Worldwide Limited (which includes the brands Explore - soft adventure tours - and RegalDive - diving adventure specialist) generated net revenues of 11.2 million pounds and EBITDA of 2.3 million pounds in FY15.
Headquartered in India, Cox & Kings is a holidays and education travel group with operations in 22 countries across four continents.
At 2:11 p.m., shares in Cox & Kings were trading 2.97 per cent lower at Rs 243 apiece on the BSE, whose benchmark Sensex index was down 0.24 per cent.
