Oyo Hotels and Homes’ Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Aditya Ghosh has been elevated to the board of the hospitality aggregator. The new role for Ghosh comes exactly a year after he joined the Ritesh Agarwal-founded company. Ghosh confirmed to Mint his new role in the company.
The hospitality startup has appointed Rohit Kapoor, who headed its new real estate business since December 2018, as the chief executive. Prior to Oyo, Kapoor was executive director and a member on the board of Max Healthcare, a joint venture between Max India and Life Healthcare in South Africa.
Before Oyo, Ghosh had spent more than a decade heading India’s largest airline by market share IndiGo, owned and operated by InterGlobe Aviation Ltd. Ghosh was appointed as the CEO of Oyo in November 2018.
Ghosh, who has a law background, is one of the most sought after top executives in India’s corporate ecosystem. Ghosh’s stint at Oyo that began on 1 December 2018 was in line with the strategy of the company, which has over the years carefully built a strong base of c-suite executives.
The development comes at a time when Oyo has reported a massive loss for the financial year ended March 2019. The startup’s losses ballooned more than six-fold to ₹2,384.69 crore in 2018-19, even as revenue jumped more than four-fold during the period, signalling that the six-year-old startup has a lot to do before it can think of a public share sale.
Revenue climbed to ₹6,457 crore in 2018-19 from ₹1,413 crore a year ago, according to a valuation report filed with the Registrar of Companies (RoC) and reviewed by Mint. Total expenditure at Oyo surged nearly five times to ₹9,027.53 crore in FY19 from ₹1,835.38 crore reported a year ago.
A majority of Oyo’s expenses is attributed to “operational expenses", which swelled to ₹6,131.65 crore in FY19, a five-fold increase from the previous year. Oyo also spent ₹1,539 crore in employee-related expenses in FY19, a 500% increase from FY18.
