Title - IRCTC registers over Rs 700-crore earnings

NEW DELHI: Three years after it lost most of its captive railways' catering business, the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has bounced back with over Rs 700-crore earnings, driven by a focus on expanding businesses like catering for corporate clients such as HCL, Samsung and the Jaypee group, tour packages and e-ticketing."We were already serving some ministries but after the new policy, we expanded to other ministries and government offices. We were also in the process of setting up a state-of-the art kitchen (currently operating at a capacity of 10,000 meals per day) and this is serving our corporate clients in the Noida and Greater Noida area," said Rakesh Tandon, CMD of IRCTC, adding that he would also like to expand business to Gurgaon, but the response so far has been tepid.

IRCTC has kept product cost low to break into the market and is aiming at volumes growth to reach break-even. "We expect to break-even in another 2 years," said Tandon.

In June 2010, the railway ministry announced a new catering policy, taking away IRCTC's primary job of catering on trains, resulting in a loss of Rs 400 crore railway catering revenue. IRCTC, which did very little non-railway catering before that, decided to serve corporate clients in 2012.

Its non-railway catering business has grown to Rs 34 crore from Rs 3 crore in the last two years. IRCTC's railway catering business is currently around Rs 230 crore. Also, railways has now allowed IRCTC to serve on all newlylaunched trains.

The loss of catering services meant the overhead costs got distributed to every other product.