Following the closure of its initial public offering last week, Indian family office Apeejay Surrendra Park Hotels, based in Kolkata, is now trading as a publicly listed company.
It trades under the symbol APEJ with the Securities & Exchange Board of India stock exchange and will continue to operate hotels under its Park Hotels Group flag.
Park Hotels received preliminary papers to enact an initial public offering last December for an issue of new equity shares valued at 6.5 billion Indian rupees ($78.3 million) and an offer for sale of equity shares of a further 4 billion rupees.
The majority of the proceeds will help pay off 100% of debt and go toward opening 15 hotels, Park Hotels executives said. Deals for those 15 properties have already been signed.
If all 15 hotels open, Park Hotels' portfolio will total 56 hotels. Its brands include The Park, its luxury brand; Park Collection; Zone by The Park; and Zone Connect by The Park.
It has 30 hotels and 2,298 rooms in operation, all located in India. It owns seven of those hotels, all affiliated with The Park brand in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi and Visakhapatnam.
Recently, Park Hotels launched budget brand Stop by Zone, and the overall pipeline includes a hotel in Pune and extensions to two of its The Park hotels in Mumbai and Visakhapatnam.
The company also undertakes long-term leases and management agreements, as well as franchising other owners’ properties.
For its luxury brand The Park — which has eight hotels — occupancy was 91.8%, average daily rate was 6,070.51 Indian rupees and RevPAR was 5,571 Indian rupees, according to its initial IP prospectus dated Aug. 19, 2023, which cited performance for the full year ending March 31, 2023.
Analysts said the timing of Park Hotels' IPO comes at a good moment in the Indian hotel industry.
Sumeet Singh, head of research, IPOs and placements at Singapore-based Aequitas Research, confirmed Park Hotels’ IPO had closed and it has started full trading as of Feb. 12.
Singh said he is bullish on India’s hotel market.
“The India hotel industry is driven by a mix of corporate and leisure travel, both of which have been strong since bottoming out in COVID. Most of the larger hotel chains have been able to report occupancy of over 70% with rising [average daily rate],” he said.
Domestic Dreams
Manav Thadani, co-founder and chairman at business advisory Hotelivate, said Indian hotel firms are motivated by the surge in domestic demand, especially in leisure travel.
“Domestic travel spending generated 88.4% of the total spending [in 2022], up from 82% of the total spending in 2019. … Moreover, the rising domestic footfall has allowed leisure spending to have a 95.3% share of the total spending in 2022, compared to 93.9% in 2019,” he said.
But Thadani said investors are cautious about the recovery of urban hotel markets in India.
“The performance of leisure hotels vis-à-vis the performance of urban hotels must be carefully studied,” he said. “The sustained growth in domestic travel coupled with the return of business travel and meetings, incentives, conventions and expositions has allowed hotels in both urban and leisure locations to pull up their rates considerably.
“There is, however, a stark difference in the rate growth. The urban locations have increased their rates by 10.9%, whereas leisure locations have grown the rates by 35.6% over 2018-19 levels. This remarkable rate growth has widened the difference between leisure and urban hotels in terms of revenue per available room,” he added.
Park Hotels was founded in 1967 but can trace its history back to 1910, when Apeejay Surrendra Group started producing steel.
Its website states it is “the eighth largest hotel chain among hotel chains with asset ownership in India.”
Its last full-year earnings report added “a large portion of our revenue (approximately 75% of the total income in fiscal 2023) is realized from our top-five owned hotels with The Park Kolkata contributing 21.75%.”