Oyo Hotels & Homes on Monday named Aditya Ghosh to the company’s board of directors, replacing him with a company insider as CEO of India and South Asia operations of the hotel business.
Ghosh will join Ritesh Agarwal, founder and group CEO of Oyo, Betsy Atkins, founder and CEO, Baja Corporation and Munish Varma, managing partner, SoftBank Vision Fund, Bejul Somaia, partner, Lightspeed India Partners Advisors, Mohit Bhatnagar, managing director, Sequoia Capital India Advisor among others, the company said in a statement.
Ghosh, who was previously president of IndiGo, India's largest airline, joined Oyo only a year ago and the reshuffle in the company comes amid accelerating losses. The SoftBank-backed company's internal projections showed it may not make a profit in India and China until 2022, even as the India-based hotel chain revealed a six-fold rise in losses during fiscal year 2019.
As a part of his new role at the board, Ghosh will focus on five key areas —safety and security, customer experience, corporate governance, revenue management and stakeholder communications.
The CEO for the entire India and South Asia business of Oyo will now be Rohit Kapoor who was heading the new real estate businesses.
“Over the last year, Kapoor has been overseeing the growth of OYO LIFE - the brand’s long-term rental housing portfolio as well as other new real estate businesses in India. Rohit’s remit will now also span the operations of over 18,000+ hotels across 500+ cities in India SA," the company said.
The growing losses at Oyo come as SoftBank, its major investor, struggles to raise funding for a second investment fund, after the failed listing of office-rental company WeWork and amid questions about the path to profitability of other marquee investments like Uber.
Agarwal told travel intelligence platform Skift recently that there have been no recommendations or orders from the Japanese investment giant or other shareholders about changing strategy or business practices.
The losses highlight a period of rapid expansion by Oyo into markets such as China, the United States and the United Kingdom, which has made the six-year-old startup one of the world's biggest hotel chains by room count.
(Inputs from Reuters)
First Published: Dec 2, 2019 1:50 PM IST
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