ebookers stays on track despite war fears

The company reported a 52% increase in gross sales for the year to 31 December 2002, to £273m, with gross profit weighing in at £31m (from £20m), which helped to reduce its annual loss from £25.6m to £12.3m. Despite the increase in sales, operating costs fell by £2m to £44.6m.

Ebookers has managed to keep a tight grip on costs partly through the purchase of 22,000 square feet of office space in India, where it employs 400 staff to undertake various duties including customer service, email sales, competitor pricing analysis and accounting.

The company said its highly-qualified graduate workforce are already achieving standards on a par with their European colleagues and expects cost savings to become "far more significant as scale increases".

BT is currently under fire from unions after it said it would open customer service centres in New Delhi and Bangalore, but ebookers has proved that it makes sense to do so on a business level.

Travel companies such as ebookers are among the first to suffer as a result of overseas conflicts and shareholders have reacted nervously since the beginning of 2003 to the situation in the Middle East - shares have fallen another 17% today to 207p and have halved in value since the start of the year.

However the company said its business experienced a "rapid recovery" after the first Gulf War and the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001, as consumers regained their confidence.

The company retained £21.7m in cash at the end of the year.



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