Business Is Doubled Said Darren Huston
Darren Huston on CNBC discussed the Priceline Group’s global business and the company’s plans for international growth.
Darren Huston –
Now, I think for a lot of Americans, they think of Priceline as name your own price. William Shatner, of course, we also have Kayak, but our business is more than 80 percent international.
In fact, gross profit, 88 percent is earned outside the United States. So being a Booking dot com, which is really the principal subsidiary of the group, is an important place to be.
And we’re a very global business. And there’s not a better place than Amsterdam to run a global business.
Simon –
I mean, the value is in the fact that for so long people have counted the streets in Europe to get those hotels with booking dot com. And that’s quite unique.
So this is a true online travel agency, not a massive search platform.
Darren Huston –
Yeah, exactly I mean, being an online travel agency is an all spreadsheets and technology. It’s actually a lot about managing connections on the street.
Also dealing with customer, we have over 3000 people that speak over 42 languages helping customers travel around the world. So there’s a lot of hard work to being a traveller.
Simon –
Let’s talk about the stock price moves. I think you’ve lost over $200 on your stock price. You’ve gone from 70 billion to 60 billion in market capitalization.
I mean, how do you feel about that? Well, you like the CEO of Netflix or tested or felt that the stock was overvalued.
Darren Huston –
Yeah, you know, when I started the group three years ago, this stock has since then tripled. The business has more than doubled. We actually look back to the heyday of the Internet.
The stock has actually gone up over one hundred acts. So this is a short term issue where we focus on completely as how do we drive great business, how do we continue to grow, how do we continue to drive?
Simon –
It must have implications, for example. The speculation is that you would buy a home and away Home Away forgive me, which is which is vacation rentals booking operation out of Texas.
If I have a look at that stock, it’s done really badly recently, presumably because you guys don’t necessarily have the currency and moment to do the transaction. Oye so blurred. I mean would you buy that stock?
Darren Huston –
You know, we focused mostly on organic growth of the group. We have made transactions over the years. They usually happen fairly infrequently, like the Kayaked transaction last year. But a lot of our growth is driven organically.
And as we expand the type of accommodations we work with being hostels, resorts, motels. It’s also brought us into the vacation rental space. So some people speculate things that we might do, but we’re just continually to organically execute our increase in accommodations on our main platform.
