At the end of February, the former Priceline group, now Booking Holdings, released their full year numbers. In years gone by, we would call Priceline the largest company that you have never heard of. With the name change to Booking Holdings, at least you can associate it with their main webpage, Booking.com.
Onto the numbers, for their 4Q they had Net Income of $836 million, a rise of 19%, and for their full year, they had Net Income of $3.8 billion, up 17%..
Being the biggest online travel company, comes with some big numbers. For the full year they had $12.7 billion in revenue, to get those revenues they had to spend over $5 billion on advertising! In total for the year they had 673 million rooms booked, which translates to 77 000 bookings per hour or 1 280 bookings every minutes!
For the year ahead, management forecast growth of between 20.5% and 24.5%, amazing considering that their base continues to get bigger. If you want to buy a company to take advantage of millennials becoming the biggest component in the global workforce, we think online travel, and Booking Holdings, is one of the best places.