An Indian Brand, a Foreign Balance Sheet
OYO reads, to most Indians, as a homegrown disruptor — the orange signage on budget hotels from Jaipur to Jamshedpur. Oravel Stays' IPO filing complicates that picture considerably. For the nine months ended December 2025, only 16.2% of revenue from operations, roughly ₹112.7 crore of ₹694.1 crore, came from India. The remaining 83.8% was generated outside the country, principally across the United States, United Kingdom and Europe.
This is not a new development so much as an accelerating trend. Ex-India revenue share has risen steadily from 74.7% in FY23 to 77.7% in FY24, 79.9% in FY25, and now 83.8% in the nine-month period to December 2025. Whatever OYO is today, its revenue engine sits substantially offshore — arguably making it one of the more genuine Indian-origin multinationals outside of IT services, built through acquisition rather than organic overseas expansion.
India's Shrinking Share, and Why It Isn't Necessarily a Red Flag
India's contribution to revenue from operations has fallen from 25.3% in FY23 to 22.3% in FY24, 20.1% in FY25, and 16.2% in the nine months to December 2025. In absolute rupee terms India revenue has actually been broadly flat to slightly down across the period, while the overall revenue base has grown — meaning the shrinking share is a story of the denominator, not a collapsing home market.
For a domestic listing, this is a nuance investors will need to sit with. The India growth story that retail investors may associate with the OYO brand is, financially, the smaller and slower-growing piece of the business. The larger and faster-growing piece sits in jurisdictions with different competitive dynamics, currency exposure and regulatory regimes — all of which the company flags explicitly as risk factors in its filing.
The US Overtakes the UK: A Tale of Two Integrations
Break the "outside India" number into its constituent geographies and a sharper story emerges. US revenue share has more than doubled, from 15.0% in FY23 to 27.1% in the nine months to December 2025 — now comfortably OYO's largest single reporting geography, ahead of India itself. Europe has held broadly steady, moving between roughly 24% and 30% of revenue across the period without a clear directional trend.
The UK tells a very different story: its revenue share has fallen sharply, from 14.5% in FY23 and a peak of 17.8% in FY24 down to just 5.4% in the nine months to December 2025. That is the steepest swing in the entire geographic mix. It suggests either post-acquisition integration friction in the UK book of business, a deliberate strategic reallocation away from that market, or increased competitive and macro pressure specific to the UK travel sector — the filing does not disaggregate the cause, but flags integration risk from acquisitions including G6 Hospitality (Motel 6, Studio 6) as a live and unresolved risk factor, with no impairments recognized to date but no assurance offered for the future either.
Read together, the US and UK trend lines look like a natural experiment in acquisition integration playing out inside a single company: one market compounding, the other contracting, within the same reporting period.
Revenue Mix Is Shifting From Owned Inventory to Commission
A second structural shift sits beneath the geography story. Sale of accommodation services — essentially OYO acting as the direct seller of room inventory — has fallen from 68.0% of revenue in FY23 to 54.9% in the nine months to December 2025. Over the same period, commission from bookings and royalty income has risen from 22.3% to 31.9%.
This is a classic platform-maturation pattern: more of the revenue is now variable, negotiated per-listing, and dependent on third-party patron relationships rather than direct inventory control. The filing itself acknowledges the trade-off, noting that reliance on third-party accommodation partners exposes the business to renegotiation of commercial terms, commission caps, and potential partner attrition — risks that scale precisely as the commission-mix share grows.
Storefronts: Real Network Effects, With a Retention Tax
The number of storefronts — brands, properties and listings live on the OYO platform globally — rose from 170,101 in FY23 to 293,554 by December 2025, a 73% increase in under three years. That is a genuine indicator of platform network effects: more listings attract more customers, which in turn attracts more patrons, echoing the same dynamic that underpins marketplaces like MakeMyTrip's service-provider listings.
But this growth carries a structural cost that the metric alone doesn't show. Marketing and promotion expense as a share of revenue has risen from 13.9% in FY23 to 16.6% in the nine months to December 2025, driven largely by a near-tripling of advertising and sales promotion spend. Sustaining storefront growth increasingly means paying more, in relative terms, to keep the platform's supply side onboarded and renewed — a treadmill dynamic rather than a one-time network-effect payoff.
The Broader Takeaway
Oravel Stays' IPO filing is a useful reminder that brand geography and revenue geography can diverge sharply for acquisition-led platform businesses. OYO's growth story going forward is less about India's budget-hotel market and more about how well US, UK and European operations integrate, how the accommodation-to-commission mix shift affects margin durability, and whether storefront growth can be sustained without a proportionally rising customer-acquisition bill. FY27 will be an important test, given the acknowledged integration risks and the general softening in consumer discretionary sentiment across some of these overseas markets.