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May 24 (NBD) -- China's leading online travel agency (OTA) Ctrip reaped 6.7 billion yuan (1.05 billion U.S. dollars) in net revenue for the first quarter of this year, up 11 percent year on year, according to the company's unaudited financial results.

Net income attributed to Ctrip's shareholders increased by more than 19 times year-on-year to 1.1 billion yuan (172.37 million U.S. dollars) in the first quarter of 2018, compared to 52 million yuan (8.15 million U.S. dollars) in the same period in 2017.

The company ascribed the successful fulfillment of the desired financial targets in the first three months of 2018 to the continuous advance in transportation ticketing, accommodation reservation, packaged tour and corporate travel businesses, according to Ctrip's announcement.

It's been noticed that the growth rate of Ctrip's quarterly revenue had been slowing down ever since the fourth quarter of 2016.

With regard to the reasons behind, Chen Liteng, an analyst at the China E-Commerce Research, explained to NBD that besides the enlarged base, high development and operation cost as well as changes in the market are influential factors.

Ctrip's international businesses sustained robust growth momentum, as the company continued to ride the wave of Chinese outbound travelling and expand its customer base in overseas markets. Excluding Skyscanner, international air ticketing accounted for over 40 percent of the travel service provider's air ticketing revenue, according to the company's financial results.

Ctrip founder and executive chairman Liang Jianzhang acknowledged the contribution of outbound travel demands to the company's overall revenue at the conference meeting held after the release of the financial results.

Judging from the financial results, Ctrip had been enhancing its presence in lower-tier cities, with total gross merchandise volume of the offline stores growing around 50 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2018.

Chen held that with business expansion towards lower-cities and overseas markets, Ctrip's development is increasingly comprehensive, but it has to pay attention to competition from other OTAs, especially from Meituan-Dianping.

According to the report on the development of China's online hotel booking industry released by the mobile big data monitoring platform Trustdata, the number of Meituan-Dianping hotel room nights stood at 22.7 million in March, surpassing the monthly sum of Ctrip, Ctrip-backed Qunar and Tongcheng-Elong for the first time. Meituan-Dianping sold 57.7 million hotel room nights in the first three months of 2018, ranking first in the online hotel reservation industry.

Email: gaohan@nbd.com.cn