Food delivery platform Zomato on Thursday reported its net loss widened to Rs 347 crore for the quarter ended December 31, 2022 as against Rs 67 crore in the year-ago period. The company’s revenue rose 75% to Rs 1,948 crore as compared to Rs 1,112 crore in Q3FY22.
On Thursday, the company’s scrip on BSE closed trading 0.5% higher at Rs 54.60. Zomato said its core earnings briefly turned positive in January, helped by an increase in orders due to festivals and FIFA World Cup.
Zomato hit a milestone in January 2023 – becoming EBITDA +ve (ex Blinkit)
We are on track with our path to profitability by Q2FY24.
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The loss-making company, which went public in 2021, reaffirmed that it expected to report adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) in the second quarter of fiscal 2024.
“We still feel confident about reaching Adjusted EBITDA break-even (ex-quick commerce) by Q2FY24 as per our earlier estimate. As far as investments by way of Zomato Gold are concerned, they were already baked into our projections, as the launch of Zomato Gold has been in the works for several months now. The current slowdown in demand was unexpected which is impacting the growth in food delivery profits but despite that, we think we are in a good position to meet our profitability goal,” said Akshant Goyal, CFO, Zomato.
Order volumes at Zomato’s mainstay food delivery business rose 14%, while the average order value increased 6%.
Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal announced that Zomato Instant is being remodelled into Zomato Everyday to offer customers home-style cooked meals.
“We are working on remodeling the Zomato Instant service to focus on offering our customers home-style cooked meals at affordable prices (will be called Zomato Everyday). We believe that this is a large opportunity in a market like India and is relatively untapped currently. We plan to launch this soon in the next few weeks,” said Goyal.
Goyal said the Zomato Gold programme has scaled to over 9 lakh members in less than a month of its launch.
“The key highlight of Zomato Gold is ‘On Time Guarantee’. This feature was three years in the making, and the tech which powers this feature is a significant achievement for our team. Gold members also get priority access to more restaurants during peak times and offers from a number of restaurants on both delivery and dining-out. We have also made our intercity delivery from legendary restaurants (called Intercity Legends) exclusively available to Gold members. And of course, free delivery on orders meeting certain criteria,” said Goyal.