New Delhi: B9 Beverages Pvt. Ltd, maker of the popular Bira 91 beer, posted a loss of Rs55.06 crore for the year ended 31 March 2017, a big jump from the Rs12.32 crore the previous year, the company’s latest filing with the Registrar of Companies (RoC) shows.
Revenue from operations for the year ended 31 March 2017 stood at Rs30.9 crore, up from Rs4.02 crore in the fiscal year ended March 2016. While a majority of the revenue came from selling beer in India, the company’s US subsidiary B9 Beverages Inc. generated sales of Rs3.4 crore from the US market during the year.
“The reporting is for the period when we were still importing from Belgium and operating at low gross margin level,” said Ankur Jain, founder, B9 Beverages, commenting on the results.
According to Jain, the company targets to break even in its India business by the fiscal year ended 31 March 2019.
B9 Beverages, which has so far raised about $30 million, is majority-owned by venture capital fund Sequoia Capital India Advisors. Besides founder Jain, other minority investors in the company include Chennai-based asset management firm Anicut Capital; General Atlantic managing director Shantanu Rastogi and senior vice-president Alok Misra; Naik Family Trust 2013; Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, co-founders of e-commerce firm Snapdeal; Ashish Dhawan, co-founder of private equity firm ChrysCapital; Mayank Singhal, venture investor with RNT Capital Advisors; and Deepinder Goyal, founder of restaurant discovery platform Zomato.
Earlier this month, Jain said that B9 Beverages would go for an initial public offering (IPO) in the next three to four years. Besides India and the US, Jain has been working on entering five new markets—the UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates.
Over the next three to four years, Jain said in an interview with Mint on 13 October, the company may need to raise $150 million through debt and equity to support global expansion.