India a tough market to operate: Zomato’s Deepinder Goyal

BENGALURU: Zomato co-founder Deepinder Goyal said India is a tough market to operate in but the company will not focus on short term profits at the cost of long term success of the food delivery company.
“India is a tough market to operate in, but if you are building to succeed in India, you are already exceptional,” he wrote to his shareholders on the day when his company became the first startup unicorn to list in the BSE and investors cheered its entry with a sizeable day one spike in share price.
Goyal went on to describe Zomato and Swiggy as two of the best food delivery apps in the world today but stopped short of being termed as world class. “We have a long way to go before we can call ourselves world class by our customers’ standards, but we are determined to get there.”
Zomato’s shares surged in its debut on Friday giving the company, which counts China’s Ant Financial among its investors, a market capitalisaiton of more than Rs 1 lakh crore, an eye popping number considering corresponding valuation of many hospitality and restaurant chains.
“The tremendous response to our IPO gives us the confidence that the world is full of investors who appreciate the magnitude of investments we are making, and take a long-term view of our business,” added Goyal.
He, however, did not consider the listing to be a historical moment. “History is always made in hindsight. Never in the present. Back to work," he tweeted.
Goyal cautioned that the success of the company was also due to the country’s Internet ecosystem which had matured over the last six years by laying the “railroads” on which companies like Zomato, Flipkart, Amazon, Ola, Uber and Paytm have thrived.
“Jio’s prolific growth has set all of us up for unprecedented scale,” he said referring to the telecom company’s rock bottom data rates, which helped people access the internet and be part of the ecosystem.