Food delivery giant Swiggy (Bundl Technologies Private Limited) reported its revenues for the financial year 2020-21 as Rs 2,145 crore, a 23 per cent fall since the last financial year. The company further reported a net loss of Rs 1,314 cr during the same fiscal. This is a 65 per cent decrease from the last financial year, showed regulatory documents sourced from business intelligence platform Tofler. The Bengaluru-based company’s total expenses for the fiscal were reported as Rs 3,310 crore.
Swiggy’s expanding “convenience” vision has been a driving force in growing the on-demand economy across the country. The firm continues to contribute to the way people view food delivery in over 500 cities across the country. It leverages its technology, scale, the density of restaurant, delivery network and learnings from over 1.25 billion delivered orders to continuously improve on-demand food delivery services and develop new offerings to its customers like Concierge services and essentials on-demand.
Its latest offering Swiggy Instamart (currently live in 19 Cities) allows customers to order essentials and groceries throughout the day in 15-45 mins with a spread of over 4000 SKUs (stock-keeping units) without compromising on speed.
“As we continue to grow within existing cities and expand into newer cities, high availability along with fill through rates, very low cancellations and complaints remain at the core of our operations,” said the company in the documents.
During the year under review, the Covid-19 outbreak spread rapidly leading to the Government of India implementing various measures to contain the spread of the virus including Lockdowns, restrictions on travel, social distancing and other emergency measures. This coupled with the general fear of contracting the virus led to a significant reduction in the demand for food delivery. Despite the lockdown and other restrictions, Swiggy continued to carry on its business activities uninterruptedly. As the leading on-demand delivery platform in the country, the company said it was among the first to launch a ‘No-Contact’ delivery feature on the app to enable both customers and delivery partners to maintain a safe distance.
To monitor the health of its restaurant and delivery partners, the firm put in place several measures soon after the lockdown came into effect.
The company said the business has shown strong recovery through the year and has grown by 1.2x from March 2020 level and 2.2x from June 2020 levels with a strong focus on customer acquisition and retention; supply improvements (both restaurants and delivery riders) and a high bar on Experience with focussed interventions on improving Selection, price and convenience, and policies for its customers as well as partners.
“As our company continued to focus on business recovery and associated Unit Economics the contribution margins improved significantly with operational efficiency, and reduction in defects. The contribution margin per order improved by 150% YoY; leading to reduction in PBT (profit before tax) losses by 39ppt of revenues YoY,” said the company in the documents.
The adoption of food and online grocery is accelerating due to the pandemic and consumer demand for Swiggy’s many services continues to grow. Last month Swiggy raised $700 million in Invesco-led new funding, which, according to sources, has made the outfit a decacorn, almost doubling its valuation to $10.7 billion. Swiggy’s valuation was almost double that of Zomato before the latter went for its initial public offering. Zomato was valued at $5.4 billion before its IPO. It had overtaken sports technology company Dream Sports, the parent firm of fantasy sports platform Dream11.
While the food-delivery business has nearly doubled in gross order value (GOV) in the last year, this fundraise is enabling Swiggy to accelerate growth on the core platform and make a meaningful investment to grow Instamart, its quick commerce grocery service which remains well-positioned to continue to lead the emerging space and set to reach an annualised gross merchandise value (GMV) run rate of $1 billion in the next three quarters.
The company is strengthening its investment in the broader ecosystem. The fundraise is giving Swiggy enough firepower to take on rivals such as Zomato, Amazon, Flipkart, Dunzo, Licious, and Ola Foods.
“The GMV our food-delivery business achieved in 40 months took Instamart just 17 months, demonstrating the platform benefits of Swiggy. We will double down on this to build more categories,” Sriharsha Majety, chief executive officer and co-founder, Swiggy, said last month. “Our goal is to make Swiggy the platform that 100 million consumers can use 15 times a month. We will continue to invest in our people, products, and partners.”
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