Swiggy fully recovers from COVID-19 impact: 3 key factors
Premium- Swiggy heavily focussed on reactivating users, increasing monthly frequency and returning user conversion to levels they were at prior to the pandemic
Food and grocery delivery platform Swiggy’s business has recovered fully from the effects of the COVID pandemic, pointed out Prosus, one of its biggest investors, pointed out in its annual report. Swiggy’s gross merchandise value (GMV) grew 76% to $2.3 billion in FY22.
Here are the key factors that helped in Swiggy's recovery:
Prosus said in its report, Swiggy heavily focussed on reactivating users, increasing monthly frequency and returning user conversion to levels they were at prior to the pandemic. “This strategy paid off as Swiggy has more than 195 000 active restaurants on its platform (+110% of pre-Covid-19 level), achieved 55% growth in daily orders; and 76% growth in GMV to US$2.3bn," the report said.
Swiggy also focused on expanding its quick commerce Instamart business, which performed well, increasing daily orders 10 times year on year. This resulted in accelerated growth in the groceries vertical coupled with continuous growth in the restaurant food delivery business vertical, it further pointed out.
Swiggy has also continuously grown its users in the past year, along with subscription programme innovations across categories, such as Swiggy One (formerly ‘Super’ which catered to food delivery only), with focused investments in infrastructure, product and technology, the report mentioned.
“We believe Swiggy is well funded to capitalise on recent momentum and well positioned to improve its platform’s competitiveness by investing in product and technology, and reinforcing its artificial intelligence capabilities," Prosus said.
Swiggy currently delivers food, groceries and meat, and runs its concierge service (Genie) using its network of around 300 000 delivery riders. Prosus invested twice in Swiggy, in April 2021 and February 2022. It invested o US$274m and US$25m in two batches.
Apart from Swiggy, Prosus’ other food tech investments include Brazilian food-delivery platform iFood, German multinational Delivery Hero, German grocery-delivery startup Flink, Norwegian online grocery firm Oda, and Foodics, a restaurant-management startup in West Asia.