Bengaluru
Food delivery app Zomato’s consolidated net losses for the March 31 ended quarter increased to ₹359.7 crore as against ₹134.2 crore a year earlier, as per a regulatory filing made by the company on Monday.
Meanwhile, the company’s Q4 revenue from operations rose ₹1,212 crore, indicating a year-on-year jump of 75%.
During the quarter, Zomato’s Gross Order Value (GOV) touched ₹5,850 crore, recording 6% and 77% growth Q0Q and YoY, respectively, according to the filing.
The food delivery platform said the number of its average monthly transacting customers slightly increased to 15.7 million in Q4 as against 15.3 million in the sequential quarter.
Zomato co-founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said the company did see a low in Q3 as dining out and travel opened up only post COVID.
``We believe that was a one time correction of our growth trajectory on the back of two strong quarters. We think our growth trajectory is back on track, and we don’t foresee “post-COVID ramifications” affecting our growth rate anymore,’‘ he said. Commenting on growth acceleration, Akshant Goyal, Chief Financial officer, said the company expected its adjusted revenue growth to accelerate to double digits in the next quarter and the adjusted EBITDA losses to also come down meaningfully.
``Reduction in losses will be driven by improvement in contribution margin of the food delivery business and also operating leverage playing out as our revenue is growing faster than our fixed costs,’‘ he elaborated.
In the imaginary conversation with the shareholder, Zomato officials further said, top 8 cities contributed some 60% of the platform’s GOV in Q4FY22 and top 300 contributed some 99%.
``Beyond the top 300 cities, the GOV share was less than 1% but we expect it to grow. Our presence in these cities is for the long term, as demographics in India upgrade rapidly,’‘ they added.
Responding to another investor query on rising fuel prices and its impact on delivery costs, Mr. Goyal said, ``Increase in fuel prices does increase our delivery cost. One could say that part of our progress on improving contribution margin is getting pulled back because of fuel price increase, as we haven’t yet fully passed on the incremental cost to customers.’‘
On talent front, Deepinder Goyal said the company was seeing some stress on the availability of delivery partners in select large cities since the last week of April.
``We think this is short-term in nature, as the post COVID economic recovery has brought back jobs in cities, and we lost some delivery partners to such jobs. We think things will normalise in a few weeks. We are also working on various long term initiatives to drive more stability of delivery partners in our fleet,’‘ he explained.
