JOIN USOnline food ordering platform Zomato on Friday said its revenue in the last financial year jumped over two-fold to $394 million (around Rs 2,960 crore) as compared to 2018-19.
The earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) in the last financial year stood at around Rs 2,200 crore, Zomato said in its performance report.
In 2018-19, the revenue was about Rs 1,440 crore and EBITDA stood at Rs 2,080 crore.
"Moving our business towards profitability was a core focus for us in FY20 and we made significant progress along that journey," Zomato said.
While Covid-19 has impacted the size of the company's business, it has accelerated its journey to profitability. "In terms of the size of the business, Covid-19 has set us back by a year or so, but a year is only a small blip when one is building a company for the next 100 years," it added.
"Covid-19 has positively impacted the health of our business – we seem to have gained 2-3 years along this vector. In July 2020, we estimate our monthly burn rate to land under USD 1 million, while our revenue should land at around 60 percent of pre-Covid peaks (USD 23 million per month)," the report said.
Zomato expects to make a complete recovery over the next 3-6 months while continuing to maintain tight control on costs and profitability, it added.
Highlighting the performance of its business segments, Zomato said FY20 was a defining year for food delivery in India. While FY19 saw hyper-competition between 4 well-funded food delivery players, FY20 ended with a two-player market structure, it claimed.
The company's FY20 India Food Delivery gross merchandise value (GMV) grew to USD 1,496 million (over Rs 11,250 crore) as against USD 718 million (over Rs 5,395 crore) for 2018-19, the report said.
As of now, food delivery GMV has recovered to 60 percent of pre-Covid levels. "We have taken a number of important steps to ensure the safety of our food delivery customers, which has been a significant driver of the rebound in our business so far," it added.
As offices start opening up, these professionals are now starting to move back to the larger cities and the company expects a sharp recovery in order volumes as lockdown continues to ease and the operating environment improves, the report said.
The unit economics of the company's food delivery business has improved consistently over the last 18 months, it added.
About the Dining out, the report said, "Our dining out business grew steadily in spite of headwinds (e.g. logout campaign against Zomato Gold by restaurants in India) with significant gains in EBITDA margins across India and our international markets in FY20".
Dining out revenue grew to over Rs 421 crore in 2019-20 as against about Rs 349 crore in the preceding fiscal, it added.
This business is fast moving towards being a transaction-led business where the focus is to close the loop with restaurants by encouraging users to pay their eating-out bills through the Zomato app, the report said.
The recovery in the dining out is going to be slow. Users will be concerned about social distancing and hygiene and restaurants will need to reorganise themselves to be able to build trust with users on these fronts, it added.
Emphasising that its B2B supplies (Hyperpure) are growing strongly, Zomato said it believes that it has early indications of a strong product-market fit.
"Until now, we have only been serving Delhi and Bengaluru with Hyperpure. We have covered a lot of ground in the last two years, and we are now expanding rapidly into new cities," the report said.
The Hyperpure revenue for 2019-20 stood at over Rs 110 crore as against about Rs 13 crore in the previous year, it added.
About its social responsibility arm, Zomato Feeding Foundation, the report said the foundation aims to be the largest and most impactful not-for-profit aimed at solving hunger needs in the developing world.
Feed the Daily Wager campaign collected Rs 32 crore which was used to distribute over 65 million meals in the form of ration kits to the daily wager community, hit hard by the Covid-19 crisis, it added.
"We aim to grow our Feeding Foundation community multiple folds going forward. Solving hunger is a massive problem, but a solvable one if all of us just started caring about it enough," the report said.
The report also said Zomato has reinstated all the original salaries of its employees who had agreed for salary cuts during the initial days of the Covid-19 crisis.