Zomato, its first full-year profit in pocket, turns focus on Blinkit

livemint.com:

BENGALURU : Food-delivery company Zomato Ltd, which turned in its first full-year profit, is now doubling down on its rapidly growing quick-commerce business Blinkit, aiming to add 100 dark stores by June. By the end of this financial year, Zomato is targeting 1,000 Blinkit warehouses, the company said, announcing its quarterly results on Monday.

Zomato swung to a profit of ₹175 crore for the fourth quarter from a loss of ₹188 crore in the corresponding year-earlier period, as revenue from operations improved to ₹3,582 crore from ₹2,058 crore. For the full 2023-24 financial year, Zomato posted a profit of ₹351 crore as compared with a loss of ₹971 crore in the year before.

Blinkit, which Zomato acquired in June 2022, is already profitable on an operational level, with its gross order value, or GOV, in the March quarter nearly doubling as consumers, particularly in the metro cities, seek instant deliveries of daily household requirements. “We are just grateful that the bet that we took on Blinkit worked out just fine and we are not at a point where Akshant (Goyal, chief financial officer) and I are getting fired for an expensive acquisition gone wrong," Zomato founder and chief executive Deepinder Goyal said.

Swiggy’s Instamart and Zepto, too, have been benefiting from the increasing demand for quick deliveries of daily items, and have expanded their product catalogues to include beauty, fashion, and electronics, in addition to groceries. “In addition to scaling up the existing store network and use cases, we will be adding more use cases so the Blinkit platform is even more useful in the everyday lives of our customers," said Albinder Dhindsa, founder and chief executive of Blinkit, which was previously known as Grofers.