Lay-off had nothing to do with our performance: Deepinder Goyal

Interview with Founder & CEO, Zomato

For Deepinder Goyal, founder & chief executive officer of Zomato, 2015 has been a year of fending off bad press and taking tough steps to meet investor demands. With six countries of its portfolio of 23 breaking even, he tells Karan Choudhury that he believes the company is on the path to turning profitable by June this year. Edited excerpts:

A year after not meeting targets, laying off as many as 300 employees and dealing with the bloodbath in the food tech sector, how has Zomato managed to break even?

What helped us was that our revenue doubled in the past four months. As it happens, the oldest markets in your portfolio turn green first. In our case, it is India, West Asia and Southeast Asia. Though our timelines here also got delayed due to the launch of our food-ordering business, we recovered money from our advertisements.

Everything happens for a reason and it happened in our case as well. Laying off had nothing to do with Zomato's performance. It was a way to make our operations better. Many were given a choice to join other teams; some took it, others did not.

Now that you have broken even in some markets, do you have any acquisition plans any time soon?

No, we want to focus on widening our profits in a few more countries for the next six months. We want to reinforce our business in the places we are already in.

What is going to be your outlook for this year?

We will keep on doubling our revenues and traffic at the same time. We will not open any new vertical and focus on what we are doing at present. We are the market leader in gross merchandise value (GMV), calculated by the number of orders multiplied by average order value and we want to grow further there. Unlike our competition, our GMV is genuine, as we are not dabbling in any sort of discounting to jack up our GMV.

When would your whole operation be profitable?

We have 23 countries in our portfolio. We plan to be a profitable operation between June and September this year. We have more than doubled our revenue year-on-year for the past few years, and are going to post some great growth numbers this year as well. We are profitable in six of the 18 markets where we are the market leaders. This proves our long-lasting conviction in our business and the fact that we are on the road to creating the first truly global consumer internet company.