Food delivery giant Swiggy's revenue drops 23% in FY21 to Rs 2,145 crore

Food delivery giant Swiggy (Bundl Technologies) reported a 23 per cent fall year-on-year in revenue at Rs 2,145 crore in financial year 2020-21 (FY21). However, its net loss decreased 65 per cent YoY to Rs 1,314 crore, showed regulatory documents sourced by business intelligence platform Tofler. The Bengaluru-based company’s total expenses stood at Rs 3,310 crore.

“As we continue to grow within existing cities and expand into newer cities, high availability along with fill through rates, very low cancellations and complaints remain at the core of our operations,” said the company in the documents.

During the year under review, the Centre had imposed the nationwide lockdown to check the spread of Covid-19. This coupled with the general fear of contracting the virus led to a significant reduction in the demand for food delivery.

The company said there was strong recovery and it grew 1.2x from March 2020 level and 2.2x from June 2020 levels with a strong focus on customer acquisition and retention; supply improvements (both restaurants and delivery riders) and a high bar on experience with focussed interventions on improving Selection, price and convenience, and policies for its customers as well as partners.

“As our company continued to focus on business recovery and associated unit economics the contribution margins improved significantly with operational efficiency, and reduction in defects. The contribution margin per order improved by 150 per cent YoY; leading to reduction in PBT (profit before tax) losses by 39 ppt of revenues YoY,” said the company in the documents.

The adoption of food and online grocery is accelerating due to the pandemic and consumer demand for Swiggy’s many services continues to grow. Last month Swiggy raised $700 million in Invesco-led new funding, which, according to sources, has made the outfit a decacorn, almost doubling its valuation to $10.7 billion. Swiggy’s valuation was almost double that of Zomato before the latter went public. Zomato was valued at $5.4 billion before its IPO.

The company is strengthening its investment in the broader ecosystem. The fundraise is giving Swiggy enough firepower to take on rivals such as Zomato, Amazon, Flipkart, Dunzo, Licious, and Ola Foods.

“The GMV our food-delivery business achieved in 40 months took Instamart just 17 months, demonstrating the platform benefits of Swiggy. We will double down on this to build more categories,” Sriharsha Majety, chief executive officer and co-founder, Swiggy, said last month. “Our goal is to make Swiggy the platform that 100 million consumers can use 15 times a month. We will continue to invest in our people, products, and partners.”