Zomato posts 45% growth in FY18 revenue at USD 74 mn

Online restaurant guide and food ordering firm Zomato today said its revenue rose by 45 per cent to USD 74 million (around Rs 481 crore) in 2017-18.

While the company did not share profits/loss numbers for the fiscal year, Zomato Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said as on March 31, 2018, Zomato had over 2.8 lakh active user subscribers across its two subscription programs Zomato Gold and Zomato Treats.

Sharing the company's financial performance for 2017-18 in a blogpost, he said Zomato did "USD 74 million in topline in FY18 as compared to USD 51 million in FY17, 45 per cent growth over last year".

Goyal said the company demonstrated that its business can generate profits.

"Operating burn for FY18 was USD 11 million compared to USD 15 million in FY17; USD 6 million of the operating USD 11 million burn in this year was incurred in just February and March (when we decided to double down on growth)," he added.

In FY2017-18, food ordering comprised 30 per cent of the company's revenues, up from 18 per cent in FY2016-17, he said.

"We are now live in food ordering in 15 cities in India and five cities in the Middle East. We hit 5.5 million monthly food orders in March 2018," Goyal said.

Commenting on the number of subscribers, he added as on March 31, 2018, Zomato had over 2.8 lakh active user subscribers under subscription programmes Zomato Gold and Zomato Treats.

On the advertising, Goyal said the company stopped hiring in its ads business as it really wanted to crack the transactions piece as an organisation.

"The number of people in our ad sales team is down 20 per cent since last year, but our ads revenue for this year still grew by 20 per cent y-o-y. 15,000 restaurants paid us for advertisements in the last year," Goyal said.