Online food delivery turned out to gulp a huge chunk of cash in 2018. With two major players — Zomato and Swiggy — going neck to neck in competition with each other followed up by FoodPanda & UberEats, the two dominating players have also raised capital across multiple financing rounds.
Zomato, a Restaurant discovery and Food Delivery firm made a statement to have made a leap of 7 million orders from 21 million orders run rate in October 2018 and have achieved a run rate of 28 million orders in the month of December 2018.
Just so you know, run rate is not the absolute volume of the orders, but a calculation done on the basis of one week’s order volume in the month, generally the week with the highest amount of orders. It helps project the future volume of the month.
While Zomato declared their approximate sales in terms of run rate and not in absolute numbers, Swiggy continues to post 28 million + monthly orders in absolutes.
Ola’s FoodPanda, as well as UberEats, are the other platforms working under the same field, looking to capture more customers spending on food.
With Zomato and Swiggy, both raising funds from various resources, the cash infusion has resulted in a highly competitive environment in the food delivery industry and customer benefit as more and more discounts and offers to roll out to garner more market. However, with the vision of providing more and more discounts to their customers, both the companies have been incurring losses of $30 million to $40 million monthly, an estimate given by a source from the industry.
However, Zomato, that has already been operating on different platforms to provide a delightful customer experience also claimed to have brought a total of 7 Lakh customers under their dine-in subscription service, Zomato Gold and have crossed 6 thousand restaurant partners in December as compared to 6 Lakh members and 4 thousand + restaurant partners in October. Zomato’s reward programme, PiggyBank, reflected to have crossed 1.5 Lakh subscribers.
With the ever-growing competition in the industry, as reported by the Economic Times earlier this week, Zomato has been in talks with pre-existing as well as new investors to raise $500 million to $1 billion, whereas Swiggy announced a raise in funding of $1 billion last month.
Ending the fiscal year with impressive numbers to show, both Zomato and Swiggy have performed exceptionally in their own ways. While Swiggy registered more than threefold numbers in their revenues as compared to last year, Zomato ended their fiscal year with a 40% growth in revenue. Sitting at Rs. 466 Crores, Zomato also cut its losses by almost 73%, going from Rs. 390 crores last year to Rs. 106 crores by the end of this fiscal year.
Zomato’s Run Rate, Better Than The Best!
