Zomato FY18 revenue jumps 45%, cash burn drops: CEO Deepinder Goyal

Online restaurant finder and food delivery firm Zomato Media Pvt. Ltd increased its revenue and reduced its cash burn in the financial year ended March 2018, co-founder and chief executive Deepinder Goyal said.

Revenue jumped 45% to $74 million (Rs 481 crore at current exchange rates) for 2017-18 from $51 million the year before, Goyal wrote in a blog post.

He didn’t disclose the profit or loss figure but said the operating cash burn for 2017-18 fell to around $11 million from $15 million.

Goyal also said that food ordering comprised around 30% of the company’s revenues in 2017-18, up from around 18% the year before.

Gurugram-based Zomato now offers food ordering services in 15 cities in India and five cities in West Asia. The company also claimed that it hit close to 5.5 million monthly food orders in March 2018.

Goyal also said that the company’s annualised revenue run rate is $100 million.

Also, Zomato has broken even in EBITDA terms “almost all throughout the year”, globally, the CEO said. EBITDA is short for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation.

The company’s subscriptions businesses Zomato Gold and Zomato Treats have more than 280,000 users combined, Goyal said. Zomato Gold contributes close to 12% of the firm’s monthly revenue, he said.

Goyal said the firm’s advertisement business grew at a slower pace than the previous year. “Our advertising business grew slowly in this financial year for lack of focus. We had stopped hiring in our ads business as we really wanted to crack the transactions piece as an organisation. The number of people in our ad sales team is down 20% since last year, but our ads (advertisements) revenue for this year still grew by almost 20% year-on-year,” he said.

The food delivery business in India grew almost 48% in March 2018 over the previous month in terms of number of orders and by almost 55% in terms of revenue, Goyal said.

Zomato was set up in 2008 by IIT Delhi alumni Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah. Last month, Chaddah quit the company after a 10-year stint.