Online grocery store BigBasket’s combined net loss widens for FY17

Alibaba-backed online food and grocery store BigBasket posted an increase in its combined net loss for front-end and back-end operations to Rs 844.6 crore for 2016-17, from Rs 380 crore a year earlier, going by media reports.

Supermarket Grocery Supplies Pvt. Ltd, which owns the BigBasket brand as well as manages its back-end operations, reported a rise in its net loss to Rs 659 crore for the year ended March 2017, the Financial Express said, citing the firm’s filings with the Registrar of Companies. A year earlier, Supermarket's net loss stood at Rs 277.6 crore, going by VCCEdge, the data research platform of News Corp VCCircle.

Innovative Retail, the consumer-facing platform of BigBasket, posted an increase in losses to Rs 192 crore for 2016-17, up from Rs 103.4 crore a year earlier. Revenues rose to Rs 1,090.5 crore for 2016-17, a 107% jump from Rs 527.5 crore a year ago.  Innovative's numbers were sourced from VCCEdge.   

Back-end unit Supermarket Grocery Supplies, the Financial Express reported, posted a 109% rise in revenue from operations to Rs 1,176.6 crore over a year, and employee benefit expenses rose 48% to Rs 142.4 crore during the period. Total expenses increased 75.4% to Rs 1,516.2 crore for 2016-17 over a year earlier.

One of BigBasket’s major competitors, Grofers, recorded a 32% fall in the revenue for the year through March 2016 to Rs 58.34 lakh from Rs 86.38 lakh a year ago. Its net loss widened 15 times to Rs 60.87 crore from Rs 3.9 crore during the period. Total expenses surged to Rs 61.45 crore from Rs 4.77 crore over a year.  

Besides Grofers, BigBasket competes with players such as Milkbasket and Amazon, which offers online delivery of groceries and daily essentials through its app Amazon Now and its online supermarket service Amazon Pantry.

BigBasket might also face another formidable competitor in Flipkart, which announced its second innings in the segment through a soft launch of its grocery delivery service Supermart in November last year.

According to reports, BigBasket has also held buyout talks with Pune-based RainCan, Gurugram-based Milkbasket and Bengaluru-based Daily Ninja.

The company, which operates in 30 cities clocking Rs 200 crore in terms of monthly run-rate, had last raised $300 million from Alibaba Group Holding and other investors in February this year, inching closer to unicorn status.