In Brief: Swiggy hikes restaurant commissions, RIL’s $3-bn acquisition spree; Travelex suspends service

Food delivery platform Swiggy has been raising commissions for restaurant partners in some regions where its service is nearing maturity, according to an Economic Times report citing sources, on Friday. The company has also increased its delivery fees to control its losses on a per-delivery level, the report said.

“This is nothing but business as usual in a marketplace such as ours,” Swiggy said in a response to ET, while denying any unusual increase in commissions for any specific restaurant partner base, the report said.

The development comes at a time when the company's bottom-line is suffering, given the high cash burn in the sector. Bundl Technologies, the parent holding that owns Swiggy, reported consolidated losses that ballooned to Rs 2,364 crore during financial year 2018-2019. 

Swiggy is also looking to get restaurants to fund a larger chunk of promotions as it is pushing the partners to advertise on its platform.

India’s food delivery market is dominated by Bengaluru-based Swiggy and Gurugram-based Zomato. Rival Zomato has also been burning cash -- in FY19, it reported a surge in losses to Rs 1,001 crore from Rs 106 crore in the previous year.

RIL makes acquisitions worth $3 bn in past 3 years

Mukesh Ambani-owned RIL (Reliance Industries) made acquisitions worth $3 billion in the past three years to boost product offerings of its subsidiaries, according to a report on Deal Street Asia on Friday.

Also read: Rewind 2019: RIL ups tech acquisition game amid tepid M&A activity

Travelex suspends some services after malware attack

International foreign currency exchange Travelex has suspended some services after it was hit by malware on December 31, according to a report by TechCrunch. The London-based company, which operates more than 1,500 stores globally, said it took systems offline “as a precautionary measure in order to protect data” and to stop the spread of malware, the report added. Clients like Tesco Bank, which rely on Travelex for some services, also struggled during the outage.