Zoho’s revenue grew by mere 13% in FY17; recorded 47% decline in profits

Zoho Corporation, a cloud company, in a recent RoC filing revealed its financial figures for the year ending March 2017.

While the revenue for FY17 increases by a mere 12.84 per cent, growing from Rs 1756.8 crore in FY16 to Rs 1982.44 crore in the said year, the profit made a significant downfall from Rs 534.37 crore to Rs 285.37 crore, a 46.6 per cent decrease during the financial year 2016-2017.

The expenses for the company increased by 34.1 per cent from a Rs 1216.43 crore figure in FY16 to Rs 1631.17 crore in FY17. Zoho had filed financial statements for FY17 with Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) only this week.

Employee benefits expense became the area of highest expense for the company with expenditure worth Rs 586.6 crore, a 30.59 per cent jump from Rs 449.17 crore in FY16. Advertisement expense was the second highest expense for the year with the close figure of Rs 509.56 crore.

The earning per share (EPS) of the company for FY17 stands at Rs 54.25, which was earlier Rs 101.5

The Shridhar Vembu-led bootstrapped venture holds equity stakes in Tulip Renewable Powertech Pvt. Ltd. and Zenetech, Inc.

In March 2018, Zoho backed SaaS startup UrbanPiper.

It had also invested in Insurance fund in Japan and had made mutuals investments worth Rs 390.11 crore across various schemes in HDFC, Reliance, and Birla.

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The company has three subsidiaries in India, and five internationally. The foreign subsidiaries are spread across USA, Singapore, Japan, China, and the Netherlands.

While the performance of Zoho which provides applications for collaboration and productivity to businesses had shown a deterioration during the financial year ended on March 2017, nothing can be said about the current financial status of the company as the statements for FY18 are not filed.

Zoho competes with players like Salesforce CRM, Freshwork, Pipedrive, Sugar CRM, Atlassian, and Basecamp among others.