Zomato scores lead over Swiggy: Claims to cross 21 Mn monthly delivery mark

Following the path of e-commerce and digital payments, foodtech segment has been going through intense competition. Just like Flipkart-Amazon (in e-commerce) and Paytm-PhonePe (digital payments), Swiggy and Zomato are at war with each other to gain more market share.

Although Zomato entered online ordering vertical in 2016, it has caught on with Swiggy very fast. With a mere 3.5 million deliveries a month at the beginning of this year, the Alibaba-backed company now claims to reach 21 million delivery mark.

“With 21 million orders per month, as far as we know, we are now the market leader in the food ordering space in India,” mentions Deepinder Goyal, Co-Founder and CEO Zomato.

Besides 21 million online orders, Zomato also claimed 2 million orders originating from phone every month.

For context, Swiggy does about 20 million deliveries a month. It’s important to note that Swiggy hasn’t given its monthly volume for several months.

So far, Zomato’s online ordering vertical is operational in 38 cities and according to Goyal - the company would be expanding this service to 100 cities soon.

Goyal also claimed to deliver 90 per cent of orders through its own fleet. At the beginning of this year, Zomato used to deliver only 30 per cent of orders on its own. While the company had only 5,000 delivery boys in January, now it has a strong network of 74,000 delivery boys.

Since Zomato has been focusing to scale online ordering business for past one year, its contribution to overall GMV also ballooned to 65 per cent from mere 35 per cent in December last year.

“Our annualized GMV presently stands at $1 billion compared to $210 million in January,” says Goyal in the blogpost.

Recently, Zomato made its loyalty programme available to customers for free, just as Swiggy rolled out its Swiggy Super on a mass scale. The company is also planning to launch its own digital payment solutions and mobile wallet.

Foodtech has been witnessing fierce competition between Zomato, Swiggy, foodpanda, and UberEats. Besides dishing out discounts to customers, they are also offering enormous incentives to delivery personnels. On an average, they pay anywhere Rs 100 to 120 for delivering a single order.

As a result, all of them have been bleeding profusely. However, they are not worried as their backers want them to chase scale without thinking much about capital. After raising over $500 million collectively, Swiggy and Zomato are currently in talks to raise larger capital.