HouseJoy in FY18: Incurred Rs 49.5 crore loss to make Rs 37.8 crore revenue

HouseJoy, the Bengaluru based service marketplace is celebrating the festive season with customised service packages and discount offers.

Meanwhile, the company also revealed its financial statements for FY18 via RoC filings with MCA, showcasing a slight improvement in its performance.

The horizontal service marketplace clocked a revenue of Rs 37.85 crore in FY18, a 19 per cent increase from Rs 31.79 crore figure in FY17. The losses, on the other hand, shrunk by 29.44 per cent, from Rs 70.2 crore to Rs 49.53 crore in a span of one year ending March 2018.

The expenses of the company took a 14.32 per cent, dip to a Rs 87.38 crore figure from Rs 101.99 crore in previous fiscal.

The major area of expense was employee benefit, which went down by 8.78 per cent, from Rs 36.55 crore to Rs 33.34 crore in financial year 2017-18.

The loss making revenue practices of providing discounts and cashbacks didn’t create a huge dent in company’s cash burn but saw certain changes. While burn in discounts decreased by 21.96 per cent to Rs 2.12 crore, the expenditure in provision of cashbacks was more than doubled to Rs 1.42 crore.

As of now, the company is going through a funding crunch, whereby it hasn’t been able to raise any money since $23 million Series B round in December 2016. HouseJoy also had to fire 40 of it employees in May 2018 to carry on its operation with available funds while break even and profitability is still a long way to go.

Meanwhile, the firm’s largest competitor in the market, UrbanClap has shown tremendous improvement in FY18. Its revenue took a 3.2X jump in the fiscal, going up from Rs 16.54 crore to Rs 53.48 crore while losses shrunk to Rs 56.49 crore from Rs 67.18 crore in FY17.

The financial performance, as well as the growth curve of UrbanClap, took an upward trajectory which can be reflected by the fact that while it spent Rs 5.06 to earn Re 1 in FY17, it only had to spend Rs 2.04 in FY18.

Going further, it would be interesting to see how HouseJoy keeps on maintaining financial growth, while trying to raise funds and competing with UrbanClap.