Rivigo's losses double in FY18, revenue grows to Rs 720 Cr

Online logistics startup that recently gathered startup ecosystem-wide praise for its ESOP encashment event - Rivigo - has reported its financials for FY18, and the story is not so impressive.

In its latest filings with the Registrar of Companies at the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, the company revealed a 76.4 per cent increase in revenue from Rs 408.11 crore in FY17 to Rs 719.85 crore in FY18.

The losses, on the other hand, more than doubled in the latest reported fiscal from Rs 123.45 crore to Rs 270.23 crore. This simply means that the company’s revenue that was 3.3 times the losses in FY17, reduced to 2.66 times.

This means that even when the revenues tower over the losses and have shown significant growth, the profitability metrics have taken a hit.

However, it is appreciable that the core business of the company, sale of logistics based online services contributed 96.2 per cent (Rs 692.6 crore) to the overall income, slightly more than the 95.2 per cent (Rs 388.42 crore) share in the previous fiscal.

The largest component of the company’s costs to earn this revenue was transportation distribution charges, taking up 51.5 per cent of the expenses. The amount spent on this particular function was Rs 510.65 crore, 80.7 per cent up from Rs 282.57 crore figure in FY17. Freight charges in themselves stood at Rs 267.36 crore for the fiscal.

The total expenses of the firm stood at Rs 990.07 crore, showing an 86.3 per cent increase from FY17, where the figure stood at Rs 531.55 crore.

These are the consolidated figures of the Deepak Garg and Gazal Kalra founded company that includes the profit and loss numbers of the company’s two subsidiaries - Rivigo Freight Pvt. Ltd. and Cloudtech Services Pvt. Ltd.

The financial performance of the company also pales a little when compared with its direct competitor Blackbuck. Not only does the Blackbuck's revenue figures stand taller than Rivigo's at Rs 901.9 crore, it was also able to control its growth in losses to per cent and improve upon its profitability metrics.

Funding and ESOPs

The two fights that Rivigo still wins are those of the inflow of funds, and the employee reward system. Its rival - Blackbuck was reported to pick $7 million in October 2017, but there were no documents to prove the existence of any such event. It had raised Rs 202 crore in a round led by Sequoia Capital one year later.

Rivigo, on the other hand, completed its $50 million Series D round in December 2017. A round led by its existing investor SAIF Partners and also participated in by Spring Canter Investments. A month later, the co-founder and CEO of the company Deepak Garg had also invested further capital in the company by way of convertible debentures worth Rs 185.7 crore ($29 million).

However, the employee reward system in the company takes the cake. The company had issued ESOPs worth 8 lakhs (42 shares) in FY18, and that figure has increased around 16 times in FY19 with 1,217 shares worth Rs 1.39 crore already being issued.

The company keeps on rewarding its best employees by way of ESOPs every now and then, and that’s not just all it does for them.

The five-year-old Gurugram-based firm had rightly gained praises a few months ago when it allowed these ESOP holders to encash their shares with no cap on the amount they could take away or number of shares they could resell. In this event, 30 employees of Rivigo had taken home Rs 71 crore overall.

However, to keep on giving these rewards, the company will have to be in a financially strong position and stay on the path of growth while improving its profitability metrics. It will be interesting to see how the employee friendly firm wins the financial battle in FY19.