Foodpanda's losses ballooned to 5X with mere 17% revenue hike in FY18

Foodpanda’s story of ups and downs is something that a lot of people know about. The Ola acquired company had recently made headlines due to a possible scaling down in its operations.

The company has now revealed the financial figures for FY18 via RoC filings with Ministry of Corporate Affairs. These figures explain and strengthen Ola’s decision to not engage in a loss-making war with food delivery majors like Zomato and Swiggy.

Despite receiving Rs 245 crore across the financial year from former German owner Delivery Hero and ANI Technologies (Ola), the company managed to earn Rs 72.85 crore. This was a mere 17 per cent improvement from Rs 62.26 crore worth revenue in FY17.

The basic domestic turnover increased by a mere 18.6 per cent. Exports and other income declined by 16.5 per cent and 15.4 per cent respectively.

Moreover, the company spent Rs 162.65 crore to earn this revenue, a 51.9 per cent increase from Rs 107.09 crore in FY17. The largest of these expenses were miscellaneous expenses that included delivery, voucher, payment gateway, and foreign exchange expenses. These stood at Rs 64.63 crore altogether registering a 41.6 per cent increase.

The Advertisement expense within themselves took a 2.3X jump to Rs 40.72 crore.

The loss after tax interestingly rose from Rs 44.82 crore to a 5.1X figure Rs 227.96 crore. This included a new exceptional expense of several service charges given to SSC Volo, Delivery Hero and Foodpanda Germany that totalled to Rs 138.16 crore.

Even if we deduct the exceptional service charge, the loss grew 2X to Rs 89.8 crore, a figure still higher than the revenue earned.

To analyse the magnitude of these understand, we have to understand this was even before foodpanda gave away ridiculously high discounts during the latter half of CY18.

It is no surprise that instead of fighting a fund consuming battle against the food tech majors, Bhavish Aggarwal realised the inefficiency of the model and decided to focus on private cloud kitchen labels instead.

After acquiring the firm from Delivery Hero in December 2017, looking at the FY18 figures of the company, investing over Rs 200 crore and relentlessly working on it for a calendar year (post March 2018) with little return left an enlightening impact.

The focus of Ola has anyway been on growing towards profitability instead. FY19 is about to end and let’s see how much the steps taken by Ola wrt foodpanda work for both the food tech arm and ANI at large.