E-commerce and payments companies in India have continued to post staggering losses and so are the enablers such as supply chain and logistics companies. The case in point is Delhivery. Its losses surged by 160% to Rs 1,781.03 crore in FY19 from Rs 684.45 crore in the previous fiscal,
While the losses grew over 2.5 times, revenue has increased only by 58.2% to Rs 1694.97 crore in FY19. The firm had a revenue of Rs 1073.64 crore in FY18.
The expenses of the SoftBank-backed company has also doubled to Rs 3,463.3 crore in a year ending March 2019 from Rs 1,756.74 crore in FY18.
The gap in revenue and losses clearly shows that even though the logistics Unicorn’s revenue grew steadily during the year, the spike in its losses and expenses is relatively high.
Importantly, the company had shown a positive change in topline and bottom-line metrics previous fiscal as compared to FY19. It’s worth noting that the company also expanded operations in a few offshore markets including China. This might have driven it into losses.
Backed by the likes of Tiger Global and SoftBank among others, Delhivery has a reach to about 1,800 cities. Currently, the logistics major has about 30 fulfilment centres in 12 cities for B2C and B2B services.
So far, the company had received total funding of around $763 million. Last month, Delhivery scored a $115 million round from Canadian pension fund CPPIB at a valuation of around $1.5 billion.
Meanwhile, SoftBank is reportedly in talks to increase its stake in Delhivery to 25.72%. It had sought permission from the Competition Commission of India (CCI) to increase its stake by 3.28%.
Ecom Express, XpressBee, Buedart and Gati among others are its major competitors.
Unlike Delhivery, Ecom Express reduced losses to a large extent and had posted a 76% jump in total revenue to Rs 1,018.45 crore in FY19. The company losses stood at Rs 129.60 crore in FY19 from Rs 526.70 in FY18.
