Zomato crosses $200 Mn revenue in H1; claims 40% reduction in EBIDTA losses

Online food discovery and delivery platform Zomato has revealed its financial performance for the first half (H1) of the fiscal year ending on March 31, 2020, or FY20.

Zomato has declared an increase of about 225% in its half-yearly revenues. In a blog post, the company has claimed revenues of $205 million during H1 FY20. In comparison, the foodtech unicorn had only managed to clock $206 million in revenue during the entire FY19.

Further, the Ant Financial-backed company claims to have 214 million orders in the first half of the fiscal year. Among the several claims, the foodtech major's gross merchandise value (GMV) rose by 223%.

Zomato's GMV for H1 2020 stood at $821 million in comparison to $254 million made during the corresponding period in the last fiscal year. During the first half, the Deepinder Goyal-led firm managed to cut down its burn rate by 60% from what it was six months ago. 

Zomato, which reached 11.2 million average monthly transacting users from 3.6 million, has also clocked about 3.6 times increase in its order frequency.

In the last fiscal, the total expenses recorded by the company had taken a six-fold jump to $500 million in FY19 from $80 million in FY18. The expenses have also been reduced in the first half of this year as the company has been taking several measures to improve operational efficiency,  including trimming its employee base. 

The company, however, did not reveal figures for total expenses. 

Zomato's report also claims to host more than 1.4 million active restaurants on its platform, further revealing that the total number of listed restaurants globally has grown to 1.5 million in September 2019, versus 1.2 million in September 2018.

Apart from the growing scale of its food aggregating business, Zomato has been facing the wrath of outlet partners and the restaurant association in the past couple of months. National Restaurant Association of India had accused the company of predatory pricing and deep discounting.

Notably, the company also recorded a 180% YoY growth in its Gold subscriptions which stand at 1.4 million in September 2019. Zomato Gold had become the bone of contention between the company and NRAI and the company faced nationwide #Logout campaign. 

While the company has pulled back its newly introduced Infinity Dining, it has expanded the Gold program for home delivery. The move has not gone down well with NRAI, and the matter will be discussed in the proposed meetings this month.