Pine Labs posts Rs 492 Cr operating revenue in FY19; gifting solution registers 3X jump

Cloud-based, unified point-of-sale (POS) platform Pine Labs’ financial performance during FY19 has improved despite significant growth. Its net operating cash inflows improved by 62.83% to Rs 180.1 crore in the year ending March 2019 from Rs 110.6 crore in FY18. 

According to the annual financial report, the firm has recorded a 48% jump in operating revenue to Rs 491.63 crore in FY19 as compared to Rs 332.25 crore in the preceding fiscal.

Revenue from software development and allied services made up 74% of the total revenue generated by Pine Labs during last fiscal. Such revenue grew 27% from Rs 286.6 crore in FY18 to Rs 363.2 crore in FY19.

Significantly, the company has reaped staggering benefit from the sales of POS and rewards products which almost tripled to Rs 128.4 crore in FY19 in contrast to sales of Rs 45.65 crore in FY18.  

Pine Perks, the gifting platform floated by the PineLabs after the acquisition of Qwickcilver accounted for 76.5% sale of products, generating Rs 98.2 crore during FY19, almost tripling from the sales of Rs 33.08 crore in FY18.

Further, sale of RFID readers grew 10.2X to Rs 1.84 crore in FY19 as compared to Rs 18.5 lakhs in FY18. Last year the company also introduced Forecourt Controller, installed at several petrol pumps to process cashless transactions.  These sales amounted to an additional Rs 10.4 crore for the company.  

Surprisingly, sale of paper rolls for POS machines added another Rs 13.5 crore in sales kitty along with Rs 4.57 crore due to the sale of spares. 

On the expenses front, employee benefit expenses grew 17% to Rs 179.5 crore in FY19 from Rs 153.3 crore in FY18. Obsolescence is also a big cost factor for any technology company as reflected by depreciation & amortization costs of Rs 72.1 crore recorded by the company.

Pinelabs spent Rs 26 crore on aggregation and vouchers for Pine Perks and another Rs 1.65 crore on rewards management. It spent another Rs 20.4 crore in repairs and up-gradation of plant and machinery.

Legal expenses and travel added another Rs 15 crore & Rs 20.15 crore respectively while expenses on business promotion were Rs 1.64 crore pushing the total expenses to Rs 518.5 crore growing almost 50% from Rs 336 crore.

While the company managed to achieve sustainable growth, the increase in expenses and taxes increased losses by Rs 11.23 crore to Rs 13.7 crore during FY19. Importantly, losses before tax actually improved by 20.4% from Rs 18.32 crore in FY18 to Rs 15.22 crore in FY19.

Pine Labs had raised Rs 68.01 crore during last fiscal through issue of share. The company added tangible assets  & intellectual property worth Rs 110.5 crore and Rs 11.2 crore to its operations to achieve growth in scale while managing to pay back borrowing of Rs 40.8 crore as well.