While most tech businesses witnessed a sharp loss of scale and revenue during FY21, some managed to sail through with minor impact on their topline. One such firm is Olympus Capital-backed re-commerce firm Cashify.
Despite disruption in the supply chain and closure of its offline touchpoints and service centres, the company’s revenue managed to ride out the tough phase with a nominal hit. According to its website, it has an offline presence with 500 service locations and 40 offline stores.
At Cashify, sales of used mobile phones and other electronic gadgets like speakers, laptops, tablets, gaming consoles and smartwatches continued to dominate, with 92.6% of its total operating revenue which stood at Rs 315.37 crore, according to Cashify’s annual financial statements filed with the RoC.
These numbers were down 5.13% in FY21 as compared to Rs 332.42 crore in FY20. Rest of the operating revenue came from ancillary services such as phone recycling, refurbishing and repairing.
Importantly, revenue from these services surged 93.8% to Rs 25 crore in FY21 from Rs 12.91 crore in FY20. It appears that people thronged to Cashify for phone repairs as offline centres were mostly closed during the first and second waves of the pandemic. Or people tried to make their phones last longer, besides continuing to look for second hand deals at Cashify.
Cost of material consumed formed 78.7% of the company’s total expenditure in FY21 which decreased 5.9% to Rs 298 crore from Rs 316.6 crore in FY20. Employee benefits expense was the next major cost centre forming 11.4% of the total spending. This expenditure slightly increased by 2% to Rs 43.26 crore in FY21 from Rs 42.40 crore in FY20.
To capture more leads, Cashify resorted to heavy online marketing during FY21 as evident from a strong 38% rise in its marketing cost. The company’s expenses on marketing jumped to Rs 7.39 crore in FY21 from Rs 5.33 crore in FY20.
Cashify’s logistics cost marginally grew to Rs 4.6 crore while cost of rent for office and offline centres saw a significant reduction of 40% to Rs 4.14 crore. At the same time, its cash outflows dwindled 65% to Rs 21.3 crore in FY21 from Rs 61.5 crore in the previous fiscal year.
Cashify managed to control its losses by 23.6% to Rs 35.31 crore in FY21 while the figure stood at Rs 46.25 crore in the previous fiscal year (FY20).
On a unit level, Cashify spent Rs 1.11 to earn a single unit of operating revenue in FY21.
Operating as it does in a largely unorganized part of the market, the one thing Cashify does have going for it is the sheer size and scale of the main segment it services: mobile handsets. Like many other categories, a lot of the competition has died out here, and the opportunity to strengthen the brand by virtue of simply surviving long enough will be increasingly apparent in the coming quarters. Investors in Cashify will be hoping the firm can play to that advantage in the coming quarters and year.
