Licious’ revenue grows 64% in FY22 while losses past Rs 855 Cr

Direct-to-consumer (D2C) meat and seafood brand Licious became India’s first unicorn in its space and raised over $390 million across four funding rounds during FY22. Leveraging these proceeds, the company has continued to grow its scale in the last fiscal year and neared the Rs 700 crore revenue mark.

Licious has registered 64.3% growth in its operating revenue to Rs 682.6 crore during FY22 as compared to Rs 415.5 crore in FY21, according to its annual financial statements with the Registrar of Companies (RoC).

Revenue from the sale of meat, seafood, eggs, and others accounted for 97.5% of the overall operating revenue. These collections grew nearly 65% to Rs 665.7 crore in FY22 from Rs 403.6 crore in FY21. The company also collected Rs 16.9 crore as delivery charges which surged 42% during FY22.

Licious also booked Rs 23.5 crore in non-operating income including interest on bank deposits and current investments which drove the total revenue to Rs 706 crore during FY22.

Founded in 2015, Licious has built a farm-to-fork model including handling the entire back-end supply chain. Early last year, it also forayed into the ready-to-eat segment and operates in 25 cities, including Bengaluru, Delhi (NCR), Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Chandigarh.

On the expense front, raw materials such as meat, poultry, and seafood products emerged as the biggest cost element contributing 46.5% to the total expenditure. This cost surged 74.3% to Rs 554 crore in FY22.

Spends on employee benefits surged 76% to Rs 209.5 crore in FY22. Advertising cum promotional and transportation distribution costs ballooned 2.6X and 2.3X to Rs 170 crore and Rs 65.2 crore respectively. The company also incurred Rs 24.42 crore as information technology expenses during the same period.

Licious’ total expenses grew 85.5% to Rs 1,191 crore in FY22 while its losses ballooned 2.3X to Rs 855 crore. Cash outflows from operations also spiked over 2X to Rs 416 crore during FY22 from Rs 200 crore in FY21.

Coming to ratios, the EBITDA margin worsened to -62.72% during the year which could be ascribed to over 85% surge in annual expenses. On a unit level, the company spent Rs 1.74 to earn a rupee of operating revenue during FY22.

For a Unicorn, the numbers don’t look too encouraging despite the firm making a real impact in the category. That is due to two factors. Pricing, and customer loyalty. Licious charges a significant premium over offline markets, which makes its customer loyalty very suspect in the long term. With no segment-wise break up available, the firm has demonstrated some real innovation and category expansion with its spreads earlier, and the meat and masala biriyanis now. While it has obviously proved many detractors wrong, notably those who scoffed at people buying meat online in significant enough numbers, it might soon find that the next level of growth is where the country’s largest meat processors have found it. Outside the country.