Adar Poonawalla-backed Mylab thrived during the pandemic (FY21 and FY22) when the demand for covid related testing and other services skyrocketed. In the subsequent fiscal year ending March 2023, however, MyLab’s scale nosedived around 64% as the world returned to normalcy. Furthermore, a steep fall in demand also led the Pune-based firm to book sizable losses in FY23 against profits in FY21 and FY22.
While the company achieved a 100X growth to Rs 825 crore in FY21, its scale dwindled to Rs 95 crore in FY23, Mylab’s consolidated financial statements filed earlier this week with the Registrar of Companies show.
Even as the company remained profitable in FY22, Mylab’s scale has been on a downward trajectory since then. In FY22, the operating revenue was already down 68.4% to Rs 260.71 crore.
Founded in 2016, Mylab develops and sells diagnostic kits for clinical diagnostics. Similar to FY21 and FY22, the sale of such kits continued to be the sole source of operating revenue for Mylab in FY23
The company also added Rs 29 crore from interest and miscellaneous sources tallying the total income to Rs 124 crore in FY23.
On the cost side, the manufacturing of kits formed 27% of the total expenditure. In the line of decreasing scale, this cost was reduced by 60% to Rs 50 crore in FY23.
The firm’s burn on employee benefits, legal fees, advertising, royalty, conveyance, and other overheads took its total expenditure to Rs 185 crore in FY23 from Rs 250 crore in FY22.
See TheKredible for the detailed expense breakup.
Expense Breakdown
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https://thekredible.com/company/mylab/financials
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- Cost of materials
- Employee benefits expenses
- Legal professional charges
- Advertising promotional expenses
- Cost royalty
- Others
The decline in scale and fixed overheads led Mylab into losses for the first time in the last three reported fiscals. The company recorded a loss of Rs 47 crore in FY23, compared to a Rs 16 crore profit in FY22.
Its ROCE and EBITDA margin worsened to -18% and -24.19%, respectively. On a unit level, it spent Rs 1.95 to earn a rupee in FY23.
FY22-FY23
| FY22 | FY23 |
| EBITDA Margin | 14.81% | -24.19% |
| Expense/₹ of Op Revenue | ₹0.96 | ₹1.95 |
| ROCE | 11.42% | -18.01% |
Much like online edtechs, online healthcare also seems to have vastly underestimated the fight in offline firms that missed out during the pandemic. Be it schools and other institutions in the case of edtech, in healthcare too we have seen offline diagnostic labs and institutions fight hard to claw back share and revenues from the diagnostics market that online firms had grabbed during the pandemic. It’s a battle they understand well with first access to patients in many cases, and we are already hearing of cases where many clinics and hospitals insist on their test lab result. Doubts have also been raised on the credibility of test lab results that are picked up at home and analysed subsequently. Mylabs test kits and ancillary services model has faced these problems, and come up severely short, going by the look of things. The firm needs a better diagnosis for its own survival, and growth plans.
