Fast&Up-parent Fullife Healthcare controls losses by 39% in FY24

Fullife Healthcare, the parent company of sports nutrition brands Fast&Up and Chicnutrix, recorded a modest 10% year-on-year revenue growth for the fiscal year ending in March 2024. However, the company’s core focus appeared to be on improving profitability, as it reduced its losses by 38.8% during the same period.

Fullife Healthcare’s revenue from operations grew to Rs 188 crore during the last fiscal year from Rs 171 crore in FY23, its consolidated annual results sourced from the Registrar of Companies (RoC) show.

Fullife’s Fast&Up offers active nutrition, including protein, workout supplements, and immunity boosters. Chicnutrix, another brand by Fullife launched in 2019, focuses on women’s wellness with products for skincare, haircare, PCOS, UTI care, and more. Sales from these products were the company’s sole revenue source in the last fiscal year.

The company also earned an additional Rs 3.8 crore from non-operating sources, bringing its total revenue to Rs 191 crore in FY24.

Procurement costs for the sports nutrition brand made up 39% of total expenses, which increased by 3.6% to Rs 87 crore in FY24. Meanwhile, Fullife managed to reduce its advertising spend by 22% to Rs 46 crore.

The employee cost for the firm grew by 15.6% to Rs 37 crore in FY24. Its freight, online selling cost, legal, and other overheads brought the total expenditure to Rs 222 crore in FY24. See TheKredible for the detailed expense breakup.

Despite the modest growth, the controlled cost mechanism helped Fullife to reduce its losses by 38.8% to Rs 30 crore in FY24, compared to Rs 49 crore in FY23. On a unit level, it spent Rs 1.18 to earn a rupee in the last fiscal year. By the end of FY24, Fullife ROCE, and EBITDA margin improved to -30.7% and -13.09%, respectively. The Mumbai-based company reported a total current asset of Rs 111 crore.

Fullife Healthcare has raised over $40 million to date including its $22 million from Morgan Stanley in 2021. According to the startup data intelligence platform TheKredible, Morgan Stanley was the largest external stakeholder with 27.35% followed by Rakesh Jhunjhunwala (billionaire investor who passed away in August 2022).

The explosion of firms and brands in the nutrition space has pretty much ensured that despite the growing size and segments, profitability is way harder than it must have seemed when starting off. Thanks to the distribution channels that have opened up thanks to ecommerce and more, traditional moats have come down significantly, leaving many firms struggling to strike a compromise between growth and profitability. The Rs 150-200 crore size is one place where many will find that while they have done enough to prove their thesis of a market for their product, doing so profitably in the face of intense competition is another task altogether. With little appetite for a D2C play that will aggregate such brands, expect a lot more brands to shrink towards becoming strong and profitable  regional plays rather than large and national loss making plays.