“I’m doing a bunch of things, Akshant ( Goyal) has taken up a couple of things…we also have a strong bench. So, with a combination of these three, we’re good for now. So far, we can fit it into the 12-14 hours a day…it’s perfectly fine but we’re constantly on a lookout for talent,” Goyal said in a post-earnings analyst call on Friday.
The senior-level exits of late have included cofounders like Mohit Gupta and Gunjan Patidar, who was also its chief technology officer.
Head of new initiatives Rahul Ganjoo and Siddharth Jhawar, who was heading intercity delivery, also quit late last year.
The food and grocery-delivery company’s consolidated revenue grew 75% to Rs 1,948 crore in the October-December quarter, even as losses jumped five-fold to Rs 346 crore.
The improvement in operating performance came amid an acknowledgement by its top management that the food delivery business had slowed down after Diwali, with total orders falling.
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However, during the analyst call, Akshant Goyal indicated that the slowdown had “bottomed out”.“In the last couple of weeks, we have been seeing our app opens go up, over the last two-three months when we hadn’t seen that. That is telling us that perhaps the slowdown has bottomed out,” he said.
“That’s our conjecture at this point but we’ll have to see how it unfolds in the rest of the quarter, and whether the demand patterns change meaningfully or not. It’s still early days but whatever signals that we’re able to see, it seems like it’s only going to get better from here on from a demand standpoint,” he added.
The CFO also pointed out that even as the number of power users – or users who order more than 50 times a year – grew on the company’s platform on an annual basis in 2022, the frequency of use by power users went down during the three-month period ended December 31.
“For the last quarter, the frequency drop was across the board – in fact, I would say that it was more pronounced in the slightly higher frequency customers than in the others,” he said.
Zomato reported 2.7 million “power users” in calendar year 2022, compared with 1.8 million in 2021.
In its earnings statement, Zomato said it would relaunch the 10-minute delivery business, Zomato Instant, under a new name Zomato Everyday, in the coming weeks.
The company had said earlier that it was recalibrating its 10-minute delivery service. Its finance chief said that Zomato Everyday will be “less capital intensive” than Zomato Instant.
“It’s not going to be very asset heavy, but we’ll have to open finishing stations to service customers. Currently, we’re planning to experiment with the infrastructure we had built for Zomato Instant. We’ll use the same finishing stations to roll this out in the next few weeks in Gurgaon and Bangalore. Depending on the offtake and what we learn from there, we’ll decide on how to go ahead from there. Compared to Zomato Instant, it is going to be less capital intensive,” Akshant Goyal said.
