‘Not going to throw good money at bad growth’: Swiggy Instamart’s Amitesh Jha says competitive intensity is hurting healthy growth

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• Swiggy: Aggressive discounts harm sustainable growth in quick commerce.
• Swiggy prioritizes retention and margins over chasing volume through discounts
• Order growth without basket expansion signals unhealthy market dynamics

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India’s quick commerce market is going through a phase of sustained competitive intensity that is distorting growth outcomes, according to Amitesh Jha, chief executive of Instamart.

Speaking during Swiggy’s Q3FY26 earnings call, Jha said “irrationality” in the market has emerged as a key headwind for growth and is already impacting listed players. He added that Swiggy expects this environment to persist as new entrants continue to spend aggressively on customer acquisition.

“Growth has many reasons for not happening, primarily due to the irrationality in the market, which has impacted both listed players,” Jha said, adding that the company believes such competitive behaviour will continue to weigh on growth in the near term.

‘Good growth’ versus growth bought through discounts

Jha was unequivocal in drawing a line between what Swiggy considers healthy growth and growth driven by aggressive discounting.

“We are not going to throw good money at bad growth,” he said, stressing that the company is unwilling to compromise margins in pursuit of headline numbers. While Swiggy could show higher order volumes by deploying more capital, Jha said such growth would not translate into sustainable leadership.

“If our ambition is real market leadership, it is never going to happen by spending tons of good money on essentially buying growth,” he said.

According to Jha, discount-heavy strategies are creating behaviour where customers move rapidly between platforms with little loyalty, weakening long-term unit economics.

That stance was echoed in the company’s shareholder letter, where Sriharsha Majety, group chief executive officer, said recent efforts to lower consumer-side monetisation had failed to deliver meaningful returns.

“Our recent investments into lower consumer-side monetization have not yielded the desired incremental order-growth, especially at the bottom of the AOV-pyramid; and are being reviewed,” Majety said. “We have consciously chosen not to participate in deep-discount-driven, purely-volume-focussed growth that sacrifices AOVs and margins.”

Order growth without basket expansion a red flag

Jha also flagged a structural issue emerging from the current phase of competition: rising order volumes are not being accompanied by stronger consumer engagement.

“Whenever we have seen order growth for any of these platforms, the basket size has not increased. In fact, they have decreased,” he said, arguing that this indicates growth that is neither healthy nor sustainable.

Swiggy, he added, has consciously chosen not to compete in areas where growth is driven primarily by such metrics, even if it means foregoing short-term gains. “We can do more numbers to show higher OPD (orders per day) by putting more money into growth, but we don’t believe that is the right structural growth,” Jha said.

Focus on retention, not discount-seeking users

As competitive intensity has picked up since October, Jha said Swiggy expects elevated spending by new entrants to continue. However, he expressed confidence that the market will eventually correct as platforms focus more on retention than acquisition.

“New entrants are going after the metric of orders, not on the orders that ultimately matter to end consumers,” he said, adding that retention will ultimately depend on the strength of the core value proposition.

Jha said Swiggy is comfortable losing discount-seeking customers in the short term, arguing that long-term loyalty in quick commerce will be driven by assortment depth, availability and speed rather than sustained incentives.

“Investing good money into bad ways to make customers mature is not a priority,” he said, adding that customers acquired primarily through discounts tend to leave once incentives are withdrawn.