Seven reasons for Zomato's Rs 4,447-crore Blinkit buyout deal

Deepinder Goyal.

Zomato announced on June 24 that its board had approved the acquisition of quick commerce company Blinkit for Rs 4,447 crore.

According to the terms of the agreement, Blinkit shareholders will get a cumulative stake of 6.88 percent in Zomato and the target company’s leadership team, including co-founder and CEO Albinder Dhindsa, will stay on to run the ship.

But, questions still remain about how Zomato, a company that registered losses of Rs 1,223 crore in FY22, plans to derive value from acquiring another loss-making delivery startup.

The food delivery major’s top executives put out a ready reckoner laying out the rationale behind the deal. From having a Blinkit tab on the Zomato app to sharing delivery fleets to cut costs, here are some of the important reasons that came through from what they said:

Increased customer wallet share

“Quick commerce will help us increase the customer wallet share spent on our platform and also drive higher frequency and engagement from our customers,” said Zomato CEO and co-founder Deepinder Goyal.

The metrics shared by Zomato showed that Blinkit’s average order value in May was more than 25 percent higher than its own Rs 398 in FY22.

However, the quick commerce company’s average order value had fallen by 13 percent to Rs 509 in May, compared to January when it pivoted fully into the quick commerce model.

“Post the deal closure, we are going to start experimenting with various ideas that we have and see which all bear fruit, including having the Blinkit tab on the Zomato app,” the company said.

Decreasing delivery costs

Although Zomato said that Blinkit will continue to operate through its own app and brand, CFO Akshant Goyal indicated that they might share delivery fleets to some extent. 

“Quick commerce increases our addressable market, the potential profit pool and also makes our business more defensible. The peak demand times for food delivery are also complementary to the quick commerce demand peaks in non-meal times,” he said.

Moreover, the last-mile delivery cost in quick commerce is expected to be lower than food delivery, given the shorter delivery time and higher number of orders delivered per hour.

Better commissions in quick commerce

The post extensively compared Blinkit’s performance in January, the first month when its operated as a quick commerce company after pivoting from its next-day grocery delivery avatar, and May.

It showed that the quick commerce company’s monthly revenue had grown 162 percent to Rs 58 crore in May, compared to January. In the same period, gross order value rose 36 percent to Rs 402 crore, showing that the company has been successful in eking out more commissions from third party retailers and distributors per unit of sales with rise in volumes.

Deepinder Goyal also said that ad sales revenue in quick commerce would be higher than food delivery, given the much larger digital ad spend budgets of consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands.

Signs of quick commerce market growing

“Blinkit’s GOV (gross order value) is fast catching up with Zomato’s GOV in some key markets, therefore indicating that quick commerce will add a significant new addressable market to our business in the long term,” said Zomato co-founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal.

“In a sample market like Gurugram, Blinkit GOV is already approximately 63 percent of Zomato’s food delivery GOV,” he added.

However, in the month of May 2022, Blinkit achieved a GOV of Rs 403 crore, which was around a fifth of Zomato’s monthly average food delivery GOV in Q4FY22.

More customer stickiness 

The Zomato executives also made a case for Blinkit’s quick commerce pivot by laying out metrics that showed it had led to greater customer stickiness.

While the propensity of customers to order after opening the app had increased by 2.4 times after the pivot, ordering frequency of the average customer had grown 1.5 times.

Meanwhile, monthly order frequency on Blinkit app was 3.5x in May 2022, which is higher than that of food delivery on Zomato, the company revealed.

“All of this improvement in customer facing metrics is not driven by subsidies, as may be the perception. In fact, customers are now being offered lesser discounts by the sellers as compared to the next-day delivery model earlier,” said the CEO.

“There is also a levy of delivery charge which was not necessarily the case earlier,” he added.

Improving unit economics

Blinkit’s unit economics is still a cause for concern. Although the company’s contribution margin loss narrowed from negative 55 percent to negative 16 percent, a back-of-the-envelope calculation showed that it still lost around Rs 132 per order in May even at a conservative estimate.

Zomato said that Blinkit had shut around 50 dark stores since January – and the company will continue shuttering non-performing stores to bring down losses in the future.

“The improvement in unit economics in the last 5 months gives us confidence that Blinkit is on the right path. We have good visibility on the various levers for achieving profitability in this business. Many dark stores are already trending towards contribution break-even,” said CFO Akshant Goyal.

Trillion dollar market

Zomato said that quick commerce naturally extends across multiple categories including beauty & personal care, electronics, OTC pharma, stationery, other gift items, etc. 

Also, categories other than grocery help the quick commerce business make higher margins, and attain higher AOVs (Average Order Value).

“Total commerce market in India is $1.3 trillion and in the long term, we see quick commerce emerging as a significant channel of demand for customers at least in the top cities,” remarked Deepinder Goyal.