In a sudden move, Swiggy Instamart has added 316 dark stores in the January-March period, taking its store count to 1,021 up from 705, as it looks to intensify the competition in a rapidly evolving industry.
The move is unusual because before Q4FY25, Swiggy Instamart was adding 50-100 dark stores each quarter but has now tripled the pace to add 316 dark stores in 90 days. Swiggy's pace of opening new dark stores now matches Blinkit, the market leader, which opened around 300 dark stores in each of the past two quarters.
The dark store addition came with heavy investments, too. At the end of Q3FY25, Swiggy had a cash balance of Rs 8,183 crore which reduced to Rs 6,695 crore in Q4FY25.
Swiggy’s cash balance reduced by Rs 1,488 crore in a period of 90 days, and it is likely that a bulk of this amount went into opening new dark stores.
Swiggy's total dark store count at 1,021 is now the second-highest after market leader Blinkit which had 1,301 dark stores at the end of Q4FY25. Zepto, a key rival, has over 750 dark stores.
Swiggy has now ramped up its darkstore footprint to 4 million sq ft as guided earlier, up 62 percent on a quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) basis. It now has 1,021 active darkstores as of March 2025 across 124 cities.
It added 412 new stores in the last six months out of which one-third were added in 80 new cities. The rest were added in existing metro and tier I towns towards densification and service increased demand, Swiggy said on May 9.
“With this, our immediate thrust on network expansion for the identified city coverage is substantially complete. As we increase the utilisation of our existing network, we will continue to add new stores primarily for densification, in line with growth and serviceability parameters,” Swiggy said in its letter to shareholders.
Increased competition in the near-term will dictate the pace of the improvement, as per the company.
“We therefore expect to reach Contribution break-even in 3-5 quarters from now,” Swiggy said in its shareholder letter on May 9.
Moneycontrol had earlier reported that the top three quick commerce firms -- Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart -- together delivered a total of 4.15-4.45 million orders across India each day in March.
Eternal-owned Blinkit delivered around 1.65-1.75 million orders each day putting it ahead of Zepto which recorded a total of 1.45-1.55 million orders everyday during the same month. Swiggy Instamart was on the third spot with a total of 1.05-1.15 million orders each day in March, the data showed.
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