Share price of food delivery platform Zomato tumbled over 2 percent on January 3, a day after the company said its co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Gunjan Patidar has quit. This is the latest in a series of top-level exits.
At 11:30 am, the stock was quoting at Rs 58.90 apiece on the National Stock Exchange, down by 2.3 percent. The scrip is down 10 percent in the last one month and has lost 58 percent in one year. It is significantly below its issue price of Rs 76.
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Patidar was one of the first few employees of Zomato and built the core tech systems for the company. Over the last ten-plus years, he also built a tech leadership team, Zomato said in a stock exchange filing.
In a stock exchange filing, Zomato said that Patidar was not a key managerial personnel (KMP).
According to his LinkedIn profile, Patidar was one of Zomato's earliest employees, having worked in the company for 14 years. He also shares his alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, with Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal.
Patidar's exit comes weeks after co-founder Mohit Gupta quit the company. Zomato's new initiatives head and former food delivery chief Rahul Ganjoo and Siddharth Jhawar, the head of its Intercity Legends service, also quit. Ganjoo resigned after a five-year stint in November 2022. Jhawar also exited in November to run adtech unicorn Moloco's India operations.
He's the fourth co-founder to exit the company, following Pankaj Chaddhah, Gaurav Gupta and Mohit Gupta. Chaddah exited in 2018 and Gaurav Gupta in 2021.
Despite the series of resignations, foreign brokerage firm Jefferies sees no signs of trouble in management. "In our interactions, we find Deepinder in control of the business and hence do not see a big disruption or a major change in strategy,” said Vivek Maheshwari, equity analyst at Jefferies.
In Q2FY23, Zomato’s net loss was Rs 250.8 crore against Rs 434.9 crore registered in the same quarter the previous year. The company's revenue from operations zoomed 62.20 percent to Rs 1,661.3 crore.
The growth of Zomato's food delivery business has slowed as it has grown in size. Its quarterly sales in Q2FY23 grew 22 percent year-on-year to Rs 6,631 crore from Rs 5,410 crore in Q2FY22.
In the quarter ending September 30, 2022, Zomato said that for the food delivery business, the gross order value (GOV) growth was 3 percent quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) and 23 percent year-on-year (YoY). This, it said, was driven by growth in both order volumes and average order value.
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