Even at a time when most stakeholders say that the quick commerce industry is fragmented and each city has different market leaders, Blinkit CEO Albinder Dhindsa believes otherwise. Several analysts have so far -pointed out that Blinkit is the clear market leader in the Delhi-NCR belt while Swiggy Instamart is dominant in its home turf, Bengaluru.
And in the other cities, like Mumbai for instance, the top two players – Blinkit and Instamart – compete with Y Combinator-backed Zepto and Tata-owned BigBasket (BB Now), most industry watchers said that the dynamics keep changing and hence there was no clear winner.
“...in Bengaluru and Mumbai, for instance, we believe (that) we are the largest player in terms of gross order value (GOV) already,” Albinder Dhindsa, CEO of Blinkit said during the analyst call after announcing the company’s quarterly results. The company nearly doubled its GOV to Rs 4,027 crore in Q4FY24 from Rs 2,046 crore in Q4FY23.
Dhindsa’s comment essentially means that Blinkit has gone ahead of Swiggy Instamart which boasts being the largest player in Bengaluru, at least. To be sure, Swiggy is a private company, preparing to make a public market debut, so data around its GOV is not publicly available.
This comes at a time when the company management on May 13 said that it will focus on growing its presence in non-Delhi regions as part of its plan to expand its total dark store count to 1,000, nearly double from the existing 526 stores, by end of FY25.
The Delhi NCR belt remains Blinkit’s core market. Of the total 526 dark stores, 178 are in Delhi NCR and 62 in Bengaluru. An average of the next six cities showed that Blinkit had around 32 dark stores in each city.
Gurugram-based Blinkit is present in 26 cities at the moment. The company’s management said that its business is significantly underpenetrated in the top cities.
“Our second largest city, by GOV, Bengaluru is less than 30 percent of Delhi NCR’s GOV, our largest market. The job for us over the next few quarters is to get Bengaluru and other large cities like Mumbai and Hyderabad to the penetration of Delhi NCR, both in terms of store footprint and GOV. This alone will lead to ~4x increase in our GOV,” the company said.
A bulk of Blinkit’s GOV – around 90 percent – comes from top 8-10 cities, the company had said earlier. But even among those, Delhi is the most efficient and the goal is to scale other cities to that level.
“The Delhi NCR market has been able to grow in quick commerce because of the product market fit (PMF) and the quality of service that we've been able to provide. We feel that as we touch more customers in these cities, with our quality of service and selection, that the quick commerce market (in cities like Bengaluru and Mumbai) will also meaningfully expand to the size of the Delhi NCR market,” Dhindsa said.
The results come at a time when quick commerce as an industry has become a mainstay in the e-commerce ecosystem. The industry was written off by most about three to four years ago but has now become an indispensable one, according to analysts.
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