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Everything You Need To Know About The Zomato IPO

Everyone wants a piece of the Zomato IPO. So much so, in fact, that the Indian food-delivery startup was nearly 36x oversubscribed by anchor investors, according to Bloomberg. Those investors likely foresee strong public demand for shares of Zomato after its July 14 trading debut.
Zomato kicked off IPO proceedings on April 28, when it submitted paperwork to the Securities and Exchange Board of India. The company hopes to raise $1.3 billion through the IPO process, which could help it fend off competition from its top rival, Swiggy, as well as a small but menacing delivery challenger in Amazon. Most recently, Zomato garnered a $5.4 billion valuation following a $250 million funding round disclosed in February.
On paper, Zomato has a lot going for it: Demand for food delivery has soared during the pandemic, the company operates in a nation home to over 1.3 billion people and its backers include Ant Group and Sequoia. But turning a sustainable profit in the food delivery space is notoriously difficult, and Zomato is no exception. It posted a net loss of $320 million for the year ended March 31, 2020; this was more than double the net loss reported for the year prior, and more than 22x the loss from two years prior. With several deep-pocketed competitors vying for a larger share of India's food delivery market, Zomato faces a long and treacherous road toward profitability.
Zomato employs the standard food delivery business model. The company pays gig workers to deliver meal orders fulfilled by various restaurants. Zomato then generates revenue by charging fees associated with every order. In December 2020, Zomato had nearly 162,000 active delivery drivers and 350,000 active restaurant listings on its platform. The company also generates revenue through its premium subscription business: For the Indian market at the end of 2020, Zomato had 1.4 million premium customer subscribers and 25,350 Pro Restaurant Partners.
Zomato operates food delivery services across 23 markets, but most of its revenue comes from India. In the IPO filing, Zomato writes: "We have taken a conscious strategic call to focus only on the Indian market going forward … we believe a focused Zomato will enhance the value for all our stakeholders."
Affirming its commitment to growth in India, Zomato agreed to give Uber a 10% equity stake in exchange for its entire food delivery business in India. The two companies reached a deal in January 2020. Over the course of that year, Zomato managed to more than double its monthly transacting users to reach 10.7 million people.
Zomato looks like a typical food delivery behemoth: impressive revenue growth accompanied by net losses of a similar magnitude.
The company posted $368 million in revenue for the year ended March 31, 2020. Most (95%) of this revenue came directly from operations. For that period, revenue doubled compared to the year prior and grew over fivefold from the revenue recorded two years prior.
Between 2018 and 2020, Zomato's expenses grew at an even faster rate than revenue, contributing to the bleak profitability outlook. For the year ending March 31, 2018, Zomato posted revenue of $65 million with $80 million total expenses. For the same period in 2020, revenue grew to $368 million, but total expenses exploded to reach $672 million.
The outlook for the food delivery business is so bleak that it feels more appropriate to ask: How could this ever go right (i.e., become profitable)?
Three themes stand out from Zomato's risk section: profitability, competition and public perception.
Zomato elaborates on the significant barriers standing in the way of profitability:
What makes the food delivery industry so unprofitable? The revenue opportunity is attractive, but the low barriers to competition make it such that there is always significant pressure on margins.
Finally, public perception is particularly volatile in India, where WhatsApp acts as a public outrage generator.
Zomato disclosed the following ownership stakes, as they stood pre-IPO:
Update: This story was updated on July 13, 2021, to include the date for its trading debut; and on July 14, 2021, to include information on the subscription period.
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