Deepinder Goyal, founder and CEO of Zomato, has joined the coveted "billionaire's club", as the stock of his food-tech company touches its lifetime high. Zomato today saw its shares hitting a 52-week high and its market cap crossing ₹2 lakh crore for the first time after the company reportedly hiked platform fees to ₹6 per order. Before this, Zomato had raised its platform fee by 25% to ₹5 per order in April 2024, and suspended its inter-city food delivery service, ‘Intercity Legends’.
The company introduced a platform fee of ₹2 in August 2023 to improve its profit margins. This fee was subsequently raised to ₹3 in October and then to ₹4 before the latest increase on January 1. There had even spiked prices temporarily to ₹9 on December 31, 2023, but dropped later.
The price change impacts customers residing in major metropolitan areas such as Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Lucknow. The platform fee, an additional cost per order, is distinct from the delivery fee.
Swiggy, Zomato's primary rival, has also reportedly raised the platform fee to ₹6 on food orders.
Zomato shares, meanwhile, opened a gap up and hit the day's high at ₹232 -- up 4% from Friday's closing price -- which is also its one-year high, on the BSE.
Goyal owns 36.95 crore shares of Zomato, which is around around 4.24% holding. As per today's share price, his net worth has risen to more than ₹8,424 crore, making him a billionaire at the age of 41.
At the current share price of ₹227.45, Zomato's m-cap stands at ₹2,00,769.73 crore. The Zomato shares have seen an 8.63% rally in the past week. The share price has more than doubled in the past year at 184.30%, with its calendar year-return at 83.09%. The scrip has surged 70.88% and 20.80% in the past six months and one month, respectively.
The Gurgaon-based food delivery company had reported a net profit of ₹175 crore for the quarter ended March 31, 2024, compared with ₹188-crore loss in the same quarter a year ago. Its revenue rose 73% year-on-year to ₹3,562 crore for the fourth quarter as against ₹2,056 crore in Q4 FY23. On a sequential basis, profit rose 27% from ₹138 crore posted in the December quarter while revenue increased 8.3%. For the full financial year 2023-24, Zomato logged a profit of ₹351 crore from a loss of ₹971 crore in FY23.
The top-line growth was driven by robust performance by food delivery service and quick commerce platform Blinkit.
Blinkit CEO Albinder Dhindsa says one of the key vectors for growth for Blinkit was store expansion. "In Q4FY24, we added 75 net new stores taking our total store count to 526. In the current quarter (Q1FY25), we expect to add another 100 stores. At this point, we are aiming to get to 1,000 stores by the end of FY25,” he said after Q4 results.
Meanwhile, reacting to the development, Deepak Shenoy, founder, CEO, Capital Mind, says he has massively reduced ordering from Swiggy/Zomato. "Massively reduced ordering from Swiggy/Zomato, down to just once maybe on a weekend, like today and noticed their "platform" charge is now Rs. 6. Happy that I weaned myself off the daily ordering. They also take 30% from restaurants, btw," he wrote on X. Today, he said he moved for health reasons. "Happy to learn, from media sources, that I have reduced this ordering because of a move of platform fee from Rs. 5 to Rs. 6. Yes, that's what caused it :) I moved for health reasons, to a much more costly alternative, but it's way way healthier."
