Monday, January 28, 2019

Food delivery apps now deliver six crore orders a month

On-demand Food Delivery Biz Grows Four-fold In Nine Mths

Allirajan.M@timesgroup.com

Coimbatore:28.01.2019

The Indian appetite for food delivered through mobile apps such as Swiggy and Zomato is growing at a fast clip with about 6 crore (60 million) orders being placed on these online platforms in December, a four-fold increase in just nine months. The on-demand food delivery business, which saw 15 million orders in March 2018, is scaling up rapidly. This growth has been primarily driven by Swiggy and Zomato, which are currently the largest food delivery companies in the country and together command a market share of nearly 80%. These food delivery majors alone now employ about around 2.8 lakh persons described as “delivery executives or delivery partners”. Both Swiggy and Zomato claim that they each deliver over 25 million orders per month now, sources said.

“In the last 12 months, we have seen a four-fold increase in transactions on the platform,” Swiggy said. “This exceptional growth on an already large base is indicative of the convenience that Swiggy brings to consumers lives and the vast potential of the food delivery space in India,” the company said.

“Growth in the food delivery sector has been massive in the past few months. Our order volume has grown more than five-fold,” a Zomato spokesperson said. Zomato is also rapidly expanding its footprint — from 15 cities last January to 144 cities now with the number of restaurants on the platform surging from 28,000 to more than 80,000 during the timeframe. “Our efforts are on track to expand our footprint to more than 200 cities and more than 1,00,000 restaurants within this financial year,” the Zomato spokesperson said.

“Swiggy continues to expand the food delivery category adding millions of new users every month, emerging as the go-to food delivery platform in the country with presence in 69 cities (54 cities added in the last nine months),” the company said. “In the last 12 months alone, we have more than doubled the number of restaurant partners on the platform to close to 60,000,” Swiggy said. “Swiggy’s fleet comprises of over 1.3 lakh active delivery partners including over 200 women delivery partners,” the food delivery major said.

Foodpanda and UberEats, the food delivery platforms promoted by taxi hailing apps Ola and Uber, are also scaling up fast. With an average order size of Rs 250, the GMV (gross merchandise volume) for the on-demand food delivery business is now estimated to be around ₹18,000 crore or $2.6 billion on an annualised basis. The top-10 cities in the country account for about 80% of volumes implying a monthly run rate of 48 million orders.

Food delivery companies are pumping about $30 million (about ₹210 crore) per month into their business. Swiggy delivered about 75 million orders in the fourth quarter of 2018, a whopping 279% surge on a year-on-year (y-o-y) basis, data compiled by Kotak Institutional Equities from multiple sources showed.

The annualised GMV for both Swiggy and Zomato is estimated to have touched $1 billion in 2018. “We believe this (growth) has been on account of increased capital availability and its deployment into delivery infrastructure creation, customer acquisition and rapid expansion into tier-I/II cities,” analysts at Kotak Institutional Equities said.

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