Indian food delivery giant Zomato posts June quarter loss

[BENGALURU] India's Zomato reported a loss for the quarter ended June in the first results update since its listing last month, as the pandemic hurt the food delivery company's dining-out business and it incurred higher expenses.

Together with SoftBank-backed startup Swiggy, Zomato has come to dominate an Indian delivery market that benefited from the pandemic as people stayed in.

However, Zomato said a second wave of Covid-19 infections in India significantly impacted the dining-out business and reversed most of the gains the industry made in the previous quarter.

Consolidated net loss was 3.56 billion rupees (S$64.9 million) for the first quarter, compared with a loss of 998 million rupees a year earlier, Zomato, also a restaurant aggregator said in a regulatory filing.

Its shares fell around 4 per cent on Tuesday ahead of the results, leaving them roughly flat since a stock market launch in Mumbai on July 23 that valued the company at more than US$13 billion.

Based in Gurugram, a satellite city of India's capital New Delhi, Zomato generates most of its revenue from food delivery and related fees it charges restaurants for using the company's platform.

Its gross orders hit a record for the reported quarter at 45.4 billion rupees.

REUTERS