Gurugram-based Eternal Ltd, the parent company of food delivery aggregator Zomato, has now reported a steep year-on-year decline in quarterly net profit for the three months ended March 31. For Q3 FY25, the company posted a consolidated net profit of ₹39 crore in the fourth quarter, marking a steep drop from ₹175 crore recorded in the same quarter last fiscal year.
While revenue from operations scaled to ₹5,833 crore in Q4FY25, marking a 64% increase compared to ₹3,562 crore in the corresponding quarter in the previous year, this was overshadowed by a marked rise in expenses. Total expenditures surged by nearly 68% to ₹6,104 crore, as the company doubled down on scaling its quick commerce unit, Blinkit, and expanded its warehousing and store network.
Eternal’s B2B arm, Hyperpure, also registered a strong performance. Revenue from Hyperpure jumped 93% year-on-year to ₹1,840 crore. Goyal noted that despite increased investments across the board, the food delivery segment’s adjusted EBITDA margin improved to 5.2% of NOV in Q4FY25, up from 3.8% a year ago. Despite the net profit miss, shares of Eternal closed marginally higher at ₹232.50 ahead of the earnings announcement. Trading was paused on May 1 due to Maharashtra Day, with markets set to resume tomorrow on May 2.
Despite the quarterly profit miss, Eternal clocked a net profit of ₹527 crore for the entire year, marking an increase from ₹351 crore in the previous year. Total revenue for the year stood at ₹20,243 crore, a 67% year-on-year jump, which means that the company’s diversified bets across food delivery, quick commerce, and B2B operations are beginning to yield returns, albeit not without cost pressures. According to Eternal CFO Akshant Goyal, the combined Net Order Value (NOV) for the company’s consumer-facing businesses rose 53% year-on-year in Q4FY25 to ₹17,440 crore. Even when adjusted to exclude the recent acquisition of Paytm’s entertainment ticketing division, NOV still grew by 48% over the same period last year.
Food delivery, Eternal’s original mainstay, saw Gross Order Value increase by 16% to ₹9,778 crore in the fourth quarter. It also brought in ₹2,409 crore in revenue, marking a growth of 17%. However, the more aggressive expansion came from Blinkit, its quick commerce arm, which added a record 294 net new stores during the quarter. Still, while Blinkit is expanding aggressively, it is also consuming significant capital, contributing to underperformance in short-term profitability.
“We added 294 net new stores in Q4 FY25, making it our highest-ever net store addition in a single quarter. As a result, around 40 per cent of our overall network of 1,301 stores are underutilised stores, opened in the last two quarters alone (216 in Q3 FY25 and 294 in Q4 FY25). We also added 1 million sq ft of new warehousing space to support the store expansion. Despite that, the Contribution margin (which includes all expansion costs except capex) increased from 3.8 per cent to 3.9 per cent of NOV (net order value),” noted Albinder Dhindsa, CEO of Blinkit. Despite these short-term cost implications, the contribution margin for Blinkit has seen marginal improvement, inching up from 3.8% to 3.9% of Net Order Value.
Alongside its earnings report, Eternal announced that it is shuttering two of its less profitable initiatives—Zomato Quick and Everyday. CEO Deepinder Goyal explained the rationale behind these exits, citing unsatisfactory customer experience due to limitations in restaurant density and infrastructure. He further stated, “With Everyday, we realized that the need for homely-meals is a limited use case largely for office locations in metros. We did not see enough ROI by keeping it running at a small scale.”
