Indian food delivery startup Zomato made its bumper debut on Indian stock exchanges on Friday, becoming the first internet unicorn in the country to go public. The startup listed its shares on the BSE at INR 115, a 51.32% premium over the issue price of INR 76, while on the NSE, it began trading at INR 116, surging by INR 40 or 52.63%.
With the mega listing, the market capitalization of Zomato has crossed INR 1 trillion (USD 13.4 billion), making it one of the top 100 listed companies. At the issue price, its market cap stood at nearly INR 650 billion (USD 8.7 billion). Reportedly, analysts were expecting Zomato shares to list at a 25-30% premium, given the strong demand for the issue. While Zomato shares hit a high of around INR 138 on both stock exchanges soon after the market opened, they eventually came down to trade at about INR 124 at 1:15 pm.
Zomato’s INR 93.7 billion (USD 1.25 billion) IPO—India’s biggest so far this year—was sold in a price band of INR 74–76 a share from July 14–16. The offer size—which entailed a fresh issue of equity shares worth INR 90 billion and an offer for sale worth INR 3.75 billion by existing investor Info Edge—was subscribed 38 times. The shares reserved for qualified institutional buyers were subscribed 54.71 times, while the quota reserved for non-institutional investors and retail investors were subscribed 34.80 times and 7.87 times, respectively.
Overall, the issue received bids for INR 2.13 trillion worth of shares, the third-highest in the history of the Indian capital market.
“This tremendous response to our IPO gives us the confidence that the world is full of investors who appreciate the magnitude of investments we are making and take a long-term view of our business,” said Deepinder Goyal, co-founder and CEO of Zomato, in a blog post.
“Today is a big day for us—a new Day Zero. But we couldn’t have gotten here without the incredible efforts of India’s entire internet ecosystem,” he added. “Jio’s prolific growth has set all of us up for unprecedented scale. Flipkart, Amazon, Ola, Uber, Paytm—have also, over the years, collectively laid the railroads that are enabling companies like ours to build the India of the future.”
Founded in 2008 by Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah, Zomato has emerged as a leading integrated platform for food ordering and delivery, restaurant booking, and review, among other things. It also supplies ingredients to restaurant partners under a separate vertical called Hyperpure. The company competes with SoftBank-backed Swiggy and recent entrant Amazon Food in India’s rapidly growing food delivery market. According to RedSeer, India’s total addressable foodservice market opportunity is expected to grow to USD 110 billion in 2025 from USD 65 billion in 2019.
Currently, Zomato is present across 525 Indian cities with almost 390,000 listed restaurants. As of March 31, 2021, its monthly active users stood at 32.1 million, while the number of delivery partners was around 170,000.
For FY 2021, Zomato’s revenue dipped almost 23% to INR 21.1 billion (USD 284.2 million) compared to FY 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the losses also narrowed to INR 8.164 billion (USD 109.5 million), down 66%. Meanwhile, between April 2020 and December 2020, Zomato’s unit economics improved with commissions and delivery charges rising compared to 2019-20, with discounts falling greatly.
“We are going to relentlessly focus on ten years out and beyond and are not going to alter our course for short-term profits at the cost of the long-term success of the company,” Goyal said.
Zomato IPO has set a benchmark for a slew of internet companies that are looking to list their shares on bourses this year. The list includes payments firms Paytm and MobiKwik, and online insurance marketplace PolicyBazaar, among others.
