Swiggy’s food delivery revenue grew 56% from April to Sept, Prosus says

Prosus, the Dutch-listed arm of Naspers, said in a blog post that the performance of its global food businesses, which include Bengaluru-based Swiggy, remained strong on the back of complementary adjacencies such as convenience and grocery delivery. According to the post, Swiggy’s grocery revenues grew 75% over the six months to September 30.

Prosus has backed some of the largest consumer internet companies globally. Its bets in India include PayU (which acquired BillDesk earlier this year), Meesho and Flipkart. Its stake in Swiggy rose to 36.3% after it infused an additional $274 million in the company this year.

In
an interview with ET in July, Swiggy’s Sriharsha Majety had said that as much as 25% of the company’s revenue was coming from non-food delivery businesses and that the company was going to invest heavily in non-food verticals. Offering discounts has been a key customer acquisition route for both Swiggy and Zomato.

ET also reported on September 28 that Swiggy was
in talks to close another financing round at a $10-billion valuation, double that of its previous round, led by US asset manager Invesco, in what is a likely re-rating exercise stoked by Zomato’s rising market cap.

In an interview in July, Sumer Juneja, partner, SoftBank Investment Advisers, said that Swiggy’s express grocery delivery service Instamart was the largest category after food delivery across cities active for more than six to nine months. He also said Instamart had better unit economics than Swiggy’s food delivery business had the same scale.

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ET reported last week that Swiggy’s rival Zomato plans to double down on its grocery bet in e-grocer Grofers and
may invest another $500 million in it to push its quick commerce play, a direct competitor to Instamart.

Bob van Dijk, group CEO, Prosus and Naspers, wrote in the post, “In the first half of the year, our internet businesses delivered solid growth compounding a strong performance for the same period last year. Our progress is reflected in the increasing value attributed to our ecommerce portfolio and, to capture the significant opportunity ahead, we stepped up investment in our core segments of food delivery, edtech, payments and fintech, and classifieds.”

“The businesses we’ve backed have tremendous upside from even where we are investing. BillDesk is a great example of that. The same works for companies like Meesho, Swiggy, Urban Company, Elastic Run, PharmEasy, and others. There is significant money that is being paid, but the upside is tremendous, in our view,” Dijk had
said in an interview with ET in September, adding that India can deliver hefty returns for late-stage investors too.

Prosus-backed PayU, a fintech company that serves online merchants, acquired BillDesk for $4.7 billion in September. The company said that PayU’s total payment volume (TPV) grew by 48% to $35.3 billion and its revenue grew 44% to $359 million, “driven largely by a strong payments performance in our India business and resumed activity in credit”. TPV in India grew 70% to $18.9 billion and revenue increased 55% to $133 million.