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Indian food delivery company Swiggy’s stock fell below both its IPO price and its last private valuation as mounting losses and a wavering market position in quick commerce pressured its margins in the last quarter.
The food delivery company’s stock fell as low as ₹374.80 ($4.29) on Thursday below its November IPO price of ₹390, squeezing its market cap to $9.75 billion, before recovering slightly to around the IPO price level. The stock plummeted after Swiggy posted quarterly results this week, revealing that its quick-commerce business Instamart lost market share.
The market share declines came despite efforts to ramp up store expansion and marketing spending in an attempt to keep pace with a fast-growing number of rivals.
The stock market’s reaction marks a change in sentiment towards Swiggy, which posted the world’s largest tech IPO last year and earned a private valuation of $10.7 billion in early 2022. The share price decline is also notable compared to the stock’s mid-December peak of ₹617.
Meanwhile, competitor Zomato’s quick-commerce unit Blinkit recorded quarterly gross order value of ₹78 billion ($890 million), nearly double Instamart’s ₹39.1 billion ($446 million). On an annualized basis, Instamart’s gross order value of $1.8 billion significantly trailed both Blinkit’s order value of $3.7 billion and competitor Zepto’s $3 billion.
Bank of America analysts said they expect the competition among quick-commerce firms to continue through mid-2025. Swiggy added 96 dark stores in the quarter for a total of 705 locations across the country, but was outpaced by Blinkit’s addition of 216 stores for a total of 1,007. Zepto has quietly built up its network to over 950 stores, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
What makes the current dynamic particularly challenging is that the top companies have massive war chests. All of the major quick-commerce platforms have strong financial backing, giving them the ability to sustain prolonged periods of high marketing spend and expansion costs.
Still, Swiggy’s cash reserves of ₹82 billion ($936 million) are less than half of Zomato’s ₹190 billion ($2.2 billion), though Swiggy did manage to increase its average order value in quick commerce by 7% to ₹534 ($6.10) compared to the previous quarter.
Zepto raised $1.35 billion last year, much of which it has yet to deploy.
Manish Singh is a senior reporter at TechCrunch, covering India’s startup scene and venture capital investments. He also reports on global tech firms’ India play. Before joining TechCrunch in 2019, Singh wrote for about a dozen publications, including CNBC and VentureBeat. He graduated in Computer Science and Engineering in 2015. He is reachable on manish(at)techcrunch(dot)com.
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