Daybreak - Daybreak Special: Zomato’s the investor’s favourite billion dollar baby. Could Swiggy beat it post-IPO?
Episode Date: July 18, 2024With Swiggy set to go public soon, the quick commerce space in India is starting to look more and more like a wrestling match. Going to head to head against Swiggy is the only listed quick ...commerce platform in the country, its arch rival Zomato.Both companies are doing exactly the same thing but somehow Zomato managed to leave Swiggy far behind. Swiggy’s market share has dropped considerably in the last few years both in quick commerce and food delivery. Now, not only is Zomato listed, its share prices have been going through the roof and Blinkit has become the jewel in its crown. So does Swiggy, the OG of food delivery in India, stand a chance? To find out, hosts Snigdha and Rahel invite The Ken's Deputy Editor Seetharaman G to the studio.Tune in.P.S. – Check out the first episode of the latest addition to our podcast slate, Two by Two, where the speakers discuss the rivalry between Flipkart and Phonepe, on Spotify, Apple or YouTube!Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar.
If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies,
and my contrarian takes on most topics.
And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too.
It's for a special announcement.
For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor,
have been working on an ambitious new podcast.
It's called Intermission.
We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies.
Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture,
how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today.
To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people.
And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix.
Yes, you heard that right.
Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production.
Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording.
Intermission launches on March 23rd.
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episode, please follow intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcast or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel.
You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am.
With that, back to your episode.
Welcome to the 2024 Quick Commerce Championship.
Entering the ring first is the defending champion with a market cap of more than
two trillion rupees.
Already an investor's favorite, Zomato from Gurgao.
And on the other side, here to win back the trophy, the OG QuickCommerce giant,
a trailblazer in the grocery delivery space and soon to hit the stock market, Swiggy!
Okay, so I'm sure you figured out by now that neither Snigda nor I know very much about wrestling.
But with Swiggy said to go public soon, the QuickCommerce space in India is starting to look more and more like a wrestling match.
Hence the slightly indulgent introduction to this episode.
Now, going head-to-head against Swiggy
is the only listed quick commerce platform in the country.
It's arch rival Zomato.
And like every great wrestler,
Swiggy has the ultimate backstory.
It started out as a trailblazer in the food tech space.
In fact, it was the one that actually got the ball rolling
both in food delivery and in grocery delivery.
Zomato, meanwhile, was still mostly about restaurant reviews back then.
It was only in 2015 when Swiggy started seeing massive success that Zomato launched food delivery.
And ever since, you could say Zomato has been mirroring Swigy.
So Swigy started Instamart, Zomato acquired growers and turned it into Blinket.
Basically, both companies are doing exactly the same thing.
But somehow Zomato managed to leave Swiggy far behind.
Swiggy's market share has dropped considerably in the last few years, both in quick commerce and food delivery.
Now, not only is Zomato listed, its share prices have been going through the roof, and Blinket has become the jewel in its crown.
And to add to Swiggy's wars, the market is not as empathetic as it was three years ago when Zumato went public.
Back then, investors took a little more kindly to companies that had not shown profitability.
That is not the case anymore.
So why then is Swiggy going public now?
And by any chance, could Zumato's success on the borses actually work in Swiggy's favour or not?
To find out and to give us a ringside view of what wouldn't be a stretch to call a landmark moment in India's booming pick-commerce space,
we have the Ken's deputy editor, Sita Raman.
Hello and welcome to another special episode of Daybreak.
I'm Sikda and I'm Rahil and every week.
week, we come together to talk about something in business and tech that interests the both of us.
And it won't just be us. Depending on what we're talking about, we will bring a bunch of
really interesting people onto the podcast. Today is Friday, the 19th of July.
Between three years ago when Zomato went public and now, can you tell us what's changed for both
companies, for Swiggy and for Zomato? I think a lot has changed. One, I think the businesses have
headed in different in that different directions you know and how investors and consumers perceive
them that is also changed dramatically and that is obviously linked to how they have fed you know
when zumato went public you know the you know it listed at a premium and then you know the
stock plunged below 50 bucks a share and then it bounced below 50 bucks a share and then it bounced
back quite spectacularly.
This is all thanks to
the unexpected
and glorious rise of Blinket,
which I think,
you know, it's surprising
because when Zomato acquired Blinket,
not too many people were actually happy with it.
Blinket was almost dead then.
Zumato threw the company a lifeline,
you know, I think
gave it some cash
and then decided to acquire it.
Swiggy, I mean, we all know
Swiggy was the first, I mean, among the two, was the first to launch food delivery.
And Zumato was basically a restaurant discovery platform.
It's older than Swiggy, but it's after Swiggy's entry into the space that Zomato also decided to, you know, sort of get in.
And Swiggy for a long time was the larger of the two.
I think pre-pandemic Swiggy's market share in food delivery was roughly about 55%.
But now it's Zomato, which has 55%.
Right?
And Instamart had a massive headstart on Blinket in grocery, right?
But Blinket has become the largest, right?
So what's so that are even in Swiggy's backyard, which is Bangalore,
Blinket is larger than Instamate.
Yeah, I remember even Dipinder Goel himself had announced a couple of months ago, right,
that blinket would be bigger than Zumato.
And talking about founders, Sita, can you tell us a little bit about these two founders,
Srihashya Banjati from Swiggy and Dipinder Goel from Zamato?
How does their public image make a difference to how we perceive these companies?
Yeah, I think, you know, Dipinder is a is a very, very public.
founder. You know, he's on Twitter all the time. Now he has a podcast as well, I think, where he talks to
restaurant owners and chefs, I think, right? So the way he communicates with investors and, you know,
Zomato users, I think that's also helped Zomato in the past three, four years. It's hard
to quantify. It's almost impossible to quantify. But it certainly helped. Right. And this is a
company that's always done things differently. Right. Even when you look back at, you know,
when Zomato went public, it said it wouldn't do quarterly analyst calls. Yeah. A lot of analysts were
actually quite angry about it because Zomato essentially said that it was just going to put out
this note with questions that they thought people might want to ask them like FAQs. Yeah. I think
we'll ask the questions and we'll answer them ourselves, right?
Which is very, very unusual, okay?
All major, almost all major listed companies do quarterly earnings calls, okay?
Which is where analysts sort of try and sort of understand the nitty-grity of the company.
Zomato didn't want to do that, which was a problem because Zomato was the first, you know,
sort of tech startup to go public, right, in 2021.
And very few public market investors and analysts actually understood the internet economy.
So, I mean, I've written a few pieces arguing how, if anything, Zomato should have, you know, engaged more, not less than a typical listed company, right?
But they fix that.
You know, now they do hold quarterly calls, right?
And in addition to that, you know, Depender talking about, say, a new, you know, sort of feature.
that they've launched,
responding to consumers on Twitter,
that certainly helped.
And Srihasha, you know,
is nowhere near as sort of available
on social media, right?
So that sort of, I mean,
you've seen a lot of, you know,
customer complaints on social, right?
I'm not saying it's absolutely,
it's necessary for a founder
to address those questions,
but in this case, you have two founders,
you know,
one is very public, the other is anything but.
Yeah, and he's always responding to so many of these complaints like the Pinders.
So that makes it all the more stark that, you know, the other founders not that, like, engaging at that level.
I don't think it's a, it's a strategy at all.
I think it's a function maybe of the person Sri Hasha is, you know.
Maybe he's not comfortable responding to, you know, 30, you know, consumers every day, right?
But you have to remember, I mean, we're talking about how this has helped Zomato only because
Zomato's numbers look very good, right?
I mean, if Zomato wasn't growing, if the stock wasn't doing well, we would be, you know,
maybe slamming Dipinder for doing all that when his company was not doing well, right?
So, I mean, which is why, I mean, I'm not saying it's, I think it's just, I mean, the people that they are.
and here it certainly helped, I think.
In Zomato's case, what's also important is, you know,
Zomato went public, then came Policy Bazaar, then NICA, then PETM.
And a lot of individual investors who had never, ever invested in stocks directly, you know,
you know, applied for Zomato shares in the IPO, right?
And that was a function of the rise in the number of individual investors trading in stocks, right?
And until then, people didn't really bother, but then they realized here's a company that I use every other day that's going public now.
So why don't I get a piece of that?
I do like the company, right?
I know all my friends are using it.
Even if I don't understand the fundamentals of a stock, I know that a lot of people use this company.
Right.
Yeah, and exactly.
That's what happened with Nica as well, right?
When you have a solid story, you're immediately, yeah, you want to kind of buy into that.
Right.
So, Sita, a little while ago, you spoke about investor perception.
I'm interested to know how differently investors are likely to look at Swiggy now than they looked at Zovato three years ago, right?
Especially when it comes to things like profitability.
We know that Swiggy isn't there yet.
Do you think that matters to investors this time around?
You have to remember.
that Indian public market investors
are very, very particular about profitability.
Okay.
You know, in the U.S., you've had,
you know, you had Amazon going public in the mid-90s,
and it, you know, it was lossmaking for, I think, 15 years, right?
It kept telling investors, we're going to lose money
for another five years, but we're going to focus on growth, right?
And investors sort of bought that story, right?
Whereas here, we're all about profitability, right?
Even how you value a company is actually based on the profits that a company makes.
So when Zomato and Nica and all went public, I'm sure it must have been very difficult for Zomato's investment bankers to actually convince a lot of people that they should invest in Zomato, even if Zomato wasn't profitable, right?
So the sort of the pitch would have been, don't worry, we're not profitable, right?
now, but we're going to be in, you know, in, in, in, in a year. Right. Without that, I don't think anyone
would have, you know, invested. So they've seen that these companies were not making money
when they went public, but over time they did. Right. But the problem here is, you know,
if Swiggy decides to list, you know, before, you know, before turning a profit, the problem is, you know,
you know, investors will say
you two are in the same
businesses, you know, food delivery,
you know, restaurant
booking, restaurant discovery
and booking and quick commerce.
Right. And Zomato
actually turned a profit, what, three or four quarters
ago, it was not a lot, right?
Just single digits. So
why are you four or five
quarters behind Zomato?
But one investor
did tell me that it shouldn't be
a deal breaker as long as
Swiggy says, okay, listen, just three quarters.
Look at our trajectory.
We will be in the black very soon.
So, Sita, apart from, you know, the focus on profitability not existing three years ago for Zumato,
what were the other advantages that existed in the market that Zomato took advantage of?
See, it was just, we were just coming out of the first wave, I guess.
I think Zomato went public in June 21.
And there was still a lot of hype around, you know, food delivery, e-commerce, right?
Quick-commerce was not really a thing.
You know, Zepto had just sort of launched.
So people thought, okay, you know, a lot of people thought it would sustain, right?
It hasn't.
Not in e-commerce, not in food delivery.
And so, and people were finally sort of excited, I guess.
like I said, a lot of individual investors that they could, you know, buy a piece of a company that they use day in and day out.
Right.
So I think that certainly helped.
And like I'll say with Nica as well, right?
But at that point, NICA seemed to be the clear winner.
Okay.
Zomato listed at a premium, but Nica listed at an even bigger premium.
Okay.
and it seemed to be a more acceptable business.
It's profitable.
There's a huge market.
There is no real competitor.
So it was a lot easier for investors to digest.
But then ever since, you know, I think Nike listed,
things have not really gone according to plan for the company.
we've written about it, right?
So now you look at the difference in valuation, you know,
between Zomato and Mika.
There's a massive gulf.
Correct.
So what do you think it was about Zomato that kind of set it apart in that sense?
Like what worked so well for Zomato?
I mean, the fact that it was operating in a, you know, in a doopoly market.
Okay?
So there was no question of another player coming in, right?
If you remember, a decade ago, there were about six, seven players.
There was Food Panda.
There was Ola.
There was Uber Eats.
Then some exited.
Some were acquired.
Then it became very clear.
Amazon also, I think, had a pilot in Bangalore.
I don't think, I mean, I think it was sort of, it was dead on arrival.
So it became very clear that there are only going to be two players in this market.
It's so funny that you said food panda, because for a second, I was like, wait, what?
that was a thing too.
It's like completely planned.
Yeah.
So I think that is something that,
so even if I know that you're not,
you're bleeding right now,
I know that you will eventually make money
because customers have just these two companies
to turn to whenever they want all the food, right?
That's, that's, I mean,
you don't come across too many industries
where there are just two companies, right?
But to, in hindsight, I mean,
I mean, now we're not even talking about food delivery.
No one talks about food delivery when they talk about Zuma.
Yeah.
Which is, which is strange.
I'm excited to be back in the studio.
Yeah, I'm excited too, but actually kind of nervous.
Okay, fine, let's do it.
Hi, I'm Rohind Dharma Kumar and I'm here with my colleague and co-host, Praveen Gopal Krishna.
Hello, hello, hello.
And we're the co-hosts of a brand-new weekly business podcast from the Ken called
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There are several stories like this
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All right.
Now back to Snigda and Rahil.
What is it that Swiggy seems to be getting so wrong, you know?
Because right now, yes, in comparison to Zomato and its exponential rise,
it is looking like the underdog,
but then again,
the doopoly still exists,
right?
At least in the food delivery side,
it does.
So, yeah,
what is Swiggy not getting right?
Yeah, so like I said,
food delivery sort of dominated
the conversation
when Zumato listed.
But no one
really cares for it now.
Not because it's not important.
It's just that it's not the kind of business
that will grow at 30, 40%, right?
And investors want high growth businesses, right?
So, you know, they already know that there are only two players in food delivery
and, you know, and the market will grow at 10%, 12%, whatever, right?
So the conversation has shifted to quick commerce.
And this you can see in the kind of questions analysts ask Zomato every quarter,
you know, for every three or four questions on, blink,
there is one on food delivery.
Right?
And Instamart is where I think
Swiggy could have done a lot more.
I'll just give you an example.
Instamart was launched before Zepto.
Months, I think, in 2020.
And Zepto was in 2021.
And Blinket was then grofers.
It was floundering.
You know, it had gone through multiple pivots.
It was not really a serious player.
So Instamart said, listen, you know, we're going to do, it's going to be, you know, 20, 30 minute delivery, right?
Then came Zepto and said 10 minutes.
Well, Instamart said, no, you know, that's nonsense.
We're still going to do 30 minutes, right?
At that point, it seemed to me that Instamart was the smartest one in the room because it sort of, I thought, everyone thought that 10 minute delivery was a fad, right?
and obviously people didn't want to wait until, you know, the following day for their delivery,
but they surely didn't want it in 10 minutes, right?
So I thought Instamard was being really smart by sticking to its 30 minute, 20, 30, 45 minute promise, right?
It stayed on that path, then came Blinket and took 10 minute delivery mainstream, right?
Then I think it was a lot of catching up to do for Instamart.
Right. So basically, despite being first to the quick commerce game, somewhere along the way Swiggy seems to have fallen behind it.
You know, this actually reminds me of this edition of NutGraf from quite recently.
For our listeners who aren't familiar with NutGraph, it's the Ken's most popular newsletter.
It's written by Praveen Gopal Krishna, excuse me, the Ken's C-O.
So PGK wrote about how technically in many ways Swiggy has certain structural advantages that Zomachian.
doesn't.
And what he was referring to with that is that Swiggy, unlike Zomato, offers both food delivery
and grocery delivery on the same app.
Yeah.
Which in many ways should technically work out well for Swiggy, right?
Because it does allow for certain efficiencies, especially since both groceries and food
deliveries share the same delivery fleet.
So it should help Swiggy create certain optimizations.
Yeah, but it's clearly not working, right?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, maybe Swiggy hoped.
it would, but it isn't.
And for a lot of people actually going to the app
and having to pick between food delivery, Instamat,
Swiggy Mini, dine out there.
So many things, it's just too much stuff in one place.
So, yeah, you're right.
It is easier to find blankets separately
or Zomato separately on your phone.
Anyway, talking about how these apps are designed,
can we talk a little bit about innovation at Swiggy Sita?
Because we also did an episode of this on daybreak
and also there was a story on the ken about this,
about how Swiggy has always been known for its innovation.
And now, because of the fact that it's chasing profitability,
and of course that is very important,
innovation has kind of taken a backseat, right?
There's a lot of pressure on employees,
like lots of things have shut down like Swiggy Meets, Swiggy Daily,
all of handpicked is also gone.
So what does this mean for Swiggy's IPO?
Like, my question is, how will investors be looking at all of this, you know?
Does it even matter to them?
Innovation in a company, I mean.
Does it affect investors in any way?
I've never heard anyone talk about innovation, right?
On earnings calls.
It doesn't honestly matter to them if you have 10 projects, you know, going at the same time,
as long as you're not spending $300 million on them.
they don't care what i mean you can have as many projects as you want right but how are your top
three four verticals doing that's what matters right uh and i mean there is this sort of uh there
will be questions around do you folks really want to sort of waste your resources on so many
tiny things right uh wouldn't all these people be put i mean sort of would you not want to put them
to better use in your food delivery or your quick commerce vertical,
right?
Beyond that, I don't think they care.
I think Zomato got into logistics.
I think they, you know, so I mean, it's very small.
As long as, you know, it's not, it doesn't cost a lot of money.
You know, they don't really care.
I want to flip that argument a bit.
And tell me if this is a possibility at all, Sita, you know, Zomato's been doing really, really well.
could that potentially end up working in Swiggy's favor?
Because sure, Swiggy isn't doing as well right now.
But at least thanks to Zomato, investors know that this is a business model that works, right?
These two companies are doing exactly the same thing at the end of the day.
Yeah, certainly.
Swiggy doesn't have to spend hours explaining the economics of food delivery and quick commerce, right?
Swiggy just needs to say, hey, listen, you know, these are our numbers.
and in three or four months,
we will reach this particular point, right?
So all investors need to do is go and see what, say,
Blinkets Journey was.
And that's enough, right?
They don't have to educate investors about food delivery or quick commerce.
But then you also get assessed every quarter.
relative to Zomato, right?
So you may be doing well.
You may be growing at 20%.
But then they'll say, listen,
Zomato is growing at 35%.
What gives?
So Zomato is that Sharmaji's
beta.
Absolutely.
The syndrome is going to happen
in time for Svigy.
I couldn't have phrased it better.
So, Sita, apart from this,
are there any other ways in which
investors benefit when two companies
mirror each other?
It helps a lot because you have these two companies which are almost identical to each other.
Food delivery, restaurant discovery, quick commerce, right?
Zomato has HyperPure, which is basically supplying, you know,
staples and fruit and vegetables to restaurants.
That's a business that Spiggy doesn't have.
And Spiggy has one or two things which Zomato doesn't have, right?
But overall, I mean, broadly speaking, these are identical.
companies.
So, and you don't get too many such companies in the listed space, you know, especially
if you take FMCG companies, you have a company which is heavy on foods, right, almost
entirely foods, like data consumer, right?
Then you have a company which is big on, say, personal care, which is like Marico, right?
Then you have a company which is a mix of personal care, home care foods, which is a
Hindustan Unilever, right?
So it becomes a bit hard, you know, to compare these companies.
Here, that's not a problem at all, right?
So, you know, so it becomes much, much easier to assess these companies, compare them.
So one's valuation will obviously have an impact on the others.
Got it, got it.
So is this what you mean when you say, like, the public market is relative, or that's a completely
Absolutely. No, no, absolutely. So, yeah. So I, you know, it's, it's way more relative than private markets.
You know, when, say, say, when Zomato and Swiggy were, were unlisted, I'm sure anyone who wanted to invest in, any venture capitalist that wanted to invest in,
Swiggy would obviously look at Zomato's last fundraise and what their valuation was. And then decide.
what kind of value to assign Swiggy.
But you never had the kind of numbers,
you know, granular numbers that you have for a listed company.
Right.
So it's very, very relative and it's every three months, right?
So it's, you know, so it has to be relative.
All right.
So, Sita, let's imagine a future, you know,
when Swiggy has gone for its IPO.
And let's assume that Zomato shares are still.
doing as well as they are right now.
How will that affect Swiggy's
initial offer price? Will
Swiggy have to offer
extra discount on it because
Zomato is doing so well?
See, as long as the
bull run continues, I think
there will be
takers for all kinds of
companies. Okay.
So,
no one needs to worry about
their sort of, you know,
not
having enough investors, right?
subscribe to their issue.
The point is whether or not, I mean, it's very clear at this point it's going to be at a
discount to Zumato.
What I mean by that is, you know, analysts use different metrics to value companies, right?
So if Zomato is sort of valued at, say, you know, 10x on a particular metric, then
Zomato will have to price, you know, will have to offer the shares at maybe like 7x or
8x, right?
simply because
I don't think Instamart
has been able to match Blinket's growth.
Right?
So, you know,
a discount to Zomato's price,
I think, is a given at this point.
Okay, so Sita, then the obvious next question is why now, right?
Why did Swiggy not choose to maybe wait another year,
wait a while before it got like all its businesses in order?
You know, where profitability, it was closer to profitability.
Why do you think it chose to, you know,
why is it doing all of this?
now.
Can I just like add my question to this?
Why not earlier also, right?
Like when things were still looking good and profitability was not such a, you know,
such an important thing for investors.
Like, could have done it earlier also.
And when Swiggy was still number one back in.
There was a point.
There was doing much better.
Yeah.
I mean, I wish I had the answer to this.
I think it's a, it's a function of what not just Viggy wants,
but also what its investors are comfortable with.
Right.
maybe Zomato's investors thought
2021 was the right time for the company to go public
and Swiggy's investors felt there was no need for the company
to go public because you have to understand
there is a lot of scrutiny.
Okay, do you really want to take questions every three months?
Do you really want to
notify the stock exchanges about every little rumor that comes out?
There is a lot of pressure.
So that's not, it's not, being listed is not for the paint of art.
So, so, so, so, so would you really want to do it?
So maybe Swiggy thought, uh, 24 was the right time to do it.
And, uh, yeah, I mean, I don't know if they can, what if they wait and the tight turns in the market, right?
And no one is interested in IPOs, right?
So then they'll have to think about an even bigger discount.
Sita, before you leave, we have this thing where we ask our guests for a recommendation, whether it's a movie, a book, even a song, actually.
Anything that you have to recommend.
Yeah, actually, I read, you know, Salman Roushti's most recent memoir, Nice.
Oh, yeah, the one about the attack.
Yeah, it's, yeah, I mean, I read that right after his first memoir, Joseph Anton.
So it's quite something, you know.
And then I decided to reread some of his earlier work.
So I'm currently on Harun and the Sea of Stories.
Oh, that's one of my favorites.
Yeah, beautiful.
I mean, Knife is absolutely, yeah.
It's a very short book, unlike Joseph Anton, but, you know, it's worth it.
And I love the cover.
It's like both ways, nah?
Yeah, the cover is brilliant.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Is there a work?
for it for those kind of books that you can flip and read like you know either way yeah no is it
like that I don't think I mean I actually read it on the Kind of I don't know okay okay anyway thank you so much
sita thank you guys your time daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first
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