Swiggy Spends Rs 778 Cr In Promotional Activities In FY19

17-Dec-2019

Bengaluru-based food delivery platform Swiggy spent Rs 778 crore on advertising and marketing in FY19 as compared to Rs 130 crore in the previous financial year.

The company has reported Rs 1,297 crore as revenues for 2018-19, a 177 percent jump compared to the last financial year, according to financial data accessed by business intelligence platform Tofler. The company has further reported a net loss of Rs 2,364 crore during the same fiscal which is a 495% increase from the previous financial year’s Rs 397 crore. Furthermore, the company’s total expenses for the fiscal were reported as Rs 3,638 crore.

Anchal Agarwal, Founder, Tofler, pointed out that Swiggy’s increase in losses is due to a multi-fold increase in advertising spends, employee expenses and delivery costs. “Clearly, Swiggy's focus right now is growing its customer base, unlike many other start-ups who are focussed on achieving sustainability and controlling costs this financial year,” said Agarwal.

In 2019, Swiggy capitalized slice-of-life advertising and hyperlocal marketing to penetrate to the smaller towns in the country. It leveraged properties like IPL and ICC World Cup in a big way to further brand visibility.

The company heavily utilized television and digital in building the brand while print and outdoor were strategically used for hyperlocal marketing. Moreover, advertising on social media and digital platforms such as Facebook, Google, email marketing and push notifications allowed the platform to hyper-target consumers. The food delivery major recently said that it will invest Rs 75 crore over two years to expand its network of cloud kitchens across the country.

Two years ago, it started Swiggy Access, an effort where Swiggy would take up real estate on a lease, refurbish it into small shared kitchens and sub-let it to restaurant chains. These are delivery-only cloud kitchens and help restaurants service areas where they do not have a presence without having to invest in the infrastructure on their own.

Swiggy spent about Rs 175 crore towards opening 1,000 cloud kitchens in over a million square feet of space across 14 cities. This, the company claimed, is the biggest network of cloud kitchens owned by a single player.

Currently, Swiggy clocks nearly 1.4 million food orders daily across India, compared to about 700,000 orders per day a year ago. The start-up has a presence in over 500 cities and towns, 140,000 restaurants on its platform and 2.1 lakh active delivery partners. It also plans to expand into another 100 cities in the next year.

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