Swiggy Q1 revenue surges 54% but loss nearly doubles to Rs 1,197 crore on Instamart burn

Food and grocery delivery company Swiggy on Thursday reported another steep quarterly loss and the second consecutive three-month period of cash burn of over Rs 1,000 crore.

The loss comes amid heightened competition in the quick commerce arena, even as the company slowed down dark store expansion.

For the April-June period, Swiggy’s net loss doubled year-on-year to Rs 1,197 crore, while it spent Rs 1,053 crore of cash on a net basis, after accounting for operating, investing, and financing activities. The Bengaluru-based company’s operating revenue for the quarter increased 54% to Rs 4,961 crore.

Swiggy also said that it is looking to offload its 12% stake in urban mobility startup Rapido, which has announced plans to enter the food delivery segment. Swiggy had invested around Rs 1,050 crore in the bike-taxi platform in 2022, and its stake is currently worth Rs 1,400-1,500 crore, as per Rapido’s valuation in its last funding round.

“When we got into Rapido, it was a mobility player doing really well and we wanted to partner with them on that journey. We’ve even had conversations with them on a partnership in food delivery but unfortunately that didn’t materialise and they’ve decided to get into the business themselves. That’s just a wedge…and we’re planning to go separate ways on this,” said Sriharsha Majety, Swiggy’s group CEO.

In a conversation with ET, the company’s CFO, Rahul Bothra, said that while Swiggy hasn’t finalised a timeline to sell its stake in Rapido, it has received inbound interest from multiple buyers. “We don’t want to be in a situation where we continue to own a significant minority stake in a competitor and therefore the choice is being made. At the same time, I think we want to extract the right value for the investment,” he said.

Also Read: Rapido eyeing food delivery service Ownly’s pilot in Bengaluru by next week

During the three-month period that ended on June 30, Instamart, Swiggy’s quick commerce business, added only 42 dark stores, compared to the 316 such micro-warehouses it had added in the January-March quarter. However, the number of orders Instamart clocked per dark store per day during the quarter fell to 985 from 1,190 in the March quarter.

As of June 30, the company had a consolidated cash balance of Rs 5,354 crore. This compares to Rs 6,695 crore three months earlier and Rs 8,183 crore following its initial public offering in November 2024. So far, the company has burnt through nearly half of the nearly Rs 4,500 crore in capital raised from the IPO.

By comparison, Swiggy’s key rival Eternal had a closing cash balance of Rs 18,557 crore on June 30.

Bothra said in a post-earnings conference call that the company had a strong balance sheet. “We have sufficient cash balance to make investments,” he said, when asked if Swiggy was planning to raise additional capital.


After two quarters of slowing growth, Swiggy’s food delivery business — its largest segment — picked up to grow at 19% year-on-year, faster than rival Zomato, which had grown at 16% during the April-June period.


However, the quarter saw the margins for food delivery come under pressure due to seasonal factors such as lower availability of delivery partners.

“We are consistently looking at ways to drive growth and fund growth because that remains a very important vector to chase. Frankly, if it's not a large movement, but a small trade-off on margins, which leads to growth, I think I will take that call any day,” Swiggy’s food marketplace CEO Rohit Kapoor told ET.

Instamart bleeds

Instamart logged an Rs 896-crore loss — with a negative 15.8% margin — even as its gross order value (GOV) more than doubled year-on-year to Rs 5,655 crore. Analysts said the decline may indicate that Swiggy expanded more quickly than it was able to bring in demand. The company says it has taken steps to raise its average order value (AOV) by pushing its bulk order feature, Maxxsaver, and cutting down on low-value orders by increasing the minimum order size required for free delivery.

“In Q1, we expanded operations to 127 cities, and added dark stores selectively for alleviating capacity constraints or creating coverage in specific pockets that demonstrated the need. Our focus has been on improving wallet-share by increasing basket size, which is one of the prime determinants of long-term profitability,” Sriharsha Majety, Swiggy’s founder and group CEO, said.

Majety also pointed out that competitive intensity in the quick commerce segment remained high, as standalone players such as Zepto and BigBasket doubled down on their offerings while ecommerce giants Flipkart and Amazon entered the 10-minute delivery race.

“Given the rapid growth and massive potential, competitive intensity remains fairly high in general from both ‘QComm-only’ and ‘QComm-also’ players,” Majety said. “The former are modulating investments based on their specific network capacities and strategies, while the latter are calibrating expansion by figuring out if their model should be ‘Quick’-commerce or ‘Quick-enough’-commerce.”