Foodtech major Zomato is set to revolutionize the ‘going-out’ experience with the launch of its new app, ‘District.’ This innovative platform will enable customers to discover and book restaurants, as well as tickets for movies, sports, live performances, and more.
In a recent shareholder letter, Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal revealed that the company’s dining-out business is now operating at an impressive run-rate of over $500 million annualized gross order value (GOV) and has already achieved profitability. Goyal emphasized the potential to expand further within the ‘going-out’ sector by incorporating additional services. “Additional use cases for customers in the going-out space include movies, sports ticketing, live performances, shopping, staycations among others,” he said, adding that the company has already launched some of these services and is actively working on others.
“Building a one-stop destination app for going-out could be a game changer for each of these use cases, and we intend to do exactly that with our new District (by Zomato) app. If we execute this well, we see going-out becoming the third large B2C business emerging out of Zomato,” Goyal stated. It is noteworthy that Zomato has recently engaged in preliminary discussions with Paytm to acquire the fintech giant’s movie ticketing and events business.
During a post-earnings call, Zomato CFO Akshant Goyal outlined the strategy for leveraging traffic from their existing food delivery app to support District. “We’re planning to launch (District) as a separate app and brand. It’s going to be pretty much like how we built Blinkit, which is a separate brand and separate app… but making sure that we keep our cost of customer acquisition lower using the traffic that we have on the Zomato app,” he explained.
Zomato’s current going-out business includes the dining-out and Zomato Live verticals, which significantly contributed INR 95 crore to the company’s top line in the reported quarter, marking a 126% increase from INR 42 crore in Q1 FY24.
In its financial performance for Q1 FY25, Zomato reported a consolidated net profit of INR 253 crore, a substantial rise from INR 2 crore in the same quarter the previous year. Additionally, revenue from operations surged by 74% to INR 4,206 crore in Q1 FY25, compared to INR 2,416 crore in the corresponding quarter last year.