Shiprocket Loss Widens, Even As Revenue Grows 80% In FY23

Shiprocket has posted an 80% spike in revenue for FY23, with losses also widening, driven by operational costs from the five acquisitions it made.

Zomato-backed Shiprocket, which is registered as Bigfoot Retail Solutions Pvt., has posted a revenue of Rs 1,089 crore in FY23, up from Rs 611 crore in FY22. However, losses have also widened from Rs 93 crore to Rs 340 crore for the fiscal.

The six-year-old platform has expanded from initially offering shipping services to becoming a full-stack service provider for small and medium businesses.

It turned unicorn in August 2022, after a $33.5 million, or Rs 265 crore, fundraise at a valuation of over $1 billion. In 2022, it made five acquisitions, gobbling up Wigzo, Glaucus, Arvind Internet's Omuni, Rocketbox and Pickrr.

As a result, on top of shipping, the company now offers warehousing, checkout and payment solutions, as well as marketing and automation tools, among others.

In a conversation with BQ Prime, Shiprocket's Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Saahil Goel, said the company's core business remains profitable, while losses from its acquisitions make up most of its bleed.

"We bought five companies. That's how we've been able to accelerate what we've done on the stack in the past year. Our shipping business turned profitable a couple of years before FY22. It's actually very high Ebitda right now, which generates a lot of cash for the company. But we also end up investing a lot of this money in our fulfilment engine, cargo, ads and a bunch of stuff that's in the building phase," Goel said over a telephonic conversation.

He said shipping brings in about 80–85% of Shiprocket's revenue, while the other parts bring in the rest. "By FY24, this will get further dominated by other parts of the stack," he added.

Goel said the company carried on a lot of the operational costs from the acquisitions. "From a PAT perspective, FY22 was about a negative Rs 90 crore, of which Rs 30 crore was ESOP costs and Rs 60 crore was operational loss on the Rs 600 crore topline. For FY23, the losses are at Rs 340 crore, of which the operational path is a negative Rs 180 crore, and the ESOP cost is about Rs 90 crore, and about Rs 70 crore is actually an accounting adjustment from doing the merger-demerger structuring," Goel said.

He added that a lot of those investments have now borne fruit. "A lot of them have had their gestation time and so on. We're already very close to being a net-breakeven kind of company."