“Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill

All the numbers in this “short form” annual report are unaudited. Exact numbers might change in small deltas while we go through the audit.

Financial year 2018 (year ending March 31, 2018) was a memorable year for us in many ways. While each of our businesses hit multiple milestones during the year gone-by, if I were to mention the five biggest learnings/achievements for Zomato, as a company, they would be:

1. We demonstrated that our business can generate profits – almost all throughout the year, we hit EBITDA break-even globally, across all our business, and while maintaining good growth levels; and then in the last two months, we decided to double-down on growth (more on that later).
2. Innovation drives long term survival, growth, revenue and profit (yes, all the good things) – we feel proud of ourselves for getting the product market fit right with Zomato Gold and Zomato Treats. Since launching Zomato Gold a few months ago in India, we have seen unparalleled demand from our users for this product and at ~160k subscribers, we are probably the fastest user subscription program in the country to reach this scale in such a short timeframe. Our waitlist for Zomato Gold is hovering at 500k users right now.
3. People should be the primary rationale behind an acquisition:
   ·Early 2017, we decided that we need to build our own fulfillment capabilities in order to provide more choice and best experience to our users – that’s why we acquired Runnr some time ago.
   ·I feel proud of the fact that in a matter of ~6 months, from zero, we now deliver, ourselves, ~60% of the food orders on our platform. Given how operations intensive this particular business is, this growth is phenomenal and almost unreal.
   ·This has far exceeded our expectations and if we are able to execute with this intensity, we would have some fabulous years ahead.
   ·All of this happened because we have a very committed and solid team from Runnr working with us.
4. Sometimes, people leave. It’s ok. But then, some of them also come back. This last year was very emotional for us as Pankaj, after 10 years of building Zomato, decided to hang up his boots. While we celebrate his exit and achievements, we are also welcoming back a number of ex-Zomans who took a break from Zomato to learn and invest in themselves – and now they are coming back to where they belong. Home.
5. Reading helps. The four most helpful books for me this year which helped shape Zomato were:
   ·Leverage Points: Places to Intervene In a System (not exactly a book but a short pdf essay by Donella Meadows) – helps everywhere. This essay could very well be called Life 101.
   ·The Art of Thinking Clearly (by Rolf Dobelli) – this is the sum total of all the psychology books you can read – helped me become a better product/marketing manager.
   ·Thinking Backwards (by Martin Scheepbouwer and Rob van Haastrecht) – helped me problem solve in a more structured, faster way and get to better answers than before.
   ·Relentless (by Tim Grover) – helped me easily identify the kind of people I work with. And then identify the right roles for these folks to help them thrive.

How did we fare in FY18?

• Revenue
  We did ~$74m in topline in FY18 as compared to $51m in FY17 – ~45% growth over last year.
• Cost/Burn
  Operating burn for FY18 was ~$11m compared to $15m in FY17; $6m of the operating $11m burn in this year was incurred in just February and March (when we decided to double down on growth).
• Ordering
  In FY18, food ordering comprised ~30% of our revenues, up from ~18% in FY17. We are now live in food ordering in 15 cities in India and 5 cities in the Middle East. We hit ~5.5m monthly food orders in March 2018.
• Subscriptions (Zomato Gold and Zomato Treats)
  As on March 31, 2018, we have 280k+ active user subscribers (and growing very rapidly) across our two subscription programs – Zomato Gold and Zomato Treats.
• Advertising
  Our advertising business grew slowly in this financial year for lack of focus. We had stopped hiring in our ads business as we really wanted to crack the transactions piece as an organisation. The number of people in our ad sales team is down 20% since last year, but our ads revenue for this year still grew by ~20% y-o-y. ~15,000 restaurants paid us for advertisements in the last year. We have started investing in growing this business in the last month and we are seeing some great results (more on that a few months from now).

Execution diary from the last few months
We have ended the year on a very high note. Our food delivery business in India grew ~48% in March 2018 over the previous month in terms of number of order volume and by ~55% in terms of revenue.

In a short period of time, Zomato Gold now contributes ~12% of our monthly revenue. We are excited about Zomato Gold and are very soon taking it to more cities and also expanding our membership base as fast as we can.

Our ads business is growing really well. We introduced some new products to the mix, and they are being very well received by the restaurant owners community.

We introduced a new app version a couple of months ago. All the conversion numbers are up significantly and this update could not have come at a better time because we are investing heavily in marketing the app.

As we enter a new financial year, we are extremely excited and pumped and hope we can add more value to our restaurant partners and keep delighting our users in the coming years. We are currently at an annualized revenue run rate of $100m. And looking at the last two months (our revenue in March is 35% up from January), if the momentum continues, we will be recording one of our best years in business. And the team is very adamant to continue (and even further increase) this momentum.

Over and out.