Snapdeal posts Rs 916 crore revenue in FY20; losses up Rs 88 crore amid Covid-led disruption in Q4

E-commerce company for value-conscious customers Snapdeal on Wednesday reported a 0.8 per cent jump in its operating revenue from Rs 839.4 crore in FY19 to Rs 846.4 crore in FY20 amid Covid-led sales disruption in Q4. Moreover, its consolidated revenue dropped 1 per cent from Rs 925.3 crore to Rs 916 crore during the said period on the back of continued investments made by Snapdeal in FY20 in market expansion activities including “video, vernacular and other strategic projects aimed at growing the online market amongst new users,” it said.

On the other hand, FY20 losses for Snapdeal stood at Rs 274 crore, up 47 per cent (by Rs 88 crore) from around Rs 186 crore in FY19 on account of such initiatives, according to the company. “While the on-going financial year has seen recurrent disruptions and subdued consumer sentiment on account of safety and economic concerns, the benefit of these growth initiatives is expected to play out over the coming years,” the company said in a statement. However, Snapdeal was able to reduce its losses significantly by 95 per cent from Rs 5,143 crore in FY17 to Rs 188 crore in FY19. The company added that over 2 per cent of India (27 million buyers) bought from its marketplace in FY20 while over 85 per cent of its orders were shipped to customers based in cities beyond the top 10 metros.

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“What the acceleration and online adoption by sellers did in six months, we would have expected to happen in three years. In the last six months, we’ve seen 20,000 new sellers come onto our platform and 10,000 of them just in the last 90 days. Out of them, about 5,000 are manufacturers, which I feel is a very positive trend for India in general and also for the consumers,” Kunal Bahl, Co-founder and CEO, Snapdeal had told Financial Express Online in an interaction in October.

Snapdeal had furloughed around 7 per cent – 50-55 employees – of its 750 full-time employees for three months in May due to the Covid impact. The last major realignment exercise at Snapdeal, in which employees were impacted, took place in 2017 when it had reportedly laid off around 600 employees while founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal had foregone their salaries to stay on their path to profitability. The company has so far raised $1.8 billion across 13 funding rounds and had raised investments from Alibaba, SoftBank, Nexus Venture Partners, Anand Piramal in the past, according to Crunchbase.