Blinkit unit economics hit in July-September on back of investment ramp up

Zomato-owned quick commerce platform Blinkit saw its margins deteriorating sequentially during the July-September quarter as the company invested heavily on infrastructure expansion.

Blinkit reported adjusted Ebitda loss of Rs 8 crore in the three months ended September, an increase from loss of Rs 3 crore in the April-June period.

Explaining the lack of improvement in margins, Zomato's chief financial officer Akshant Goyal said, "While most of our stores today are profitable with expanding margins, we are not seeing margin expansion at aggregate level at this moment because of the investments we are making towards scaling our infrastructure".

"This includes not just the stores that we are adding, but also the back-end large warehouses. For example, in Q2FY25, we added 152 net new stores and seven warehouses. Since new stores and warehouses take a few months to ramp-up, they end up being margin dilutive in the short term," he added.

As of September 30, Blinkit had 791 dark stores, or micro warehouses from where 10-minute deliveries are made, compared to 639 stores as of June 30.

The company is undertaking an aggressive expansion plan, aiming to have 1,000 dark stores by the end of this fiscal and 2,000 dark stores by the end of 2026. Over the past few months, Blinkit has also been adding tier-II and tier-III cities to its service map.