Eternal's Q4 net profit jumps to Rs 174 cr; eyes USD 1 bn adjusted EBITDA by FY29

Food delivery and quick commerce firm Eternal, which owns the Zomato and Blinkit brands, on Tuesday reported a multi-fold jump in its consolidated net profit to Rs 174 crore for the fourth quarter, supported by higher revenue growth.

Food delivery and quick commerce firm Eternal, which owns the Zomato and Blinkit brands, on Tuesday reported a multi-fold jump in its consolidated net profit to Rs 174 crore for the fourth quarter, supported by higher revenue growth. The company had posted a net profit of Rs 39 crore a year ago, according to a regulatory filing. Eternal Founder Deepinder Goyal, in a letter to shareholders, said the company took 18 years to achieve an annual net order value (NOV) of USD 10 billion, but the doubling to USD 20 billion will take less than two years, and the company expects to ''reach USD 1 billion of Adjusted EBITDA, hopefully by FY29''. Goyal also dismissed concerns that artificial intelligence chat interfaces could disrupt the company's food delivery (Zomato) and quick commerce (Blinkit) businesses, arguing that ''consumer behaviour is the hardest thing in the world to change'' and ''nowhere close to disrupting our business''. ''People who order dinner on Zomato four times a week, or groceries on Blinkit every other day, are not going to reroute those habits through a chat window. The people who are excited about experimenting with ordering food through AI assistants are a real but early segment, and currently, nowhere close to disrupting our business''. The Eternal founder also said the recent LPG shortage in India had ''no meaningful impact yet''. ''Some restaurants in affected pockets did see temporary disruption, but platform-level throughput wasn't impacted,'' Goyal stated in the letter. In the fourth quarter, Eternal's revenue from operations zoomed to Rs 17,292 crore from Rs 5,833 crore in the year-ago period. Its total expenses surged to Rs 17,406 crore from Rs 6,104 crore in the comparable January-March quarter of the preceding financial year. For the full financial year 2025-26, Eternal posted a net profit of Rs 366 crore. The company had recorded a net profit of Rs 527 crore during the preceding financial year. On August 27, 2024, Eternal Limited completed the acquisition of Orbgen Technologies Private Limited and Wasteland Entertainment Private Limited (WEPL), operating in the movies ticketing and events businesses, respectively, from One97 Communications Limited. ''Due to this acquisition, the results for the year ended March 31, 2026, and year ended March 31, 2025, are not comparable to that extent,'' Eternal stated. Albinder Singh Dhindsa, Group CEO, Eternal, stated that the growth rates for the quick commerce business are ''now naturally moderating off a much larger base''. He observed that quick commerce today is still concentrated in the top 15-20 cities and in a relatively narrow set of categories. The headroom for growth on geography, assortment, and frequency is substantial. However, Dhindsa said high competition can have adverse impact in certain periods of time, like the one we are going through now, where aggressive discounting is leading to poor-quality growth centred around select low-margin SKUs (stock keeping units). Akshant Goyal, Chief Financial Officer, Eternal, informed in the letter that the food delivery (Zomato) NOV growth at 18.8 per cent year-on-year continues to improve for the third quarter in a row, inching closer to its long-term expectation of over 20 per cent. ''Quick commerce (Blinkit) NOV growth remains strong at 95.4 per cent y-o-y (8.2 per cent q-o-q). 216 net new stores were added in the quarter taking the total store count to 2,243 stores as at the end of the quarter,'' Akshant Goyal stated. Eternal said it is entering into an asset transfer agreement with its subsidiary Wasteland Entertainment Private Limited to transfer the technology stack of the District platform, along with its identified employees, for an aggregate consideration of over Rs 24.19 crore. WEPL, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the company, is engaged in the business of providing online/offline ticketing services for events and other activities, booking of slots for sports facilities, and other related ancillary services to event organisers.