Zomato’s Largest Stakeholder Bullish On Upcoming ‘District’ App

Food delivery platform Zomato Ltd. is set to expand its going-out business with the launch of a dedicated app, ‘District’. The new platform for booking restaurants, movie tickets and events is expected to be launched by September 2024. Amid the buzz around the company’s massive scale-up of the going-out business, Zomato’s largest stakeholder, Info Edge (India) Ltd., is bullish about the move.

The platform has immense potential to grow in terms of revenue and profitability, according to Chintan Thakkar, director and chief financial officer at Info Edge.

“We have been founding investors in both Zomato and Policybazaar. We are the largest shareholders even as on this date. We see great value in terms of the business that has been created, we still think there’s a lot more headroom for them to grow in terms of the real business, revenue growth and profitability. We have a very long-term outlook for the investment,” Thakkar told NDTV Profit.

Thakkar’s comments come after Zomato announced last week that it would acquire Paytm’s movie and event ticket booking business in an all-cash deal worth Rs 2,048 crore.

Info Edge supports Zomato’s new ‘going-out’ venture, Thakkar said. He is bullish about the company’s ability to successfully launch their new platform, ‘District’.

“We are certainly supporting whatever moves they have taken. We are pretty confident that they will come out with flying colours in the execution of this new platform they are making called District. We are very bullish about the same,” Thakkar said.

While fiscal 2024 saw hiring slowdowns, the last quarter had some green shoots for hiring in the information technology sector, he said.

“Post-Covid, there was a resurgence in the hiring market and then from mid-FY23, it has kind of started slowing down. FY24 was flattish, but in the last quarter of FY24, we started seeing some greenshoots in terms of how the recruitment business was growing, particularly on the IT side. It has somewhat stayed in a bit lower range in Q1 as well,” Thakkar said.

The JobSpeak index published by Naukri.com, the recruitment market has seen a growth of 11% year-on-year and 12% month-on-month in July, the Info Edge CFO said. However, since a lot of billings take place towards the end of the quarter, the recruitment numbers for September need to be taken into consideration, he said.

“A lot of billings happen around the end of the quarter or the last 15 days of the quarter, so we need to see how September will go. So far, the trend that the JobSpeak index suggests is that we are on track,” Thakkar said.

Adoption of the 'Freemium' model for JeevanSathi.com has helped the company reach closer to a break-even point, Thakkar said. The strategy has also helped the company increase its overall user profiles, he said.

“Shiksha has been steadily growing and the growth rate in billings for Shiksha was about 25% but JeevanSathi grew by about 35%. That’s a part of the new strategy we had for the freemium model," he said.

This strategy was selected about two years ago and there is steady growth in progress that Jeevansaathi is seeing, Thakkar said.