On-demand home services marketplace Urban Company closed CY21 with 11.5 million orders with an average ticket price of `1,100-1,200, Abhiraj Singh Bhal, co-founder and CEO, Urban Company, told BrandWagon Online. He declined to share, however, how this compares with CY20 and CY19, which was a non-pandemic year.
Bhal said the company expects to end March with 1.5 million orders. “We expect a 10-15% increase in orders in April with summer season kicking in,” he said.
The company claims to charge a commission of 21-22% on average from its service partner. In a year, a customer returns four to six times to the platform.
The company’s net loss widened 51% to `207 crore in FY21 from `137 crore in FY20, as per regulatory documents sourced by business intelligence platform Tofler. It posted a 13.8% increase in revenue from operations to `239 crore in FY21 compared to `210 crore in FY20.
The consumer tech company claims to have created two revenue streams — subscription and business-to-business (B2B) under which it sells goods to its partners. As per Bhal, the number of active paid subscribers currently stand at about 7.5 lakh. Consumers can either opt for a six-month subscription plan or an annual one. As for its B2B business, the company claims it will cross revenue of `100 crore in FY22.
“We have also started a third revenue stream under business-to-consumers, wherein we have begun to sell water purifiers,” he said.
As per the recently released UC Earnings Index, partners who delivered at least 30 orders a month, earned `30,455 per month, with the top quartile of partners earning `38,263 per month. Since 2014, the company claims to have invested more than `100 crore in training and skilling of its partners. The company operates over 100 training centres pan-India and has an in-house team of over 200 full-time trainers.
Meanwhile, the company has expanded its presence in international markets such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, Singapore and Australia. Additionally, it has expanded operations to 20 cities in India in the last two years. “While the major chunk of our business comes from top-tier cities, we expect that the contribution of tier-2 and tier-3 cities will be at par with the metropolitan cities in the next one-two years,” Raghav Chandra, co-founder and CTO, Urban Company, said.
With no plans to take the initial public offering route, the company aims to turn profitable over the next few years. “As far as our core India business is concerned, there is a lot of focus towards turning the business profitable at an EBIDTA level over the next couple of years,” Bhal said.