Zomato’s management on Monday emphasised that Blinkit will continue to focus on top eight cities, including Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru, to expand its dark store network and penetrate deeper into the urban markets. Of the 75 new stores Blinkit added in Q4, 80% were in these eight cities. Blinkit now has 526 dark stores across India and plans to double the number to 1,000 in the next 12 months.Increasing store penetration in these eight cities will boost the segment’s gross order value by nearly 4 times, the company said.
In the fourth quarter, Blinkit clocked a GOV of Rs 4,027 crore, nearly double on a year-on-year basis and up about 14% over Q3. Its contribution margin increased to 3.9% in Q4 from 2.4% in the December quarter.As for cities beyond top eight, the company said it will continue to progress slowly. “Expansion beyond the top eight cities is more experimental in nature to test the depth of the market and so far most of our stores in these smaller cities are doing well. We plan to continue opening more stores in a measured way in the smaller cities,” its management said.Blinkit generated 65.3 million orders in Q4, up 66% over the year-ago period.
Its average order value — a key metric to measure the unit economics of a quick commerce business — increased to `617 in Q4, from `522 a year ago, but slipped from the high of `635 in Q3, which included the festive season.On an average, the platform recorded 6.4 million monthly transacting customers in Q4, much lower than Zomato’s food delivery platform that recorded 19 million transacting customers each month. However, the company’s management is confident that Blinkit’s monthly transacting customers will surpass that of Zomato’s food delivery business, but is unsure of the timeline.