A 10-minute parcel comes for Dalal Street

**Krishna** (0:04)
In today's episode, we will break down two important stories. First, we will talk about Zepto's IPO, and then we talk about what's been happening with memory chips. Welcome back to The Daily Brief Show by Zerodha, where we cut through the noise to help you understand what's actually happening in the most important stories from business and markets. I'm your host Krishna, and today is Friday, 12th June. Now you see, the quick commerce race in India has really narrowed down to three players. Blinkit, Swiggy's Instamart, and Zepto. Of the three, only Zepto wasn't a public company.
Zepto has now officially filed its IPO papers, and of course, we had to cover it. Now the quick commerce industry has evolved in interesting ways to get here. It was Swiggy that actually first experimented with instant deliveries back when the idea felt novel.
When it launched in 2021, Zepto went further by making the 10-minute promise the entire product and branding itself around that. But BlinkIt, which started as growfers and completely reinvented itself, ran away with the market. Now, nobody has been able to close the gap with them since. In the last quarter of FY26, BlinkIt processed almost 274 million orders from around 2200 dark stores across more than 200 cities. Zepto processed 210 million from around 1100 stores across 66 cities, while Instamart did 1112 million orders. Now, that puts BlinkIt at around 46% of all quick-commerce orders, Zepto at around 35% and Instamart at around 19%.
Now, the market that these three are competing over is worth about $11 billion.
That's still less than 2% of India's total grocery spend. And Zepto's bet, and essentially all the other players in the ecosystem, is that there is more room to grow.
Now, let's get into the numbers in Zepto's IPO filing. Zepto's revenue went from almost $4500 crores in FY24 to roughly $11000 crores in FY25 to about $22600 crores in FY26.
Losses, meanwhile, went from $1215 crores to $4700 crores to about $6000 crores. Now, the revenue numbers come with a bit of a caveat though. That impressive jump from FY24 to FY25 includes an accounting change. You see, in January 2025, Zepto shifted from a marketplace model to a principal model. Now, what does that mean? You see, before that, when you ordered 500 rupees of groceries, the company only counted its service fee in its revenue, which is 50 rupees it earned for storing and delivering your order. Now, after the shift, it started counting the full 500 rupees because as per accounting rules, when a company physically controls a good it sells, it has to book the whole transaction. Now, this is also why, rather than merely revenue, Zepto measures its business using a measure called Net Receivable Value or NRV. NRV includes the actual value of all orders on the platform plus advertising income and subscription fees, all with taxes included.
In comparison, Blink-8 uses Net Order Value or NOV, while Sugi uses Gross Order Value or GOV.
Both track the value of orders placed and are calculated differently from each other. It's worth keeping in mind though that they are not the same metric. So, comparisons between all the three firms must be done with a little bit of caution. Now, how does money change hands with each delivery? See, when you place an order, you pay Zepto the full amount. Zepto then pays the merchant partners who are the suppliers of these goods. Now, that leaves Zepto with a gross margin of about Rs.72 then has to cover getting the order to your door. About Rs.46 goes to the delivery partner as pay. Around Rs.34 goes to the cost of running the dark store, which includes rent and paying the pickers and packers. Now combined all of this, that easily exceeds Rs.72.
In one order, just the act of delivering the goods, which is their business, loses money. Now Zepto tries to make up their difference by ad placements. Every time you see a sponsored listing or a banner on the app, a brand is paying Zepto for that placement. Now the IPO papers show us what this business looks like for the first time. Zepto earned 49 crores in FY24, 651 crores in FY25, and 1636 crores in FY26. In FY26, Zepto earned more from advertising than it spent on its own advertising. Now add this all up, and Zepto lost about 79 rupees per order in FY26.
In FY25, that number was 136 rupees. Now a structural challenge that any quick commerce player faces is that the unit economics of the delivery are immune to the order size. As per the ARG, Zepto's average order value is worth about 330 rupees, Blink-It's is 525 rupees, and Instamarts is 700 rupees. But getting a 330 rupees basket to your door costs the delivery partner roughly the same as the 525 rupees one. Now the last mile expense doesn't shrink just because the order is smaller.