Zomato founder opposes HSBC valuation claim

Brokerage HSBC Securities and Capital Markets (India) had said that Zomato  should be valued at $500 million, which is half of the $1 billion that marked Zomato as a ‘unicorn’, a popular term  for start-ups that are valued at $1 billion or more.

In his blog, Goyal spoke about those aspects of his company which  prompted HSBC to halve the valuation. 

Goyal said , "this report is an outlier." He said that there are enough analysts, VCs, and founders who have called Zomato the only defensible Indian unicorn, and who have called Zomato “the only defensible Indian unicorn”, and “there’s multiples more inherent value in Zomato”.

Talking about the report's claim that Zomato has low market share, he said, "Our internal data shows that we drove a large percentage (>50%) of business to some of the biggest restaurant names in the country. Our traffic in India, our home market, also grew 8% in April 2016 over March 2016. We have over 8.5 million monthly uniques in India alone – very few Indian companies can claim that much traffic share in a single category. Also, we are currently present in 23 countries, and we are the market leaders in 18 of them."

After talking in detail about his food ordering business, US operations, ad sales profitability and overall profitability, he signed off by saying,"No pressure. There’s that much more to live up to, and win.There’s something that we say often – we are only 1% done. We are truly 1% done, and if we continue to focus on execution, the noise will die down very soon."