Meat and seafood brand Licious' FY22 loss swelled by 2.3x to Rs 856 crore from Rs 370 crore in the previous fiscal due to a significant increase in its goods procurement cost as well as promotional and employee finance costs.
Licious, operated by Delightful Gourmet Pvt. Ltd, reported a 64.6% jump in its consolidated revenue from operations in FY22, at Rs 683 crore against nearly Rs 415 crore in the previous year, as per its latest filings with the Registrar of Companies (RoC). The company earned Rs 665 crore from sale of products while it made Rs 12 crore from sale of services.
Licious didn’t respond to VCCircle’s queries till the time of publishing.
Last month, in an interaction with VCCircle, the meat delivery unicorn's co-founder Abhay Hanjura pointed towards Ebitda profitability in the next 12 months.
He said, "the company is expected to hit a revenue run rate of Rs 1,500 crore by March-end. We hope to achieve Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) profitability over the next 12 months. Currently, we are contributory margin positive.”
Once the company turns Ebitda positive, it will start preparing for an initial public offering, Hanjura added. “We feel an IPO is three to four years away. We are in no hurry at this point of time,” he added.
In FY22, Licious saw its expenses grow nearly 2x to Rs 1,191 crore from Rs 642 crore in the year before. The procurement cost of raw materials, which includes meat, poultry and seafood items, accounted for bulk of total expenses at Rs 554 crore, up from Rs 319 crore in FY21.
Meanwhile, the company’s employee benefits expense grew 76.5% to Rs 210 crore in the last fiscal, as compared to Rs 119 crore in FY21. Also, its advertising cost jumped to Rs 170 crore in the fiscal under review.
Licious, which provides doorstep delivery of fresh meat, eggs and seafood, saw its transportation and distribution costs balloon to Rs 65 crore from Rs 28 crore in the fiscal before.
Founded by Hanjura and Vivek Gupta in 2015, Licious became a unicorn (a privately held company with a valuation of $1 billion or more) in October last year after it bagged $52 million in a funding round led by IIFL AMC’s Late-Stage Tech Fund. The company also raised $192 million in its Series F round led by Temasek and Multiples Private Equity in June 2021.
The Temasek-backed company claims to have grown 300% in the past six years. At present, it operates in 28 cities including Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi NCR, Chandigarh, Mumbai and Pune. It claims to serve over 2 million orders every month, and employs about 6,000 people.
Licious is targeting a 50% jump in revenue run rate by the end of the financial year 2023, buoyed by its latest foray into the plant-based meat business, Hanjura had told VCCircle in an interview last month.
