As the food-aggregator app Zomato establishes its presence in 500 cities, Zomato CEO Mohit Gupta said that one of the company’s key learning remains that every Indian city, whether big or small, possesses excellent exploration for business because of mobile penetration in households. The food aggregator application Zomato now serves in 500 cities and has expanded its presence from 25 towns in July 2018 to 20 folds at present. While the company has witnessed three times growth in the top 15 cities, 40% of Zomato’s business comes from emerging regions, Zomato announced.
Zomato has grown at a rate of 4 new cities every day in the last month and is tapping tier 3 and tier 4 regions to establish a strong foothold in the domestic food-delivery market, the Deepinder Goyal founded company said. With this, Zomato has also extended its services to three north-eastern states – Meghalaya, Assam and Tripura. The company deploys a data-driven strategy to choose potential cities for serving. The food-aggregator takes factors like overall population, student population and restaurants into account, Mohit Gupta, CEO- Food Delivery, Zomato said.
In its latest addition, Zomato has connected several new Indian cities to its service network. Some of them are Pushkar (Rajasthan), Ankleshwar and Mehsana (Gujarat), Fazilka and Nawanshahr (Punjab), Vrindavan and Azamgarh (Uttar Pradesh), Silvassa (Daman), Chittoor (Andhra Pradesh), Pataudi (Gurgaon), and Shillong (Meghalaya) Kanyakumari, Kodaikanal.
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos’ Amazon is also eyeing Indian food-delivery market and is planning to launch its own services this year, news agency Reuters reported. This move is expected to raise competition for the current market dominators such as Zomato, Swiggy and Uber Eats. Amazon has already started roping in staff for its ambitious plan, the news agency cited sources as saying.
Food delivery business has been on a northward trend of late and the phenomenon is not exclusive to India. The industry is expected to see a steady 3.7% CAGR in 2020, according to a McKinsey report. “We believe [online] penetration rates will grow further as the market matures, eventually reaching 65 per cent per year,” the report said.
