CASE STUDY: ZOMATO

INTRODUCTION:

Zomato is a food and restaurant search engine which caters to the daily demands of people who are in search of good eating places. With the largest catalogue of restaurants around the globe, zomato is used on a daily basis to locate nearby restaurants. Moreover, it can also be used to book a table in a few selected restaurants at a certain time. It also has a consumer suggestion list which specifies the availability of a certain dish or cuisine at a certain time. It was started as a simple restaurant search and discovery service by two people: Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah. Before the foundation of zomato, Deepinder Goyal was a management consultant for Bain and Company in New Delhi. It was at Bain that Deepinder conceived the idea of an online restaurant information service after seeing the demand for menu cards among his colleagues.

BRIEF TIMELINE:

2008-The service began as "Foodiebay".

November 2010- Foodiebay was renamed as Zomato.

2011-Zomato launched in Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad and launched smartphone applications.

2013-The company launched in New Zealand, Turkey, Brazil, and Indonesia with its website and apps available in Turkish, Brazilian Portuguese, Indonesian, and English.

April 2014- Zomato launched its services in Portugal.

July 2014-Zomato made its first acquisition by buying Menu-mania for an undisclosed sum.

September 2014-Zomato acquired Poland-based restaurant search service Gastronauci for an undisclosed sum

October 2014-Zomato launched its services in Canada

November 2014-It extended its reach to Lebanon and Ireland as well

 December 2015-Zomato acquired Italian restaurant search service Cibando.

April 2015-Another round of funding for Zomato, led by Info Edge, Vy Capital and Sequoia Capital,

January 2015- Zomato acquired Seattle-based food portal Urbanspoon for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition marked Zomato's entry into the United States, Canada and Australia, and brought it into direct competition with Yelp, Zagat and OpenTable. 

GROWTH AND POPULARITY:

Database

The numbers of listed restaurants has significantly increased over the years. With growing demands of food orders, restaurants have decided to register themselves under a single site for online orders. This gives an extra edge to the zomato, which has been built for this purpose.

In 2008, 4000 restaurants have been registered under zomato. The number has exponentially increased. In 2013, the number rocketed to 94000.

 No. Of visitors

As the no. of restaurants increased, so did the no of visitors in the official site of zomato. The site is constantly under development, making a more friendly and convenient interface for people to order food online from the nearest places. The no of online web viewers of zomato restaurants have increases from a few thousands in 2008 to more than a million viewers by the end of 2013.

Revenue

Over the span of five years, the annual turnover for zomato has grown significantly. Despite the fluctuations in the Indian GDP, the global as well as national income for zomato has always been double or triple to that of the total investment. The investment includes sales and advertising, Home delivery, maintenance of restaurants, etc.

A GENERAL TREND OF THE REVENUE, ONLINE POPULARITY AND NO. OF LISTED RESTAURANTS

CONCLUSION:

This is the first review of the project (CASE STUDY OF ZOMATO). Hence we have only provided minimal information about the various aspects of the Indian start-up. However there are a lot of aspects which we have planned to cover as a part of the case study. On a concluding note, we have provided with a list of the aspects that we have planned to explain for the next part of our case study:

·         Global popularity

·         SWOT analysis of zomato

·         Revenue model

·         Revenue graph and annual trend

·         Upcoming Strategies and Alternatives