Deepinder Goyal on Unit Economics

Aggressive international expansion through 2012–2015 took Zomato into more than 20 countries, including the United States via the acquisition of Seattle-based Urbanspoon. The breadth-first push proved expensive; over 2022–2024 the company unwound most overseas markets, liquidating ten foreign subsidiaries inside a year — a tacit admission that global sprawl had underdelivered on unit economics.

Zomato reported its first quarterly profit in 2023, a milestone Goyal attributed to scale efficiencies, advertising monetisation and a tightening of zone-level delivery economics. The break into the green was read across the startup ecosystem as evidence that Indian consumer-internet firms could graduate from cash-burn to operating profit without ceding growth.

During the 2020 lockdown Zomato temporarily ran a Zomato Market grocery service across more than 80 cities and trialled alcohol delivery in West Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha. Both experiments were discontinued — alcohol delivery in April 2021, with management citing weak unit economics and scale concerns — but the grocery pilot seeded the eventual Blinkit thesis.