Continuing its growth journey, home service marketplace Urban Company has managed a 45.4% spike in scale during the last fiscal year. Unlike in the past, the company also narrowed down losses in the fiscal year ending March 2023. We will elaborate Urban Company’s expenses which eventually helped it to cut losses in the second half of the story.
For now, let’s focus on the avenues of revenue and growth.
Urban Company’s operating revenue grew 45.4% to Rs 637 crore during FY23, as per its annual report published on the website of the company.
The sale of services (on-demand home services) accounted for 77.9% of the overall collections. This income surged 42.9% to Rs 496 crore in FY23. The sale of products that the company primarily pushes across the beauty and grooming verticals increased 54.9% to Rs 141 crore in FY23.
When it comes to burn, direct and support expenses formed 27.2% of the expenses which increased 8.4% to Rs 257 crore in FY23. Its employee benefits expenses increased by 16.1% to Rs 252 crore during FY23 from Rs 217 crore in FY22. The cost of ESOP (employee stock compensation cost) has been excluded.
Its marketing and advertising, IT, and legal and professional costs pushed the overall expenditure to Rs 945 crore in FY23. Importantly, the company hasn’t given expense breakup across the aforementioned heads in its blog post but we will highlight them once the firm files consolidated financial statements for the last fiscal year with the Registrar of Companies (RoC).
Significantly, Urban Company has reduced its losses by 40.1% to Rs 308 crore in FY23, whereas the figures stood at Rs 514 crore in FY22.
Urban Company joined the unicorn club in June 2021 with valuation of over $2 billion but the company didn’t raise any money in the past two years.
While Urban Company has been facing challenges due to protests by the company’s partners (especially beauticians), it claims to have invested Rs 250 crore towards training and skilling of 50,000 service partners. Despite an estranged relationship with partners, the Gurugram-based firm topped the list of fair work ratings in 2022. Besides India, it operates in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sydney, Singapore, and the US.
During FY23, Urban Company co-led a strategic investment in Tiger Global-backed company, MyGate. Entrackr exclusively reported the transaction in September last year.
