Eternal

Timeline

1. 2008Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah start Foodiebay, a restaurant menu and listing site, while working as analysts at Bain and Company.
2. 2010DC Foodiebay Online Services Pvt Ltd is incorporated on 18 January.
3. 2011The restaurant discovery service spreads from the Delhi region to cities across India.
4. 2012The website is renamed Zomato, partly to avoid a trademark clash and partly to allow expansion beyond food.
5. 2013Info Edge has invested about 16.7 million dollars and holds a 57.9 per cent stake in the company.
6. 2014A run of acquisitions of restaurant guides across Europe, Oceania and North America begins.MenuMania, Lunchtime.cz, Obedovat.sk and others
7. 2015Food delivery launches in India in March, and the platform has operations in 21 countries by early in the year.
8. 2015Urbanspoon is acquired, giving the company a base in the United States, Canada and Australia.
9. 2017Delivery startup Runnr is acquired so that logistics can be brought in house.
10. 2017Wotu Technologies is acquired and rebuilt as Hyperpure to supply ingredients to partner restaurants.
11. 2018The company reaches unicorn status after a 200 million dollar investment from Ant Financial at a valuation of about 1.1 billion dollars.
12. 2019Feeding India is acquired in July, adding a hunger relief non profit to the group.
13. 2020Uber Eats' India business is acquired in an all-stock deal, and Uber takes a 9.99 per cent stake in Zomato.
14. 2020Zomato Market delivers groceries and essentials in more than 80 cities during the lockdown, and contactless dining is introduced.
15. 2020Alcohol delivery begins in West Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha in May.
16. 2021A 250 million dollar round led by Tiger Global values the company at 5.4 billion dollars before listing.
17. 2021The company lists on the BSE and NSE in July and the stock jumps more than 80 per cent on its market debut.
18. 2021The company pulls out of alcohol delivery in April and says it will serve only India and the UAE from November.
19. 2022Blinkit, formerly Grofers, is bought for 568 million dollars in June and becomes the quick-commerce arm.
20. 2022Legends, an inter-city food delivery service, launches in August.
21. 2023Xtreme, a merchant focused parcel delivery service, launches in October.
22. 2024Paytm's event ticketing subsidiaries are acquired for about 244.2 million dollars in August.
23. 2024The District app launches in November for movie tickets, dining reservations and live events.
24. 2024Legends and Xtreme are both discontinued, and the liquidation of more than 10 overseas subsidiaries is completed.
25. 2025The holding company is renamed Eternal Limited on 6 February while the consumer apps keep their names.
26. 2025For the year to March 2025 the group reports revenue of 20,243 crore rupees and net profit of 527 crore rupees.
27. 2025By July Blinkit's transaction value overtakes the core food delivery business for the first time.

What it does

Eternal Limited is a Gurugram based holding company for a family of consumer internet businesses in India. Its four operating verticals serve different customers from the same technology and delivery backbone: Zomato, the restaurant discovery and food delivery app; Blinkit, the quick-commerce service that delivers groceries and daily essentials in minutes; Hyperpure, the business to business supply arm that sells produce and kitchen goods to restaurants; and District, the going-out app for movie tickets, dining reservations and live events.^[1]

The name changed from Zomato Limited to Eternal Limited on 6 February 2025, when chief executive Deepinder Goyal told the market that the parent had outgrown the food delivery label. The consumer apps kept their own branding, so a customer still orders on Zomato and buys groceries on Blinkit even though both sit inside Eternal.^[12]

The group is best understood as two engines. Food delivery and dining out is the older, more mature business that supplies steady margins and the cash the group reinvests. Quick commerce through Blinkit is the newer business that grew faster than anyone expected and, by mid 2025, was contributing more transaction value than food delivery itself.^[11]

Money comes in four ways. The delivery marketplace takes a commission on each order and sells advertising placement to restaurants and brands. Quick commerce earns the margin between what it pays for goods and what the customer pays for them. Hyperpure earns a wholesale margin on ingredients and supplies. District earns ticketing and booking fees. Each of these is a different kind of business, which is why the group reports them separately.^[1][6]

History

The company began in 2008 as Foodiebay, a restaurant listing website that Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah built while they were analysts at Bain and Company. The original problem was simple: restaurant menus were not available online, so the founders collected menus from local restaurants and uploaded them by hand. On 18 January 2010 the business was incorporated as DC Foodiebay Online Services Pvt Ltd.^[1]

The website was renamed Zomato in 2012, in part to avoid a trademark conflict and in part because the founders wanted room to grow beyond food. The company expanded to city after city inside India and then, from 2012, abroad. By early 2015 the platform listed restaurants in 21 countries, including the United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada and the United Arab Emirates.^[1]

Growth between 2014 and 2016 came largely through buying other restaurant discovery companies. Zomato acquired MenuMania in New Zealand, Lunchtime.cz and Obedovat.sk in central Europe, Gastronauci in Poland, Cibando in Italy, Mekanist in Turkey and Urbanspoon in the United States. Each acquisition brought a listing database in a new market rather than building one from scratch.^[1][4]

Food delivery, the business that eventually defined the company, launched in India only in March 2015. Zomato first partnered with hyperlocal logistics firms such as Delhivery and Grab, then brought delivery in house by acquiring the startup Runnr in 2017. The same period produced Hyperpure, built out of the acquired Wotu Technologies, which turned the company from a listing platform into a supplier to the restaurants it already worked with.^[1][5]

In January 2020 Zomato acquired the Indian business of Uber Eats in an all-stock deal. Uber walked away with a 9.99 per cent stake in Zomato, and the Indian food delivery market settled into a duopoly between Zomato and Swiggy. The deal removed a loss-making competitor and handed Zomato the delivery volume that made its unit economics work.^[3]

The company listed on the BSE and NSE in July 2021, raising money at a valuation of more than 8 billion dollars, and the stock jumped over 80 per cent on its first day of trading. The listing gave Eternal, then still Zomato, the currency to buy its way into new categories.^[1][9]

In the years after the listing the company used its shares as currency for a series of minority investments in Indian technology startups, taking small stakes in businesses it thought might matter later rather than buying them outright. That approach is common among listed consumer internet companies in India, which use strategic investments to keep a view on adjacent categories without taking on the management burden of a full acquisition. The decisive move of that period was still the purchase of Blinkit in 2022, which took the company from a food delivery business into retail.^[1]

In June 2022 the company bought Blinkit, the quick-commerce business formerly known as Grofers, for 568 million dollars. It was the most consequential acquisition in the company's history, because quick commerce grew into the group's largest business by transaction value within three years. In August 2024 Zomato paid about 244.2 million dollars for the event ticketing businesses of Paytm, and in November 2024 folded them into the District app.^[1][8][10]

The name Eternal had been used inside the company well before it became the official one. After the Blinkit acquisition, staff needed a way to talk about the corporate umbrella without implying that Zomato, the app, and Zomato, the listed company, were the same thing. When the change was announced on 6 February 2025, the reasoning given was that the parent no longer depended on food delivery for its identity, and the consumer apps would keep their own names.^[1][12]

Zomato: food delivery and dining out

Zomato is the app the company is still best known for. It began as a restaurant discovery product and now covers four jobs in one place: finding a restaurant, reading reviews, ordering food for delivery and booking a table. The delivery marketplace connects customers, restaurant partners and a network of delivery partners, and takes a commission on each order.^[1]

The delivery business grew through a mix of discounts, logistics investment and acquisitions. The purchase of Uber Eats' India operations in 2020 consolidated the market, and the acquisition of Runnr in 2017 gave Zomato control of the delivery fleet rather than relying on third parties. Together these moves made delivery the company's largest revenue line through the early 2020s.^[3][5]

By 2025 the balance had shifted. Blinkit, the quick-commerce business, overtook food delivery in overall transaction value, which was the clearest signal that Eternal is no longer a restaurant company that also sells groceries but a consumer platform where quick commerce leads.^[11]

Zomato Gold, the company's loyalty programme, and the dining-out product sit on top of the delivery marketplace. They matter because they raise how often a customer opens the app, which is the metric that decides whether the group can sell advertising to restaurants and brands.^[6]

The economics of delivery depend on order density. A rider who completes more orders in an hour costs less per order, and a city with more restaurants and more customers on the platform reaches that density sooner. That is why Zomato spent years competing on discounts and delivery speed in the largest cities before it could report a profit on the business.^[1][5]

The discovery business that came first still underpins the rest. The company's database of restaurants, built city by city from menus that the founders collected by hand, is what let it add delivery, table reservations and loyalty programmes without starting from nothing in each new city. A listing business is cheap to run and gives the delivery arm a map of which restaurants exist and where they are, which is an advantage a delivery only startup has to build from scratch.^[1][4]

Blinkit and quick commerce

Blinkit is the group's quick-commerce arm. It runs small warehouses, called dark stores, inside city neighbourhoods and promises delivery of groceries and daily essentials within minutes. The model works on density rather than size: a dark store is profitable only when enough nearby customers order often enough, so growth is a matter of adding stores in the right pin codes rather than adding cities.^[1]

Zomato acquired Blinkit in June 2022 for 568 million dollars. The business had been Grofers, a grocery delivery company that struggled as a scheduled delivery service before it pivoted to ten minute delivery and renamed itself Blinkit. Within three years of the acquisition, quick commerce had become the group's biggest business by transaction value.^[1][11]

Quick commerce pulled the group into direct competition with India's largest retail and e-commerce players as well as with rival startups. It also changed what Eternal spends money on: capital expenditure moved from delivery fleets and restaurant marketing to warehouses, cold storage chains and inventory, which is a very different business from a pure marketplace.^[11]

The tipping point arrived in 2025. Reporting through the year showed Blinkit's gross order value passing the food delivery business, and the parent company's share price reacting to the shift. For a group that had spent a decade being described as a food delivery company, this was the moment the description stopped fitting.^[11]

The comparison that matters for Blinkit is with food delivery inside the same company, because the two share customers, technology and leadership. Delivery is a marketplace that earns a fee on someone else's product. Blinkit is a retailer that owns the goods until they are sold, which means it can lose money on a slow moving dark store in a way a delivery marketplace cannot.^[1][11]

Hyperpure and restaurant supply

Hyperpure is the least visible part of the group and the one most closely tied to its restaurant base. It is a business to business supply chain that sells fresh produce, meat, seafood and kitchen supplies directly to restaurants, hotels and caterers. It grew out of the company's own problem: restaurants that list on Zomato also need reliable ingredients, and Zomato already knew who they were.^[1]

The operation began with the acquisition of Wotu Technologies, which was rebuilt as Hyperpure. Because it is vertically integrated, Hyperpure controls sourcing, cold storage and last mile delivery instead of acting as a pass through marketplace. That gives it better margins than restaurant delivery on the food it sells, and it also makes the company a supplier to businesses that compete with each other.^[1]

Hyperpure sits inside the same supply chain that feeds Blinkit's dark stores, so the two businesses share warehouses, cold chain and logistics in several cities. That overlap is deliberate: the group's argument to investors is that the same infrastructure serves a restaurant ordering vegetables in bulk and a household ordering milk at midnight.^[1][6]

The business is also a hedge. Food delivery commissions depend on restaurants doing well, so anything that helps a restaurant's margins is good for the platform in the long run. By selling ingredients and supplies to the same restaurants it lists, the group earns money on both sides of the relationship, and it learns which kitchens are growing before their growth shows up in orders.^[1][6]

District and the going-out business

District is the group's attempt to own the going-out economy, the money people spend outside the home on films, dinners, concerts and events. The app launched in November 2024 after Zomato bought two Paytm subsidiaries, Wasteland Entertainment and Orbgen Technologies, for about 244.2 million dollars in August 2024. Those businesses brought ticketing assets including BookMyShow's rival platforms into the group.^[1][8][10]

District combines movie ticketing, dining reservations and live event bookings in a single app. The logic is that these are purchases a customer makes with the same intent as ordering food, and that Zomato already has the audience and the payment relationship to sell them.^[10]

The going-out business is small next to food delivery and quick commerce in revenue, but it is strategically important because it pushes the group beyond transactions it already dominates. It also puts Eternal in competition with established ticketing players rather than with delivery companies.^[10]

Revenue and financials

For the financial year ending March 2025, Eternal reported consolidated revenue of 20,243 crore rupees and a net profit of 527 crore rupees. The numbers matter less for their size than for their sign: the company had crossed into profit after years of losses, which is unusual for an Indian consumer internet business of its age.^[1]

Revenue is spread across the four verticals. Food delivery contributes commissions and advertising, quick commerce contributes the sale of goods, Hyperpure contributes wholesale supply revenue and District contributes ticketing and booking fees. Because quick commerce books the value of the goods it sells, its revenue line is larger and its margins thinner than the delivery marketplace.^[1][11]

The reported profit is the group's headline achievement. Indian food delivery and quick commerce both burned cash for years, and Eternal's ability to report a consolidated profit for the year to March 2025 was read by the market as proof that the unit economics of the two main businesses had turned.^[1]

Investors watch gross order value and contribution margin as closely as reported revenue, because those two measures show whether growth is being bought with discounts. By July 2025 Blinkit's transaction value had passed the food delivery business, which means the fastest growing part of the group is also the part with the heaviest capital spending.^[11]

The year to March 2025 was the first in which the group could point to profit alongside growth. For most of its life Zomato had reported losses, as have most Indian consumer internet companies of its generation, and crossing into profit changed how the company is judged: from a growth story that might eventually make money to a business that is making money while it grows.^[1]

Shareholding and ownership

Eternal is a publicly traded company. Its shares are listed on the National Stock Exchange and the Bombay Stock Exchange under the ticker ETERNAL, previously ZOMATO, and the stock is a constituent of the Nifty 50 and the BSE Sensex.^[1]

The largest identified public shareholders include Info Edge, the Naukri parent that backed Zomato from its earliest years and once held more than half the company, and founder Deepinder Goyal. Uber received a 9.99 per cent stake when it sold its Indian food delivery business to Zomato in 2020, and Ant Financial was a major investor before the listing.^[1][3][7]

The shareholding history traces the company's funding path. Info Edge invested about 16.7 million dollars between 2010 and 2013 and held a 57.9 per cent stake by February 2013. Rounds between 2014 and 2015 raised more than 170 million dollars from investors including Sequoia Capital, Vy Capital and Temasek, and a 200 million dollar cheque from Ant Financial in 2018 made the company a unicorn. A 250 million dollar round in 2021, led by Tiger Global, set a pre-IPO valuation of 5.4 billion dollars.^[1][2][7]

Because the company is index heavy, its shares are held by a wide range of Indian and foreign institutional investors through mutual funds and index trackers. That makes the stock sensitive to changes in quarterly order values, especially at Blinkit, since index funds must hold it regardless of how any single quarter looks.^[1][11]

Employees and offices

Eternal's corporate headquarters is in Gurugram, Haryana, where the group's product, engineering, finance and leadership teams sit. The delivery business adds a much larger flexible workforce: the delivery partners who carry orders are classified as independent contractors rather than employees, which is the arrangement at the centre of most of the scrutiny the company faces.^[1]

Corporate headcount is only part of the picture. Blinkit's dark stores employ pickers and packers, Hyperpure runs warehouses and cold chain teams, and the delivery marketplace depends on a network of riders whose numbers run into the hundreds of thousands across India. The company has argued that its platforms have created more than a lakh of direct and indirect jobs in India.^[1]

The workforce is one reason the group's labour practices attract attention. When Blinkit changed payout structures in 2023, riders in the National Capital Region struck and deliveries stopped in parts of the city, showing how quickly a dispute with a contractor workforce becomes an operational problem.^[1]

The corporate side of the business is concentrated in Gurugram, where hiring is weighted towards engineering, product, data and finance roles. Much of the operating work, from dark store picking to delivery, is done by people who are not on the company's payroll, which keeps the fixed cost base low and shifts the cost of demand swings onto the flexible workforce.^[1]

Acquisitions and joint ventures

• Urbanspoon, acquired in 2015, brought restaurant listings in the United States, Canada and Australia and gave Zomato its first serious presence outside India.^[1][4]
• Runnr, acquired in 2017, was a delivery startup that let Zomato bring food logistics in house instead of depending on partners such as Delhivery.^[1][5]
• Wotu Technologies, acquired and rebranded as Hyperpure, became the group's restaurant supply business.^[1]
• Uber Eats India, acquired in January 2020 in an all-stock deal, consolidated the food delivery market and gave Uber a 9.99 per cent stake in Zomato.^[3]
• Blinkit, formerly Grofers, acquired in June 2022 for 568 million dollars, became the quick-commerce arm and later the group's largest business by transaction value.^[1][11]
• Wasteland Entertainment and Orbgen Technologies, bought from Paytm in August 2024 for about 244.2 million dollars, provided the ticketing assets behind the District app.^[8][10]

Services and ideas that did not last

Not everything the company has launched has survived, and the list of products it has closed is a useful guide to what the business can and cannot do. The pattern is consistent: experiments that used the existing delivery network and the existing customers were kept, and experiments that needed a new kind of operation were shut.^[13]

The most visible attempt was Zomato Market. Between April and July 2020, during the first COVID-19 lockdown, the company delivered groceries and essentials in more than 80 Indian cities, which was the moment it first looked like an online grocery business rather than a restaurant app. It was wound down once lockdown demand faded, and grocery was only revisited seriously when Blinkit was acquired two years later.^[13]

Alcohol delivery was the quicker attempt. In May 2020 the company began delivering alcohol in West Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha, markets where the rules allowed it, and pulled out in April 2021 saying the unit economics and the scalability were not good enough. The same pandemic period produced contactless dining at partner restaurants, a feature that lost its purpose as soon as restaurants reopened.^[13]

Two later products ran for about two years each. Legends, an inter-city food delivery service that carried dishes between cities, launched in August 2022 and was discontinued two years later. Xtreme, a merchant focused service for sending small parcels, launched in October 2023 and was closed after the company concluded that demand was not sufficient. Neither was a failure of technology. Both were businesses with no order density behind them, and density is the only thing that makes delivery cheap.^[13]

The company also retreated abroad. In November 2021 it announced that it would stop operating in every country except India and the United Arab Emirates, and by early 2024 it had liquidated more than 10 overseas subsidiaries, most of them restaurant discovery businesses that had come with the acquisitions of the mid 2010s. Its food delivery business in the UAE had already been sold to Talabat in March 2019, which left the UAE as the only market outside India where the Zomato brand still trades.^[13]

The early years had one idea that did not travel either. In 2011, on the back of the new .xxx domains, the company briefly ran zomato.xxx, a site of food photography, which quietly disappeared as Zomato settled into being a serious restaurant business.^[13]

The willingness to close things is unusual in Indian consumer internet, where a founder is often too attached to a product to let it go. Zomato's record reads instead as a company that treats each product as a test of unit economics rather than as a brand to be defended, which is how a restaurant listing site ended up running grocery warehouses a decade later.^[13]

Competition

In food delivery, Eternal's main competitor is Swiggy, and the two companies have traded the lead in different cities for years. The market has been a duopoly since Zomato bought Uber Eats' India business in 2020, which reduced the number of platforms competing for the same restaurants and customers.^[3]

In quick commerce the field is more crowded. Blinkit competes with Zepto and with Swiggy's Instamart, and more recently with the quick-delivery arms of large retail and e-commerce groups. Unlike food delivery, where the restaurant supplies the food, quick commerce requires the operator to buy, store and move inventory, so the contest is about supply chains and warehouse economics as much as about the app.^[11]

In going out, District competes with established ticketing and booking platforms that had the market largely to themselves for two decades. In restaurant supply, Hyperpure competes with traditional wholesale distributors and with newer supply chain startups, a market with many local players and no single dominant brand.^[1][10]

The competitive pressure that matters most to the share price is in quick commerce, because that is where the group is spending its capital. Growth in Blinkit is expensive, and rivals bidding for the same dark store locations and the same customers can compress margins across the industry.^[11]

Controversies and criticism

The company's most persistent criticism concerns its delivery partners. Because riders are engaged as independent contractors rather than employees, they fall outside the protections that come with formal employment, and the classification has been the subject of public debate in India. In 2023, hundreds of delivery partners working for Blinkit went on strike in the National Capital Region over changes to how they were paid, and deliveries stopped in parts of the city until the dispute was addressed.^[1]

In March 2024 the company launched a Pure Veg fleet, with delivery partners in green uniforms delivering only from vegetarian restaurants. Critics said the arrangement segregated riders and echoed caste based discrimination, and that riders in the standard red uniforms risked harassment in neighbourhoods where food choices are treated as a marker of identity. Chief executive Deepinder Goyal withdrew the green uniforms and boxes within 24 hours, though the routing system that separated vegetarian orders was kept.^[1]

The company has also faced questions about how its platforms treat restaurant partners, including commission levels and the way listings and rankings are decided. These complaints are common across delivery marketplaces, where the platform sets the terms for businesses that depend on it for demand.^[1]

Regulatory attention on gig work has grown as delivery platforms have become part of daily life in Indian cities. Any rule that reclassifies delivery partners, requires benefits or sets minimum earnings would raise costs across the industry, and Eternal, as one of the largest operators, would absorb a significant share of that increase.^[1]

Restaurant partners have their own complaints. Because the platform decides how listings are ranked and what a commission costs, restaurants argue that they have little room to negotiate, and several have said that discount programmes designed to win customers are paid for out of their margins. The company's position is that the platform brings demand that the restaurant could not reach on its own.^[1][6]

Feeding India and the group's social work

Eternal has run a non profit arm since it acquired Feeding India in July 2019. Feeding India had been started in 2014 by Ankit Kawatra as an organisation focused on hunger relief, and it worked through volunteers who collected surplus food and turned it into distributed meals. The acquisition put a charity inside a listed consumer internet company, which is unusual in India and gives the group a social programme that sits entirely outside its commercial products.^[13]

By May 2022 the organisation said it was serving more than 200,000 meals every day under what it calls its Daily Feeding Program. That scale is possible because the group already owns much of the machinery a food charity needs: restaurant relationships in hundreds of cities, kitchens inside the Hyperpure supply chain and a workforce that understands how to move food quickly.^[13]

The group has also used the platform to raise money and attention rather than only to hand out food. Feeding India organised benefit concerts in Mumbai to raise awareness about malnutrition, headlined by Post Malone in 2022 and by Dua Lipa in 2024, which put the charity in front of audiences a normal non profit campaign would struggle to reach.^[13]

For a company of this size the programme does several jobs at once. It creates a visible community programme for a business that is otherwise judged on delivery speed and order volumes, it gives restaurant partners a way to donate surplus food instead of discarding it, and it gives employees a cause the company can point to when it is asked about its wider impact.^[1][13]

It does not answer the criticism the group faces over how it treats the people who do the delivering. The most persistent public criticism of the company concerns the classification of delivery partners as independent contractors and the payout changes that led to strikes, and a hunger relief programme sits in a different part of the business from that argument.^[1][13]

The programme also fits the group's oldest asset, which is its map of restaurants. A charity that rescues surplus food needs to know which kitchens have food left over at the end of a service and which neighbourhoods need it, and that is the kind of local information Zomato has been collecting since the founders uploaded menus by hand in 2008.^[1][13]

The honest way to read corporate philanthropy of this kind is to hold two facts at once. Feeding India is a real operation with a measurable output in meals per day, and it is also a brand asset for a company that gains from being liked. In most large Indian companies both statements are true together.^[13]

Data security and privacy

Eternal's platforms hold a great deal of personal data: telephone numbers, delivery addresses, order histories and, through Blinkit, a record of what a household buys every week. The company has had two serious security incidents on the record, and both matter because they set the terms on which the group's data practices are judged.^[13]

The first came on 4 June 2015, when a security researcher broke into the Zomato website and reached information about 62.5 million users. The data included telephone numbers, email addresses and private Instagram photographs that the researcher could pull through access tokens the site had stored. The company said it fixed the vulnerability within 48 hours of it becoming apparent.^[13]

The second was reported on 18 May 2017, when a security blog claimed that more than 17 million user records, including email addresses and password hashes, had been taken. The company said no payment information and no credit card details had been stolen, and the attacker removed the data from the dark web after Zomato agreed to start a bug bounty programme.^[13]

Two details from those incidents explain how the group's security posture changed. The first is that neither incident involved stored card data, because the company did not hold it, which is the design most Indian platforms adopted after the payment scandals of the early 2010s. The second is the bug bounty programme, which turned the informal market for stolen data into a channel for reporting flaws to the company instead.^[13]

The stakes rose as the group grew into quick commerce. A Blinkit order reveals a home address and a pattern of purchases, and the group now runs a ticketing surface through District as well as two shopping apps, so the data in question is no longer just a restaurant review history. That is a different level of exposure from the Foodiebay years, when the only information the company held was a menu.^[1][13]

Indian rules on personal data have tightened since. A data protection law was passed in 2023, with its rules still being brought into force, and platforms of this size now answer to obligations that did not exist when the 2015 breach happened. For a business that handles addresses, telephone numbers and payment relationships for tens of millions of people, security is now a compliance question as well as an engineering one.^[13]

Reading the numbers

Three numbers tell most of the Eternal story. The first is revenue of 20,243 crore rupees for the year to March 2025, which shows how large the group has become. The second is net profit of 527 crore rupees for the same year, which shows that the growth is no longer being bought entirely with losses. The third is the shift in transaction value towards Blinkit, which shows where the growth is coming from now.^[1][11]

The caution is in the mix. Quick commerce books the full value of the goods it sells as revenue while keeping a thin margin on each item, so a rising revenue line can coexist with heavy capital spending on warehouses and inventory. Food delivery, by contrast, earns a commission on someone else's product and turns a larger share of each order into profit.^[1][11]

That is why the market watches contribution margin and gross order value rather than headline revenue alone. A quarter in which Blinkit grows fast but spends heavily to do so can look strong on revenue and weak on profit, and the reverse is true for a quarter in which food delivery does the heavy lifting.^[1][11]

One comparison is worth keeping in mind when reading the group's results. Food delivery in India settled into a duopoly after 2020, so the competitive pressure on commissions is bounded. Quick commerce has no such comfort: Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart, along with the quick delivery arms of large retailers, are all building dark stores in the same neighbourhoods, and the cost of winning a customer in that market is set by the most aggressive competitor rather than by the leader. For a group that reports one set of numbers across both businesses, the mix between them decides what the headline profit actually means.^[11]

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