Zomato Now a Profitable Company, Introduces Zero Commission for Food Ordering in India

Restaurant search and review website Zomato is now a profitable company in all of the 24 markets it operates in, founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said on Monday. The company says it will now work to give back to the community, starting with India, where it has waived off the commission it charges restaurants on orders.

Zomato's core advertising business in its three key regions - India, Southeast Asia, and Middle East - is generating "enough cash" to cover for the millions of dollars of investments it has made in other regions as it expanded its presence worldwide, the Haryana-headquartered company said. It also noted that is profitable across all of its businesses.

Not all the restaurants will be able to avail the zero commission offering from Zomato, the company said, adding that it has a set of predefined criteria such as the number of orders a restaurant processes with Zomato on a weekly basis, and customer feedback. Zomato didn't share how many orders were required to quality for the program, but citing its own data, it said 70 percent of its partnered restaurants should quality for it.

The announcement comes on the heels of its acquisition of logistics and food delivery startup Runnr, which was announced last week. "With the combination of Zomato and Runnr, we have everything in the stack of building a delightful food delivery service - end to end - listings, discovery, reviews, ordering, and now, logistics," Goyal said at the time.

Zomato had achieved an operation break-even for its business in six markets - India, Indonesia, the UAE, Lebanon, Qatar, and the Philippines - in February this year.