Shiprocket swings to a ₹60 lakh profit as revenue grows 35% and its debt is repaid

01How Shiprocket earns

Shiprocket owns no trucks. It connects small online sellers, brands selling from their own websites and social media rather than marketplaces, to more than 42 courier companies and about 250 other partners, and picks a courier for each parcel. “We charge the merchants on consumption. As and when they send a shipment, or as and when they make a checkout, they pay us,” the chief executive, Saahil Goel, said on its first results call in September.⁴ Much of that money passes through: its largest expense, the cost of merchant solutions, was 73.5% of revenue in the quarter, by our arithmetic. Even IPO money paid courier bills: ₹60.6 crore set aside for general corporate purposes went to Blue Dart (₹40.8 crore) and Delhivery (₹19.8 crore), the monitoring agency’s report shows.¹

It reports two businesses. Core, mainly domestic shipping, earned ₹461.5 crore, up 25%, at an adjusted EBITDA margin of 12.8% (operating profit before stock-option costs, depreciation, interest and other income). Emerging, which is checkout and marketing software, cross-border shipping and fulfilment for brands, earned ₹212.2 crore, up 61%, and lost ₹44.9 crore on the same measure.¹³

02What turned the loss into a profit

The chief financial officer, Tanmay Kumar, named three drivers: scale in Core, growth in Emerging, and “a stronger balance sheet: IPO proceeds retired all our borrowings, which cut finance costs, and the surplus now earns interest income.”² Finance costs fell to ₹4.9 crore from ₹6.7 crore. Of ₹825.0 crore of net IPO proceeds, ₹210 crore repaid overdrafts at HDFC Bank (₹133.5 crore) and ICICI Bank (₹76.5 crore); ₹554.4 crore was unspent on 30 September, ₹550 crore of it in bank deposits paying 6.10–6.75% a year.¹

03Where the growth comes from

Two lines grew fastest. Marketing software, now sold as Fastrr (ads, checkout and Engage), grew 102%, yet fewer than 10% of Shiprocket’s merchants use one of its products: about 20,000 use checkout and fewer than 250 the ads product, counted over the past twelve months. Omnichannel grew 79% as brands used Shiprocket to restock quick-commerce dark stores, the small warehouses that deliver in minutes: trucks arrive in booked slots at the warehouses of platforms such as Blinkit and Zepto, with the platforms’ purchase orders visible in real time.²³ Cross-border shipping grew 9%. Emerging is now 31% of revenue, from 26%, and 9.3% of Core merchants use one of its products, from 7.9%.³

The rest of the IPO money is allotted: ₹205.8 crore to marketing and ₹159.8 crore to technology, mainly for Emerging, over the three years to March 2029, and ₹249.4 crore to acquisitions and general purposes. The filing also discloses that on 16 September an outsider emailed the company claiming access to its systems and company information; Shiprocket reported it to CERT-In and the police, found no payment card or bank account information, and says its assessments so far show no impact on its core or financial systems.¹