The revenue growth remains a priority for the recently listed Nykaa said Anchit Nayar, chief executive officer of the company's Beauty E-commerce segment, amid concerns from market analysts that the company is not focused on profitability.
In a panel discussion at the ASCENT eConclave 2021 Nayar, he said that profitability needs to be considered and is a part of the company's culture in terms of respect of capital and delivery of return on equity.
Growth remains a priority for us, and top-line growth remains the priority. Profitability is something that needs to be considered and that's how we want to build the culture internally. There needs to be respect for capital. There is respect for shareholders and investors. Nayar said there is a culture for respect of capital and delivery return on equity.
FSN E-Commerce Ventures Ltd, the company that operates the Indian beauty startup Nykaa, saw its profit fall by 96 per cent in the second quarter of September 2021. Its revenues were up 47 per cent on a year-on-year basis during this period.
He said that the omnichannel of online and offline will coexist for the company, as luxury products require an element of trial for the customer.
Gaurav Agarwal, co-founder of 1 mg, an online pharmacy company, pointed out that there was a lot of innovation that online can bring to offline. He said that the company is going to bring innovation into the Omni channel space over the next few months and pilots were going on for that. Bring in a digital doctor to a pharmacy to reduce what happens traditionally offline with self-medication, etc. The quotient of safety is increasing when it comes to collections, quality of collection centers, etc. He said that there was a tremendous amount of innovation that can happen if we think of these two channels as the access point for customers to get value.
There is confidence in the start-up community over going public because of the flurry of IPOs in the start-up space.
In the next couple of years, Harshil Mathur CEO and co-founder Razorpay said they would plan to take the company public. He stated that they want to scale up their banking and lending side of the business first, and they want to raise money as a full-fledged financial ecosystem company, rather than just as a payments company, which is the core of our business today. We are a couple of years away from that. We have seen several IPOs come in the last couple of months. Mathur said at the panel discussion that the investors have responded to showing that the Indian investor is too smart to understand what a company does and what the company's fundamentals are. We have seen IPOs like Nykaa and Zomato get rewarded very aggressively, and we have seen downsides as well, which reaffirms my faith in the public markets of India, said Mathur.
Paytm, which raised a record amount of Rs 18,300 crore in its IPO, saw its shares drop 27 per cent during its first trading day last week. The valuation of Nykaa has been surprised by the fact that it has been trading at 1600 times its earnings.
Vamsi Krishna, CEO and co-founder of the Edtech startup Vedantu, said they are nearly two years away from an IPO. One of the key success metrics for us is to create a company that continues to innovate beyond our lifetime and education.
He said that the recent IPOs have instilled confidence in the start-up entrepreneurs. Most start-ups would need to look at the overseas market for listing. Krishna said that's changed now.