Delhivery is planning to launch a network of multi-tenant dark stores for “rapid in-city delivery” for e-commerce companies.
During a post-earnings conference, Delhivery founder and CEO Sahil Barua said that the logistic unicorn company will also provide e-commerce companies along with delivery services that will shorten the delivery cycle to 2-4 hours.
“… the intention is…to launch a network of shared dark store warehousing, which will be available to e-commerce companies to use on a multi-tenant basis, and then to provide a rapid local delivery…,” Barua said.
He mentioned that 30-minute or one-hour deliveries are unlikely to disrupt the broader e-commerce space. Only a few “narrow categories”, and within that a set of narrow stock-keeping units, would require this service. For such categories, Delhivery aims to set up dark stores.
Following this he added that multiple ecommerce companies and D2C brands can also use these dark stores to share the costs.
“It’s essentially the process of creating micro fulfilment for most direct-to-consumer brands…,” he added.
As per reports, earlier this year the startup was looking to branch out beyond serving ecommerce orders to meet the demand in the quick commerce space as companies like Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy, and Instamart are driving the shift.
However, Barua said that the quick commerce space doesn’t need to work out for logistics players in term of unit economics. He believes that in terms of category penetration and geographical presence quick commerce’s share in online transaction is still pretty low beyond grocery-related purchases.
This came into spotlight when Blinkit CEO Albinder Dhindsa made a statement on the ecommerce vs quick commerce debate. In Zomato’s shareholder’s letter, Dhindsa said that Blinkit has been seeing a shift of non-grocery users from ecommerce players.
Barua stated that the unit economic margins are considerably lower for products that are favoured by quick commerce users compared to that of ecommerce platforms. “I don’t believe that the unit economics for sub one hour or sub 30-minute delivery for low value products with no significant value density and distances higher than three or four kilometres in an urban environment like India are going to work out,” Barua said.
More than this another logistics major, Shiprocket recently said that the startup was not focusing on quick commerce but rapid deliveries for offline stores.
Meanwhile, in the first quarter of FY25, Delhivery posted a net profit of INR 54.3 Cr against a loss of INR 69 Cr in the previous quarter. Operating revenue grew 5% to INR 2,172 Cr in Q1 FY25 from INR 2,076 Cr in Q4 FY24.
