A convenience to buy a thing and have it delivered in 10 minutes becomes a habit.
The most tangible thing that converts as sales for a company is Habit.
That said, who in India is poised to make the most of this habit?
We have 2 listed players - Eternal (blinkit), Swiggy,
A few unlisted player - Zepto, bigbasket (tata), flipkart (minutes), amazon (now) and a few other players trying to catch up.
To track the growth of quick commerce, we can only compare how the listed players are doing - Eternal Vs Swiggy.
Both have declared results last week and the answer is starting to emerge clearly:
Blinkit is pulling away.
In the September quarter Blinkit did ₹20,940 Cr of net order value, up 79% from a year ago. Instamart did ₹6,594 Cr, up 35%. A year ago Blinkit was about 2.4 times Instamart’s size. Today it is 3.2 times. The gap is not closing, it is getting wider.
Another way to look at it. Over the last twelve months Blinkit added ₹9,261 Cr of quarterly order value. Instamart added ₹1,702 Cr. For every rupee of new business Instamart won, Blinkit won more than five.
| Blinkit | Instamart | |
|---|---|---|
| NOV (Q2FY27) | ₹20,940 Cr | ₹6,594 Cr |
| YoY growth | 79% | 35% |
| QoQ growth | 22% | 13% |
| Adj. EBITDA | +₹184 Cr | –₹895 Cr |
| Dark stores | 2,751 | 1,240 |
| Monthly users | 3.7 Cr | 1.5 Cr |
Coming back to habit. Blinkit has 3.7 Cr people ordering every month, almost double what it had a year ago. Its stores are getting busier even as it opens new ones: order value per store per day went from about ₹7.7 lakh to ₹9 lakh in a year. By my rough math Instamart is at around ₹6 lakh per store per day. That is what habit looks like in the numbers: the same store, more orders.
And Blinkit is doing this while making money. It is now in its fourth straight quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA. Instamart lost ₹895 Cr this quarter, up from ₹778 Cr in June. Blinkit has raised its store target to over 3,500 by March 2027 and about 5,000 by March 2028, and says profits from food delivery and quick commerce let it fund that pace comfortably.
To be fair to Swiggy, management says Instamart’s losses peaked this quarter and expects margins to improve by about 1% of GOV next quarter. The move to Indian-owned status lets Instamart hold its own inventory, which they expect to add about 0.8% to margin. Their own maths says breakeven needs about ₹60,000 Cr of annualised order value, 2.3 times where they are today. Blinkit is already running at about ₹84,000 Cr annualised.
What could spoil the story: Blinkit’s margin is still thin at 0.9% of order value, and Swiggy itself says competition is not easing anytime soon, with Flipkart and Amazon spending hard through the festive season. Zepto is the big unlisted unknown.
For now, though, the habit is forming on Blinkit, and Blinkit is profitable while it forms.
Would love to hear what others think could change this picture.