‘Urban Company’s revenue may double’

‘Demand higher than pre-COVID level’

Home services aggregator Urban Company, which has onboarded 6,000 service partners over the past two months, is expecting to double its revenue in the current financial year, driven by higher demand for services such as men’s grooming, home cleaning and home painting, than before the pandemic.

“We’ve been fortunate and the business has come back very strongly after the lockdown,” Varun Khaitan, co-founder, Urban Company, said in an interview.

“We are optimistic about the trajectory here onwards as more consumption happens. Consumers will come back to us in even larger numbers, and by the end of the financial year, we hope to be twice of what we were in March, in terms of revenue,” he added. The firm had posted a revenue of ₹216 crore for FY20, a growth of 103% over FY19.

With the onboarding of service providers over the last two months, the total number now stands at about 30,000 in 18 cities.

“This [6,000 service providers], I think, is sizeable and most of these people are those who had lost their previous jobs because their workplace had to shut down. From what we understand, 30-40% offline salons and spas have shut down and may not open,” he said.

He added pre-COVID-19, the platform was providing 7.5 lakh services a month and in October, this number was expected to rise to 9.5 lakh services.

The growth has been driven by services such as appliance repair, home cleaning — which is at almost double the pre-COVID-19 level, home painting — expected to be four times pre-COVID-19 level, men’s grooming and haircuts — which is seven times the pre-COVID-19 level.

“Some of the growth has also been fuelled by the festive demand. The only services which are still catching up are services like women’s beauty and spa massage because understandably, these are very high touch services but still the recovery of these services is much more than one would have anticipated.”

Mr. Khaitan added that Urban Company was spending about ₹4-5 crore on PPEs which were sent out to all service providers every two weeks.

Further, the platform is planning to expand operations in 12 new cities by next summer.

“Internationally, we are good in these three countries [UAE, Australia and Singapore] and will be launching in another new country sometime next year.”

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