Indian Generalist Quikr Suffers Another Poor Year as it Cuts Back

Indian generalist classifieds operator Quikr saw its revenues shrink by 45% over its FY21 with the company also cutting expenses by 76% over the period. Despite the increased financial discipline and a 90% reduction in losses compared to FY20, Quikr still lost Rs 55.48 crore ($7.3 million) for the year.

According to the company's financial filings, Quikr's EBITDA margin over the last 12 months has been around -54% and its main advertising revenue stream was down 40% to $3.5m in FY21 while income from referral fees also came down 33.62% to $3.6m over the year.

Founded in 2008 by Praney Chulet and Jiby Thomas the Bangalore based company was one of India's first online tech unicorns and a company that has attracted a great deal of VC investment over the years. The platform has traditionally been strong in the categories of blue-collar job ads, used goods and vehicles.

Quikr has a history of being proactive in its M&A strategy for its key verticals and in 2016 acquired real estate vertical CommonFloor in a $200m all-stock deal. At the time, CommonFloor employed some 1,000 people and had a legitimate claim to be India's largest online real estate vertical having received investment from Google's investment division the previous year.

Quikr subsequently squandered any advantage that its real estate vertical might have had and today finds itself challenging well below more popular portals such as Magic Bricks, 99acres and Housing.com

In 2020 one of the company's main backers, the Swedish investment firm Kinnevik, downgraded Quikr's valuation by 45% to around $577 million following poor performance and issues around fraudulently inflated revenues in some verticals.

Since then the company has pared down operations and has undergone a cauterising restricting process while reducing its advertising spend by around 80% for the year.