Top-line growth remains a priority, says Nykaa's Anchit Nayar

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 the market analysts that the company is not focused on profitability.

Speaking at a panel discussion at the ASCENT eConclave 2021 Nayar, however added that profitability also needs to be considered and is a large part of the company's culture in terms of respect of capital and delivery of return on equity.

"For us, top-line growth remains the priority…Growth remains paramount. Profitability also needs to be considered and again…that's how we want to build the culture internally. There needs to be a respect for capital. There is respect for shareholders and investors. Internally, there is a culture of frugality. There is a culture for respect of capital and delivery return on equity…",said Nayar.

FSN E-Commerce Ventures Ltd, the entity that operates the Indian beauty startup Nykaa, saw its profit fall 96 per cent in the second quarter ended September 2021. However, its revenues were up 47 per cent on a year on year basis during this period.

He added 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,1mg, an online pharmacy company pointed out that there was a significant amount of innovation that online can bring to offline. He added that over the next few months the company is going to bring in innovation into the Omni channel space and pilots were going on for that. "For example, bringing in a digital doctor to a pharmacy to reduce what happens traditionally in offline with self-medication, etc. Increasing the quotient of safety when it comes to collections, and quality of collection centers, etc. There is a tremendous amount of innovation that can happen if we think of these two channels as access point for customers to get value," he added.

The flurry of IPOs in the start-up space have instilled confidence in the start-up community over going public.

Harshil Mathur CEO and co-founder Razorpay said that they would plan to take the company public in a couple of years. He added that they want to scale up their banking and lending side of the business first and want to raise money as a full-fledged financial eco-system company, rather than just as a payments company, "which is the core part of our business today." "We are a couple of years away from that. We have seen multiple IPOs come in in the last couple of months. And, how the investors have responded goes on to show that the Indian investor is too smart to understand what a company does and what the company's fundamentals are," said Mathur at the panel discussion titled 'TECHnically Speaking.  "We have seen IPOs like Nykaa and Zomato get rewarded really aggressively, and we have seen downsides as well…this reaffirms my faith in the public markets of India that the investor," said Mathur.

Paytm, which raised a record Rs 18,300 crore in its IPO, saw its shares drop 27 per cent during its first trading day last week.  Meanwhile Nykaa's valuation at 1600 times its earnings has surprised investors.

Vamsi Krishna, CEO and co-founder of Edtech startup Vedantu said that they are nearly two years away from an IPO. "One of the core success metrics for us is to create a company which continues to innovate beyond even our lifetime and education.

He added that the recent IPOs have in fact instilled confidence in the start-up entrepreneurs. "Most start-ups would earlier need to look at overseas market for listing. But that has changed now," added Krishna.

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