Category: Excerpts

There are good arguments to be made against investing in Zomato at is proposed offering price, but one of the emptiest, and laziest, is that it is losing money right now.

I know that for some value investors, trained to believe that anything that trades at more than 10 or 15 times earnings or at well above book value, this argument suffices, but given how badly this has served them over the last two decades, they should revisit the argument.  

The biggest reason that Zomato is losing money is because it is a young company that is trying to take advantage of a market with immense growth potential, not because it cannot make money. In fact, if Zomato cut back on customer acquisitions and platform investments, my guess is that it could show an accounting profit, but if it did so, it would be worth a fraction of what it is today. 

–Prof Aswath Damodaran