Eternal Q1 FY27 Results: Why Revenue Grew 182% but Profit Stayed Thin

Eternal’s Q1 FY27 revenue from operations rose from ₹7,167 crore to ₹20,211 crore in Altys’ official-XBRL history. That is growth of about 182%.

Profit attributable to owners rose from ₹25 crore to ₹92 crore. It improved, but remained less than half a percent of reported revenue.

How can revenue nearly triple while the bottom line stays so thin?

Because Eternal is a collection of businesses with different accounting and unit economics, and because a change in the way commerce flows through the company can make reported revenue grow much faster than the underlying customer activity.

Start with four different measures

Measure	What it tries to capture	Why it is not interchangeable
Net order value, or NOV	Value of customer transactions under the company’s definition	Closer to marketplace activity; not company revenue
Reported revenue	Accounting revenue recognised in the financial statements	Can change when the company becomes principal rather than agent
Adjusted revenue	Management’s operating presentation	Useful, but definition is company-specific
Adjusted EBITDA	Operating profit before selected items under management’s definition	Not statutory PAT or cash flow

Eternal’s Q1 FY27 shareholder update reported B2C NOV of ₹31,120 crore, up 54% year on year. It reported consolidated adjusted revenue of ₹20,648 crore, up 173%, but said like-for-like growth was 66%.

Those three growth rates—54%, 173% and 66%—describe different denominators. None should be silently substituted for another.

Principal versus agent: the accounting hinge

Suppose a marketplace facilitates a ₹1,000 basket and earns a ₹100 commission.

If it is an agent, it may record the ₹100 commission as revenue. If it becomes the principal, controlling the goods before sale and bearing relevant inventory risk, it may record the full ₹1,000 sale as revenue and the ₹900 product cost separately.

The customer transaction is still ₹1,000. But reported revenue can move from ₹100 to ₹1,000 without the customer buying ten times more.

This is why Eternal’s like-for-like growth is important. Quick commerce increasingly includes inventory-led activity. As the accounting mix changes, reported revenue can grow far faster than NOV and far faster than gross profit.

A bigger accounting top line is not automatically a bigger economic margin pool.

The comparison to make is not reported revenue alone. It is NOV, gross or contribution profit, adjusted EBITDA, working capital and cash, each on a consistent basis.

Food delivery and quick commerce earn differently

Zomato food delivery is mainly a marketplace. Restaurants produce the food, delivery partners move it, and the platform earns commissions, fees and advertising revenue.

Blinkit quick commerce operates local fulfilment infrastructure and may participate more directly in the merchandise economics. It needs dark stores, inventory, pickers, delivery capacity and technology. Advertising and supplier income can add high-margin revenue, but store expansion creates cost before local demand matures.

The group therefore combines:

• A more mature food-delivery marketplace
• A faster-growing, infrastructure-heavy quick-commerce network
• District’s going-out and ticketing activity
• Hyperpure’s business-to-business supply operation

One consolidated revenue number cannot reveal which engine created the incremental rupee or how durable its margin is.

Q1 FY27: the reported bridge

Altys’ point-in-time financial history shows:

Metric	Q1 FY26	Q1 FY27	Change
Revenue from operations	₹7,167 cr	₹20,211 cr	+182.0%
EBITDA as filed in XBRL	₹115 cr	₹594 cr	+416.5%
PAT attributable to owners	₹25 cr	₹92 cr	+268.0%
PAT margin on reported revenue	0.35%	0.46%	+0.11 pp

Management reported adjusted EBITDA of ₹555 crore, up 223% year on year. That differs from XBRL EBITDA because management and filed definitions are not identical. The right response is to keep both labels—not force them to agree.

Profit grew faster than revenue from a small base. Yet PAT remained thin because quick-commerce expansion, fulfilment costs, newer businesses, depreciation, employee costs and other below-EBITDA items still absorb much of the gross economic value.

Growth quality lives below revenue

For Eternal, a useful quarterly scorecard has at least five levels.

1. Demand

Track transacting customers, order frequency and NOV. Eternal said more than 30 million monthly users were already on the platform in the Q1 FY27 call. User count matters only when connected to retention, frequency and economics.

2. Network density

Track stores, orders per store, basket size and delivery radius. A new store is initially a cost centre. The question is whether mature cohorts reach healthy throughput and contribution.

3. Monetisation

Track take rates, delivery and platform fees, advertising and supplier income. Rising monetisation can improve profit, but excessive fees can affect customer or merchant behaviour.

4. Contribution and adjusted EBITDA

Track each business separately. A profitable food-delivery engine can finance quick-commerce expansion while consolidated profitability appears modest.

5. Statutory profit and cash

Reconcile adjusted measures to reported EBITDA, depreciation, finance income, tax, working capital, capex and cash flow. A business can report adjusted profit and still consume cash during rapid expansion.

Why a simple P/E can mislead

Eternal’s trailing earnings are small relative to the scale of transactions and investment. A P/E based on that denominator can become extremely high or unstable. It also mixes a mature marketplace with businesses still being built.

That does not make valuation impossible. It means the model must be explicit. Analysts can value mature food delivery on sustainable cash economics, model quick commerce using store cohorts and eventual margins, and treat newer businesses with probability-weighted scenarios. The assumptions—not the elegance of the spreadsheet—are the hard part.

What can go wrong

• Reported revenue growth can be mistaken for demand growth.
• Store expansion can hide weak mature-store economics.
• Competition can force discounts, fee waivers and faster capex.
• Advertising growth can be less durable if merchant returns weaken.
• Working capital can deteriorate as inventory ownership rises.
• Adjusted EBITDA can be mistaken for statutory profit or free cash flow.
• Investors can use one multiple across four businesses at different stages.

The research takeaway

Eternal’s Q1 headline is not “revenue nearly tripled.” The useful conclusion is more precise: customer transaction value grew strongly, accounting revenue grew much faster because the business and revenue-recognition mix changed, and profit improved from a small base while remaining thin relative to the reported top line.

That is exactly the kind of company where continuous monitoring beats a one-time summary. Altys keeps reported financials, operating KPIs, management definitions and prior claims side by side, with source links and Excel exports, so an analyst can see whether growth is becoming denser, more profitable and more cash-generative each quarter.

Related reading

• The Zomato (Eternal) Business Model Explained
• Why Revenue Grew but the Stock Fell
• Why P/E Alone Is Not Enough

Data note

Financial figures use Altys’ point-in-time warehouse and Eternal’s official Q1 FY27 disclosures available through 12 September 2026. Quarterly figures are consolidated and rounded. NOV, adjusted revenue and adjusted EBITDA use Eternal’s definitions; they are not equivalent to statutory revenue, EBITDA or cash flow.

This article is educational. Altys Labs is not a registered research analyst or investment adviser, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security.