Eternal Limited Q4 FY26 Results: Zomato's Parent Just Had Its Best Quarter Yet

Profit up 346% year on year. Blinkit hit 2,243 stores. 109 million Indians transacted over $10 billion through the platform in FY26. The company that started with a motorbike and a scanner is now a different beast entirely.

The numbers first

Eternal Limited, formerly known as Zomato, reported consolidated net profit of ₹174 crore for Q4 FY26, up 346% from ₹39 crore in Q4 FY25 and up 71% from ₹102 crore in the previous quarter. A Reuters-LSEG analyst poll had estimated ₹121 crore. The company beat it comfortably.

Consolidated revenue from operations came in at ₹17,292 crore, up 196% year on year from ₹5,833 crore, though the headline comparison is inflated by an accounting shift. From Q1 FY26 onwards, Blinkit moved from a marketplace model to an inventory-led model, which means revenue now captures the full value of goods sold rather than just the commission. On a like-for-like basis, consolidated adjusted revenue grew 64% year on year. That is the more honest number to track.

Consolidated Adjusted EBITDA came in at ₹429 crore, up 160% year on year and up 18% from ₹364 crore in Q3 FY26. The company's closing cash balance stood at ₹17,972 crore, up ₹152 crore quarter on quarter. Shares settled 1.09% higher at ₹258.28 on the NSE post results.

Breaking down each business

There are now four distinct businesses inside Eternal, and each deserves to be read separately.

Zomato, the food delivery platform, reported net order value of ₹9,757 crore, up 18.8% year on year. This is the third consecutive quarter of acceleration after bottoming out in Q1 FY26, and it is inching toward the company's stated long-term target of 20%-plus year on year growth. Gross order value growth was even stronger at 22.5%. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter came in at ₹532 crore, which is 5.5% of NOV, up from 5.2% a year ago. The food delivery business is now genuinely profitable and growing at the same time.

What drove the recovery? From Q2 FY26, the company lowered the minimum order value threshold for free delivery to ₹99 from ₹199 for Gold members, pushed curated assortment for budget-conscious customers, and offered meals under ₹250 in targeted markets. Net average order value per order declined as a result — intentionally. The company is trading lower ticket sizes for higher volumes and a larger addressable market. Revenue per order is still improving, and operating cost efficiencies have kept pace. The margins held.

Blinkit, the quick commerce business, reported NOV of ₹14,386 crore, up 95.4% year on year. It added 216 net new stores in the quarter, ending at 2,243 stores. Adjusted EBITDA improved to ₹37 crore (0.3% of NOV), compared to just ₹4 crore in Q3 FY26, a 9x sequential jump. That progression matters. The Blinkit EBITDA margin chart in the shareholder letter tells the whole story: from -17.8% in FY23 to -3.7% in FY24 to -1.3% in FY25 to -0.6% in FY26 to +0.3% in Q4 FY26. The direction is unambiguous.

Delhi NCR, Blinkit's most mature market, is already approaching the company's guided steady-state margin range of 5 to 6% of NOV. The aggregate number looks modest right now because newer cities are diluting the blended margin as the company expands beyond the top eight markets. That is growth investment, not margin deterioration. CEO Albinder Dhindsa has guided for Blinkit NOV CAGR of 60%-plus over the next three years, which would put the business at 4x its current scale by FY29.

District, the going-out business covering restaurants, movies, sports, and events, reported NOV of ₹2,736 crore, up 46.5% year on year. Adjusted EBITDA losses narrowed to ₹81 crore from ₹121 crore in Q3 FY26, with margins improving to -3.0% from -4.7%. The company cautions against reading too much into individual quarters here since the going-out business is inherently lumpy — IPL skews Q1, events skew Q3, the movie release calendar determines everything in between. The annual growth of 42% for FY26 is the cleaner signal, and the trajectory toward the long-term guidance of $3 billion in NOV and $150 million in Adjusted EBITDA by FY30 remains intact.

Hyperpure, the B2B restaurant supplies business, reported revenue of ₹978 crore in Q4 FY26, down 47% year on year on a reported basis. The headline decline is misleading. From Q2 FY26 onwards, Blinkit's transition to an inventory model shifted a large portion of what was previously classified as Hyperpure revenue into the quick commerce segment. On a like-for-like basis, Hyperpure's restaurant supply revenue grew 37% year on year. Adjusted EBITDA came in at ₹5 crore (up from ₹1 crore in Q3), with margins at 0.5%. Hyperpure crossed into sustained profitability this quarter — quietly, but it counts.

The full year picture

For FY26 as a whole, Eternal reported revenue of ₹54,364 crore (vs ₹20,243 crore in FY25), a number significantly inflated by the Blinkit accounting change. Full year PAT came in at ₹366 crore, down from ₹527 crore in FY25. The decline reflects a heavier investment phase earlier in the year, particularly Q1 FY26 when expansion costs ran ahead of revenue. The quarterly trajectory tells the more relevant story: from a loss in Q1 to ₹102 crore in Q3 to ₹174 crore in Q4. The direction is clear.

The $10 billion number

Deepinder Goyal's founder letter opens with a line that deserves to sit separately from the quarterly numbers: 109 million Indians completed transactions worth over $10 billion through Blinkit, District, and Zomato in FY26. It took 18 years to get here.

The letter then makes a forward projection that is genuinely striking. The first $10 billion in annual NOV took 18 years. The company expects to double to $20 billion in less than two years from here.

This is not a marketing claim. It is backed by observable math. Blinkit's NOV grew at a CAGR of 104% between FY23 and FY26. The quick commerce business is still concentrated in the top 15 to 20 cities and in a narrow set of product categories. Delhi NCR offers close to 80,000 SKUs. The next seven cities offer 50,000-plus. Beyond that, coverage averages around 20,000 SKUs. Geographic expansion, assortment deepening, and demand densification are all still early innings, and each one compounds on the others.

The company also gave a longer-dated profitability target. It took 16 years to reach Adjusted EBITDA profitability in FY24. From there, it expects to reach $1 billion in Adjusted EBITDA by FY29, roughly 8x in five years from a base that is already profitable.

The AI question

The shareholder letter devotes considerable space to the AI question, because investors have been asking it. Will AI chat interfaces displace apps like Zomato and Blinkit? Could an AI agent order your dinner and cut out the platform entirely?

Goyal's response is worth reading carefully, because it is not dismissive. He acknowledges the risk is real. But he draws a parallel to what Google tried and failed to do. Google spent more than a decade attempting to pull transactional behaviour into its own platform through Google Flights, Google Hotels, Google Shopping, and restaurant ordering built into Google Maps. Google had the largest demand surface on earth. Booking.com is still here. Amazon is still here. The vertical apps that consumers had built habits around were not displaced.

The reason: general-purpose interfaces are good for general-purpose queries. They are poor interfaces for complex, high-frequency, habitual transactions. Someone who orders dinner on Zomato four times a week or groceries on Blinkit every other day is not going to reroute those habits through a chat window. The habit is the moat.

There is also a physical world argument. AI will not replace the need to move food through traffic. It will not stock shelves in a dark store. It will not manage crowd flow at a 50,000-person event. The moat Eternal has built is not an algorithm, it is 17 million square feet of warehousing, 2,243 dark stores, over a million delivery partners, and the operational muscle to coordinate all of it at scale in real India. Language models cannot replicate that.

Where AI does play a real role, though, is in expanding the market. Conversational interfaces lower friction for first-time users, non-native language speakers, older consumers, and tier 2 and 3 city residents who struggle with standard app flows. Zomato's Healthy Mode and Natural Language Search are early products in this direction. AI for onboarding delivery partners, and AI for giving restaurant and seller partners the kind of growth guidance previously available only to the largest accounts, those are the next applications. The net effect is more of India participating in the platform ecosystem, which is how you get from $10 billion to $20 billion in NOV.

What changed in governance this quarter

One significant change happened during the quarter. Deepinder Goyal stepped down as Managing Director and CEO on February 1, 2026. Albinder Dhindsa, the co-founder and CEO of Blinkit, was appointed as the new Group CEO of Eternal. Goyal transitioned to Vice Chairman and Non-Executive Director effective March 13, 2026, following shareholder approval.

This is a meaningful shift. The founder is moving away from day-to-day operations and handing the reins to the person who built and scaled Blinkit. It signals where the company sees its primary growth engine going forward, and it positions Eternal for a phase of scale that a founder-led operation at this stage might have been slower to execute.

The bottom line

Q4 FY26 is a clean, strong quarter across every business Eternal operates. Food delivery is accelerating for the third straight quarter. Blinkit crossed into positive EBITDA territory at the consolidated level for the first time. District is narrowing losses rapidly. Hyperpure is profitable. Cash is stable at nearly ₹18,000 crore. The company beat analyst estimates by a meaningful margin.

The story here is not any single number. It is the convergence of all of them at the same time. For a company that spent its first decade burning cash and losing money, being able to show accelerating revenue growth, expanding margins, positive EBITDA across most of its businesses, and a clear path to $1 billion in EBITDA by FY29 — that is a different kind of story. The foundation, as Goyal writes, is already laid. What happens now is compounding.

Blinkit just turned EBITDA positive. Delhi NCR is already at 5–6% margins. The aggregate 0.3% is low because newer cities are diluting it — that's expansion, not weakness.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Please consult a registered financial advisor before making any investment decisions.