After the boom in the home business during COVID, the unicorn falls almost 400 places in the list of the largest companies in Colombia and continues to show losses!
The high ranks of the powerful Colombian platform Rappi, according to an internal source of the company, are no longer kept up all night by the publicized labor claims of thousands of food delivery drivers. Today they have more weight on the agenda, he adds, other problems throughout the dozen business units that feed the portfolio of one of the great technology companies in Latin America. The forecasts of various international organizations, such as ECLAC or the The World Bank, are also worrying, warning of a possible recession or very slow economic growth in 2023.
In June 2022, it was learned that the company dropped 386 positions in the annual list made by the Superintendence of Companies of Colombia with the thousand largest companies in the country.
The Supersociedades ranking, which is based on the financial statements of 2021, indicates that the company with the white mustache logo went from position 385 in 2020, to 771 in 2021 -in 2019 it ranked 796-.
In 2020, Rappi billed 403,016 million pesos (about 100 million dollars) in Colombia alone, spurred by the sanitary confinements that forced millions of people to hibernate for months in their homes and resort to home orders to survive without going out.
Now without restrictions, the balances returned to pre-pandemic levels: in 2021 revenues fell to 254,489 million pesos (about 53 million dollars at the current exchange rate), which resulted in losses of 243,468 million pesos (about 50 million dollars).
Alex Szapiro, director of the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group Corp. in Brazil, dropped some comments during a recent interview with the Brazil Journal. The executive acknowledged that the Asian consortium, which injected 1 billion dollars into Rappi in 2019, had been “wrong” by “requiring accelerated growth from ‘startups'” instead of achieving profitability.
Berlin-based delivery giant Delivery Hero, which once controlled 19.5% of Rappi’s capital, sold 7% of its shares earlier this year in a transaction valued at $150 million.
According to internal financial reports obtained by EL PAÍS Tecnología sales of Rappi (Colombia) in 2021 fell by 32.8% compared to 2020. This, in a business that disburses millions of dollars a month in marketing, hiring, salaries and new projects , means that it continues ‘burning cash’, that is, spending capital to continue operating.
For now, it maintains its expansion plan to become a ‘superapp’, in the style of the Grab or WeChat. RappiTravel (purchase of air tickets), RappiPay (banking), TurboFresh (food shipments in a hurry), or RappiCash (withdrawal of money at home) are now part of the services that have joined the foundational line of home delivery.
