1. At a Glance – Blink and You’ll Miss the Losses
Meesho is a ₹78,596 crore listed e-commerce behemoth trading at ₹174, fresh out of its December 2025 IPO glow, and already reminding the market why loss-making tech listings are not for the faint-hearted. Sales for FY25 stand at ₹9,390 crore, quarterly revenue at ₹3,518 crore, and yet the company manages to torch ₹4,851 crore in PAT over twelve months. ROE? A majestic -264%. ROCE? -8.71%. Operating margins sit at -6.16%, which in plain English means: for every ₹100 Meesho earns, it politely burns ₹6 and asks for more venture capital vibes.
Yes, orders are massive — 1.83 billion in FY25, 690 million in Q3 FY26, 251 million annual transacting users, and 23 crore consumers — but profits are still a mythical creature. The market is valuing Meesho at 8.37× sales, not earnings, because earnings currently don’t deserve to exist.
Curious already? Good. Because this story gets spicier.
2. Introduction – The “Middle India” Messiah with a Loss Statement
Meesho pitches itself as the saviour of Bharat’s value-conscious consumers. Cheap fashion, unbranded goods, regional sellers, hyper-frugal logistics, and zero-frills shopping — basically Flipkart Lite meets WhatsApp commerce on steroids.
Founded in 2015, Meesho scaled at breakneck speed by doing what Amazon and Flipkart didn’t want to do initially:
➡️ chase low-ticket, low-margin, CoD-heavy Bharat demand
➡️ onboard lakhs of small sellers
➡️ subsidise logistics till investors stopped asking questions
And boy, did it scale. But scale without profitability is like running a marathon on credit cards.
Post IPO, Meesho is no longer allowed to say “trust
us bro, LTV will kick in someday.” Now it has quarterly concalls, CRISIL monitoring reports, and public shareholders asking uncomfortable questions like “bhai profit kab?”
Let’s dig deeper.
3. Business Model – WTF Do They Even Do?
Meesho is a multi-sided marketplace connecting:
- ~23 crore consumers
- ~7 lakh sellers
- ~50,000 content creators
- ~19,000 logistics partners
- 5 end-to-end logistics partners
- And one permanently stressed finance team
The core pitch:
👉 ultra-low-cost sourcing
👉 mostly unbranded / regional products
👉 heavy Cash-on-Delivery (72% of shipped orders in FY25)
👉 razor-thin margins
👉 insane volumes
They also own Valmo, their in-house logistics brand, because outsourcing logistics at Meesho-scale was financially suicidal.
This is not a premium marketplace. This is not aspirational commerce. This is “₹199 kurti delivered to Tier-3 town, CoD, pray it doesn’t return” commerce.
Question for you:
Is volume without pricing power a moat… or a trap?
4. Financials Overview – Numbers That Slap You
Quarterly Comparison (₹ Crore)
| Metric | Latest Qtr (Dec FY26) | YoY Qtr (Dec FY25) | Prev Qtr (Sep FY26) | YoY % | QoQ % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | 3,518 | 2,679 | 3,074 | 31.3% | 14.4% |
| EBITDA | -539 | -131 | -456 | Deteriorated | Deteriorated |
| PAT | -491 | -37 | -411 | -679% | -19.5% |
| EPS (₹) | -1.09 | -4.44 | -2.11 | Improved | Improved |
