Eternal usually brings some or the other exciting ingredient to the table. This time, while announcing its September quarter (Q2FY27) earnings, it spoke of launching a privacy-focused AI assistant, ‘dark.ai’. The assistant would use fine-tuned frontier open-weight models and run on Eternal’s own infrastructure with end-to-end encryption. Investors will closely assess how significant this could become after launch.
“We believe user adoption, independently verifiable privacy architecture, benchmarked model quality, and inference economics will determine whether dark.ai develops into a meaningful platform opportunity,” said Jefferies India’s analysts.
Coming to Q2 earnings, growth was largely in line, but net profit disappointed. Operating revenue surged 78% year-on-year to ₹24,138 crore, while net profit nearly doubled to ₹125 crore, against estimates of ₹250-300 crore.
Quick commerce remains Eternal’s biggest growth engine, contributing nearly 80% of consolidated revenue. Blinkit’s revenue soared 94% year-on-year to ₹19,152 crore, while like-for-like growth, which adjusts for revenue from own-inventory sales after Blinkit began owning inventory last year, stood at 84%. Adjusted Ebitda was ₹184 crore, against a loss of ₹156 crore a year ago, with margins improving for the sixth consecutive quarter to 0.9% of NOV (net order value).
Encouragingly, cities contributing 96% of NOV are contribution-positive, while those accounting for 70% are adjusted Ebitda-positive. The management is particularly bullish on smaller cities, while acknowledging that some stores in these markets may remain subscale. So far, such stores have ramped up to 1,000 orders a day at a pace similar to metro stores, with net average order value within 85-90% of metro levels.