Koo, the social media application which has presented itself as an alternative to Twitter in the Indian market has come in news for an unusual reason as the company reportedly had an expenditure of Rs 202 Crores but could earn a mere Rs 14 Lakhs in the Financial Year 2022 besides a massive spike of roughly 6 times in their overall losses.
The company registered a 75 percent growth in the operations revenue from Rs 8 lakh in FY21 to Rs 14 lakhs in FY22. However, the same was not enough as the firm maintained a status quo and remained in the pre-revenue stages even after the second fiscal year of its operations.
The microblogging platform was founded in 2020, and allows users to interact via text, audio, and videos, and helps them form a community. The app currently supports 11 vernaculars including a few foreign languages as Koo was launched in Brazil last year supporting Portuguese also. Koo has also had a substantial number of app downloads amounting to approximately 60 million in total on Android and IOS operating systems.
The operating income generated was only 0.14 Crore, the only respite was that the company earned Rs 4.74 crores from interest and gain on investments and other non-operating income which took its overall revenue to Rs 4.88 crores in FY22. However, the amount was way less than its expenditure in the favour of advertising and promotional activities, employee benefits, legal and professional fee, software, license, cloud server, app embeds, and other communication-related costs which bumped the company of a colossal amount of Rs 202 Crores.
What a tweet is to Twitter, a koo is to Koo, but while the tweet platform’s office, Twitter (India) registered 81.5 percent growth in revenue to Rs 156.75 crore in FY22 even after its own share of loss reporting a net loss of nearly Rs 32 crore in the country during FY22, the Koo platform has a lot to catch up on as Koo is already planning to promote a subscription and advertising-based model as well as is working with creators in a revenue-share format.