Member Article

Beelivery Achieves Substantial Sixfold Turnover Increase

Beelivery, the UK’s leading on-demand grocery delivery service, saw sales increase by nearly 600%, for the full year ending 30 September 2020, assisted by the introduction of 24-hour delivery nationwide and a four-fold investment increase in marketing expenditure. Gross margin showed sustained improvement from continued investment in e-commerce, a bespoke ERP technology system and an improved customer service experience.

COVID-19 proved a catalyst for change in UK grocery retail, kickstarting widespread adoption of grocery delivery services and leading Beelivery to invest significantly in expanding its unique crowd-sourced driver network. Beelivery now has more delivery slots available than any other dedicated UK grocery delivery service and are the only grocery delivering service to offer deliveries 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year.

Paul Gott, chief operating officer commented: “This is a notable set of full-year results, providing us with a solid base for further expansion. I’m excited by the range of opportunities we have to use our unique capabilities to create a wider ranging offer in terms of territories we can serve as well as products we can offer for our customers and, in doing so, create value for all of our other stakeholders.”

Beelivery also gave an update on their new driver enrolment campaign which has a target of adding 20,000 new drivers to the Beelivery network by Christmas. The company is now ahead of this target, with nearly 8,000 drivers signed up in September alone, the first month of the campaign. Driver numbers continued to rise substantially in October, with over 3000 drivers joining Beelivery in the month.

While COVID-19 led to extra costs, much higher sales volumes meant underlying profit still rose at the UK’s leading on-demand grocery delivery service. Beelivery hiked its investment plans after seeing strong sales, profits and cashflow as the first half of the year as the grocery sector saw record demand due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The UK market leader in on-demand grocery delivery said plans for external capital raising were ‘progressing well’ and are expected to complete before the end of March 2021, triggering further potential significant expansion of delivery slot capacity and coverage.

Lee Parkinson, Co-Founder and CEO of Beelivery said: “Our research shows that 63% of towns have populations of less than 20,000 people and many of these towns do not have any grocery delivery service available to them. For those fortunate areas who do have a delivery service, many must wait days for a delivery slot. Beelivery plugs this gap for these members of the public, offering them delivery between 30-60 minutes from placing your order on our website or app.”

The board continues to build the management team to consolidate the business even further. Chairman and Co-founder Yazan Bin Mohammad elaborates: “We continued to be focussed on further growth, cementing our current position and building upon this. I can reveal that we will be joined by a new chief financial officer before Christmas to help us achieve this aim.”

At the centre of the UK-wide job creation programme is Beelivery’s state-of-the-art fulfilment platform. Beelivery doesn’t own any warehouses or delivery vehicles and therefore jobs such as software engineers, human resources, IT and finance specialists, as well as the teams who will pick, pack and ship customer orders, are not tied to any particular location and can be home-based. Impressively, 99% of Beelivery staff are home-based, the highest proportion of home-based staff in the industry.

As other grocery delivery services struggle to cope with demand, Beelivery continues to keep delivery times short and fulfilment rates high through its unique crowd-source delivery model. It comes as no surprise therefore that several of the larger grocery retailers are in discussion to work with Beelivery, to meet their customer’s grocery delivery requirements.

Beelivery offers a wide range of products from fresh and frozen meal staples such as meat, fish, bakery items, pantry items, vegetables and fruit, to snacks and alcohol, and home cleaning products.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lindsay Jones .