Eternal's Revenue "Grew" 182%. A Big Chunk of That Isn't Real Growth.

$ETERNAL reported Q1 FY27 revenue of ₹20,211 crore, up 182% year-on-year. Sounds explosive. Here's the catch buried in the filing: a big part of this comes from Blinkit switching to a first-party inventory model. Here's what that means. Under a marketplace model, a company only records its commission as revenue. Under a first-party model, it buys the inventory itself and resells it, recording the entire sale value as revenue, not just the commission. Same business activity, very different revenue number, purely from how it's accounted for. The growth isn't fake though. Blinkit's actual operating performance genuinely improved, moving from an EBITDA loss of ₹162 crore a year ago to a positive ₹102 crore now, its fifth straight quarter of improvement. That part is real. Net profit came in at ₹92 crore, up 268% YoY, but this actually missed street estimates of around ₹258 crore, and fell 47% sequentially due to heavy spending on store expansion and advertising. The takeaway. When a revenue number looks too dramatic to be real, especially for a company with an evolving business model, check whether an accounting change is doing some of the lifting. EBITDA and segment profitability usually tell a cleaner story than headline revenue growth alone.