Online stock broking platform Zerodha's net profit jumped 39 percent to Rs 2,907 crore from Rs 2,094.3 crore in FY22.

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The company has reported a 38.5 percent growth in revenue for the financial year 2022-23 at Rs 6,875 crore compared with the previous financial year. The bootstrapped unicorn reported a revenue of Rs 4,964 crore and a profit of Rs 2,094 crore in FY22.

In a blog post, Zerodha founder and CEO Nithin Kamath said, "We continued to see phenomenal growth even in FY 22/23. That said, the business has plateaued in terms of revenue and profitability this financial year, until now."

While the trading activity in futures and options has increased significantly, Kamath said the total number of people trading F&O is still not that large. The largest retail broking firm in the country has an active client base of around 64 lakh as of August this year. However, the figures have remained the same over the last 18 months.

"(Over) 45 lakh Indians (unique) traded once a year last year in F&O. To set this in context, we have 12 crore demat accounts (non-unique) in India, and NSE active client data indicates 3 crore Indians who traded once a year (unique) on the exchange.

So approximately 3 percent of everyone with a Demat account and 15 percent who traded the market traded in F&O last year. However, this subset of users would have contributed to the majority of revenues for all brokerage firms and even the exchanges," he added.

Kamath in the blog post wrote that despite intense competition from newer discount broking firms, the company will continue to charge onboarding and maintenance charges. Zerodha competes against the likes of Groww and Upstox.

Groww had crossed 62 lakh active customers in August and could surpass Zerodha over the next couple of months if the trends hold, according to a report by The Economic Times.

"Trading the markets is a serious business with serious risks involved. Collecting an account opening fee right at the start also, in a way, helps set this expectation with a potential customer, filtering out users who may not be serious about trading or investing with us," Kamath said.

First Published:Sept 26, 2023 7:53 PM IST