Byju’s 2020-21 financials show it’s a house of cards

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Editor's note: After a delay of over a year, Think & Learn Pvt. Ltd, the parent of Byju’s, finally filed its 2020-21 financials yesterday. The numbers are not pretty. At a consolidated level, that’s Byju’s and WhiteHat Jr put together, Byju’s revenue from operations came in stagnant at Rs 2,280 crore, compared with an adjusted revenue of Rs 2,189 crore in 2019-20. We will get to this adjusted revenue in a bit.  The company’s annual losses jumped to Rs 4,588 crore in March 2021, compared with Rs 231 crore in March 2020. That translates to a loss of Rs 12.5 crore per day in 2020-21; a staggering amount to lose, the kind that few Indian startups have seen before. Just for the sake of comparison, SoftBank-backed OYO, battered by the pandemic, recorded a loss of Rs 3,943 crore in 2020-21. That Byju’s abysmal numbers are from a pandemic year, one in which the education technology business witnessed its biggest boom, is even more distressing. Revenue for rivals Unacademy and Vedantu, for example, rose 6x and 3x, respectively, in the same period. Unfortunately, …