India's Zomato posted its first-ever profit on Thursday, one quarter earlier than expected, helped by a tax gain and strong orders in its food and grocery delivery businesses.

Shares of Zomato went up as much as 3.9% after the results.

Zomato expected to hit this milestone in the September quarter, said Chief Financial Officer Akshant Goyal, adding that they were being conservative with that guidance.

Zomato expects its business to remain profitable going forward while delivering a 40% year-on-year topline growth for at least the next couple of years, he said.

Gross order value (GOV) -- the total value of all orders, a percentage of which Zomato gets as revenue -- rose 13.9% in its food delivery business.

GOV for its quick delivery business Blinkit surged 82.6% in the quarter year-on-year, growing 4.6% sequentially. It faced a temporary business disruption in April resulting from a change in the payout structure for delivery partners.

We faced a challenging period of around 45 days, when the number of overall gig workers available to work in our system was 15-20% lower than normal, said Albinder Dhindsa, Blinkit's CEO.

Zomato bought Blinkit last June for 44.47 billion rupees as its response to the fierce competition in the quick-delivery market.

"Blinkit's GOV is very close to Zomato's GOV in some of the large cities where we have an overlapping presence," said Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal.

The Gurgaon-based company posted a consolidated net profit of 20 million rupees ($241,861.37) for the quarter ended June 30, compared to a loss of 1.86 billion rupees a year ago.

Zomato had a deferred tax gain of 170 million rupees this quarter.

Revenue from operations rose 70.9% to 24.16 billion rupees in the quarter, beating analysts's estimates, according to Refinitiv IBES data. ($1 = 82.6920 Indian rupees) (Reporting by Meenakshi Maidas in Bengaluru; Editing by Nivedita Bhattacharjee and Janane Venkatraman)