Technology

Can high-speed commerce overtake e-commerce in India?

Published

5 months ago

June 17, 2024

IAM

Even as high-speed trading startups exit, consolidate or close down in many parts of the world, the model is showing encouraging signs in India. Urban consumers benefit from the convenience of getting groceries delivered to their homes in as little as 10 minutes. The corporations that make these deliveries – Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy’s Instamart – are already charting a path to profitability.

Analysts are intrigued by the potential for 10-minute deliveries to disrupt e-commerce. Goldman Sachs recently estimated that Blinkit, acquired by Zomato in 2022 for slightly below $600 million, is already more priceless than its parent company that delivers decacorn food.

According to HSBC, earlier this 12 months Blinkit had a 40% share of the fast trading market, followed by Swiggy’s Instamart and Zepto. Walmart-owned Flipkart plans to enter the fast commerce space next month, further proving the industry’s potential.

Investors are also showing great interest in the industry. Zomato boasts a valuation of $19.7 billion despite minimal profitability, fulfilling around 3 million orders a day. By comparison, the market capitalization of Chinese giant Meituan, which processes greater than 25 times more orders per day, is $93 billion. Zepto, which achieved unicorn status lower than a 12 months ago, is finalizing recent financing value greater than $3 billion, in response to people conversant in the matter.

Consumers are also buying the convenience of fast trading. According to a recent study by Bernstein, adoption was highest amongst millennials aged 18 to 35, with 60% of those aged 18 to 25 preferring fast trading platforms over other channels. Even the 36+ age group uses digital channels – over 30% prefer fast trading.

UBS’s estimate for the Indian market.

Image credits: UBS (screenshot)

While India’s rapid urbanization makes it a first-rate high-speed trading destination, the industry’s unique operating model and infrastructure needs may limit its long-term growth and profitability. As competition intensifies, the impact of high-speed trading is more likely to be felt more acutely by India’s e-commerce giants. But what makes the Indian retail market so attractive to fast trading players and what are the challenges it faces?

Possibility of fast trading in India

According to industry estimates, e-commerce sales in India were between $60 billion and $65 billion last 12 months. That’s lower than half of the sales generated by e-commerce corporations throughout the last Singles’ Day in China and represents lower than 7% of India’s total retail market value greater than $1 trillion.

Reliance Retail, India’s largest retailer, posted revenue of about $36.7 billion in the fiscal 12 months ending March, at a valuation of $100 billion. The unorganized retail sector – neighborhood stores (popularly referred to as kirana), that are positioned in hundreds of Indian cities, towns and villages – continues to dominate the market.

“The market is huge and, on paper, ripe for disruption. So far, nothing has been done to significantly harm the industry. So every time a new model shows signs of functioning, all stakeholders shower it with love,” said a seasoned entrepreneur who helped construct a supply chain for one in every of the leading retail ventures.

In other words, there is no such thing as a shortage of room for growth.

Modern retail’s share of total grocery spending in India stays significantly lower than in most other large countries and HSBC believes that is more likely to remain in order customers migrate directly from unorganized to high-speed retail (HSBC).

Fast trading corporations are borrowing many features from Kirana stores to develop into relevant to Indian consumers. They have developed a brand new supply chain system, creating tons of of inconspicuous warehouses, or “dark stores”, strategically placed inside a couple of kilometers of residential and business areas, from where a lot of orders are placed. This allows corporations to make deliveries inside minutes of placing an order.

This approach differs from that of e-commerce players akin to Amazon and Flipkart, which have fewer but much larger warehouses in town, often positioned in towns where rent is cheaper and farther from residential areas.

The unique characteristics of Indian households further enhance the attractiveness of fast trading. Indian kitchens typically have a bigger variety of SKUs in comparison with their Western counterparts, requiring frequent replenishment purchases which might be higher served by local stores and fast-trade relatively than modern retail. Additionally, limited space for storing in most Indian homes makes monthly bulk grocery purchases less practical, with customers preferring to buy fresh food, which easily enables quick trade.

According to Bernstein, quick-trade platforms can price products 10 to fifteen percent cheaper than brick-and-mortar stores while still maintaining a gross margin of about 15 percent by eliminating middlemen. Dark fast-trade stores quickly increased their SKU count from 2,000 to six,000, with plans to further increase it to 10,000 to 12,000. According to store managers, these stores restock their inventory two to 3 times a day.

Fight against e-commerce

Zepto, Blinkit and Swiggy’s Instamart are increasingly expanding beyond the grocery category, selling a wide range of products including clothing, toys, jewelry, skincare and electronics. TechCrunch evaluation found that almost all of the products listed on Amazon India bestseller list can be found on fast trading platforms.

FSR has also develop into a crucial distribution channel for major food brands in India. Consumer goods giant Dabur India expects high-speed trading to account for 25% to 30% of the corporate’s sales. Hindustan Unilever, the Indian arm of British Unilever, described fast trading as “an opportunity we will not let go of.” And for Nestle India, “Blinkit is becoming as important as Amazon.”

While high-speed commerce may not expand beyond the grocery category, itself a market value greater than half a trillion dollars in India, their expansion into electronics and fashion is more likely to be limited. According to analyst estimates, electronics account for 40% to 50% of all sales on Amazon and Flipkart. If high-speed trading manages to crack this market, it is going to pose a major and immediate challenge to e-commerce giants. Goldman Sachs estimates that the entire market addressed to grocery and non-food stores for quick-trade corporations in the 40-50 largest cities is roughly $150 billion.

According to an e-commerce entrepreneur, selling smartphones and other expensive items is more of a marketing gimmick that can not be carried out on a big scale.

Blinkit sells high-end smartphones and the PlayStation 5 console, its founder and CEO announced on social media.

“It doesn’t make any sense. Fast trading is sweet for forward trading. However, smartphones and other expensive products are inclined to have quite a low rate of return. … They do not have the infrastructure to accommodate reverse logistics,” he said, requesting anonymity because he’s one in every of the early investors in the leading high-speed trading company.

The current fast trade infrastructure also doesn’t allow the sale of huge devices. This means you may’t buy a fridge, air conditioner or TV via flash trade. “But that’s what some of these companies are suggesting and analysts confirm,” the investor said.

Falguni Nayar, founding father of skincare platform Nykaa, highlighted at a recent conference that fast commerce is principally taking share from Kirana stores and is not going to find a way to keep up as much inventory and assortment as specialist customer education platforms.

The history of high-speed trade in India stays an urban phenomenon concentrated in the 25–30 largest cities. In a recent evaluation, Goldman Sachs wrote that demand in smaller cities is probably going making the fresh food economy tougher to appreciate.

E-commerce giant Flipkart will launch its fast commerce service in limited cities next month, seeing a possibility to draw Amazon India customers. Most of Flipkart’s customers are positioned in smaller Indian cities and towns.

Amazon – increasingly limiting its e-commerce investments in India – has thus far shown no interest in high-speed commerce in the country. The company, which offers same-day delivery to Prime members on certain items, has questioned the standard of products from “fast” delivery corporations in a few of its marketing campaigns.

A recent survey of Indian consumers by Bank of America (BofA)

As brands increasingly give attention to fast commerce as their fastest-growing channel, and more consumers appreciate the convenience and value of 10-minute deliveries, the stage is ready for a fierce battle between India’s fast commerce and e-commerce giants.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com

Up Next

Google is bringing its Gemini mobile app to India with support for nine Indian languages

Don't Miss

From sperm freezing to accounting tools: Finaloop founder earns $35 million to solve e-commerce sellers’ accounting problems

Click to comment

Technology

Department of Justice: Google must sell Chrome to end its monopoly

Published

5 hours ago

November 21, 2024

IAM

The U.S. Department of Justice argued Wednesday that Google should sell its Chrome browser as part of a countermeasure to break the corporate’s illegal monopoly on online search, according to a filing with the Justice Department. United States District Court for the District of Columbia. If the answer proposed by the Department of Justice is approved, Google won’t have the option to re-enter the search marketplace for five years.

Ultimately, it’ll be District Court Judge Amit Mehta who will determine what the ultimate punishment for Google might be. This decision could fundamentally change one of the most important firms on the planet and alter the structure of the Internet as we understand it. This phase of the method is anticipated to begin sometime in 2025.

In August, Judge Mehta ruled that Google constituted an illegal monopoly since it abused its power within the search industry. The judge also questioned Google’s control over various web gateways and the corporate’s payments to third parties to maintain its status because the default search engine.

The Department of Justice’s latest filing says Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome, that are key distribution channels for its search business, poses a “significant challenge” to remediation to ensure a competitive search market.

The Justice Department has proposed other remedies to address the search engine giant’s monopoly, including Google spinning off its Android mobile operating system. The filing indicated that Google and other partners may oppose the spin-off and suggested stringent countermeasures, including ending the use of Android to the detriment of search engine competitors. The Department of Justice has suggested that if Google doesn’t impose restrictions on Android, it must be forced to sell it.

Prosecutors also argued that the corporate must be barred from stepping into exclusionary third-party agreements with browser or phone firms, resembling Google’s agreement with Apple to be the default search engine on all Apple products.

The Justice Department also argued that Google should license its search data, together with ad click data, to competitors.

Additionally, the Department of Justice also set conditions prohibiting Google from re-entering the browser market five years after the spin-off of Chrome. Additionally, it also proposed that after the sale of Chrome, Google mustn’t acquire or own any competing ad text search engine, query-based AI product, or ad technology. Moreover, the document identifies provisions that allow publishers to opt out of Google using their data to train artificial intelligence models.

If the court accepts these measures, Google will face a serious setback as a competitor to OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic in AI technology.

Google’s answer

In response, Google said the Department of Justice’s latest filing constitutes a “radical interventionist program” that may harm U.S. residents and the country’s technological prowess on the planet.

“The Department of Justice’s wildly overblown proposal goes far beyond the Court’s decision. “It would destroy the entire range of Google products – even beyond search – that people love and find useful in their everyday lives,” said Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker. blog post.

Walker made additional arguments that the proposal would threaten user security and privacy, degrade the standard of the Chrome and Android browsers, and harm services resembling Mozilla Firefox, which depends upon Google’s search engine.

He added that if the proposal is adopted, it could make it tougher for people to access Google search. Moreover, it could hurt the corporate’s prospects within the AI race.

“The Justice Department’s approach would lead to unprecedented government overreach that would harm American consumers, developers and small businesses and threaten America’s global economic and technological leadership at precisely the moment when it is needed most,” he said.

The company is to submit a response to the above request next month.

Wednesday’s filing confirms earlier reports that prosecutors were considering getting Google to spin off Chrome, which controls about 61% of the U.S. browser market. According to to the StatCounter web traffic service.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com

Technology

Snowflake acquires data management company Datavolo

Published

12 hours ago

November 21, 2024

IAM

Cloud giant Snowflake has agreed to take over Datavoloa company managing the data pipeline, for an undisclosed amount.

Snowflake announced the deal on Wednesday after the market bell closed, while reporting its third-quarter 2025 earnings. The purchase has not yet closed and is subject to customary closing conditions, Snowflake noted wa release.

Joseph Witt and Luke Roquet, who met while working together at Hortonworks, founded Datavolo in 2023. Witt was previously a vp at Cloudera, and Roquet was Cloudera’s chief marketing officer and, before that, director of business development at AWS.

Datavolo uses Apache NiFi, an open source data processing project developed by the NSA, to power a platform to automate data flow between disparate enterprise data sources. Data “processors” extract, cleanse, transform and enrich data, including for generative use of artificial intelligence.

With Datavolo having raised $21 million in enterprise capital from investors including Citi Ventures and General Catalyst prior to the acquisition, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy envisions creating more comprehensive data pipelines for Snowflake customers. For example, he says Datavolo can enable users to interchange single-use data connectors with flexible pipelines that allow them to maneuver data from cloud and on-premises sources to Snowflake’s data cloud.

“By bringing Datavolo to Snowflake, we are increasing the amount of data captured by Snowflake over the lifecycle, providing our customers with both simplicity and cost savings, without sacrificing data extensibility,” Ramaswamy said in a press release. “We are thrilled to have the Datavolo team join Snowflake as we accelerate the best platform for enterprise data – unstructured and structured, batch and streaming – and committed to the success of the open source community.”

Witt says Snowflake will support and help manage the Apache NiFi project after the acquisition closes. “Data engineering at scale can be extremely expensive and complex, and our goal has always been to simplify our customers’ experiences so they can realize value faster,” he added within the press release. “By joining forces with Snowflake, we can deliver the massive scale and radical simplicity of the Snowflake platform to our customers, ultimately unlocking data engineering for more users.”

Thanks partly to artificial intelligence, demand for data management technologies has increased. Fortune’s business insights estimates that the worldwide enterprise data management market could possibly be price $224.87 billion by 2032.

However, data management has been a challenge for enterprises long before the substitute intelligence boom. According to in a 2022 survey by Great Hopetions, a data quality platform, 91% of organizations said data quality issues impact their performance.

Against this backdrop, it isn’t surprising that firms like Datavolo are gaining prominence.

Today was a giant day for Snowflake who reported better-than-expected earnings sent the company’s shares up 19%. In addition to the acquisition of Snowflake, the company announced a multi-year partnership with Anthropic to integrate the startup’s AI models into Snowflake’s Cortex AI, Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Analyst products.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com

Technology

Federal prosecutors have charged another Forbes 30 Under 30 alum with fraud

Published

19 hours ago

November 20, 2024

IAM

Studio image of a padlock on top of a credit cardchampagne coloured background, could symbolize ideas around encryption, credit card safety, security and passwords

FBI yesterday he unveiled the indictment which accused Joanna Smith-Griffin, founding father of the bogus intelligence startup AllHere Education, of engaging in “securities fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in connection with defrauding investors” of nearly $10 million. The FBI alleges that from a minimum of November 2020 through June 2024, she misrepresented her company’s revenue, customer base and money to investors.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the corporate is in Chapter 7 bankruptcy. If convicted, Smith-Griffin faces prison sentences that include a maximum sentence of 20 years for securities fraud, a maximum sentence of 20 years for wire fraud, and a compulsory sentence two years for a professional identity thief. Smith-Griffin couldn’t be reached for comment.

The Forbes 30 Under 30 list has change into a meme over the past few years as several winners have been accused of fraud. The The Forbes-for-scam pipeline includes FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, co-CEO of (*30*) Research; Fintech founder Frank, Charlie Javice, and “Pharma bro” Martin Shkreli.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com