The stake buy will place Tata Group in direct race with Amazon, Flipkart, JioMart and Grofers
Tata Sons, through its wholly owned subsidiary Tata Digital, has acquired a majority stake of 64.3 per cent in the Alibaba-backed online grocery seller BigBasket. The deal comes at a time when the Covid-19 pandemic and resultant lockdowns have spurred a big shift to online shopping, especially for food and groceries.
The stake buy in Bigbasket will place Tata Group in direct race with Amazon, Flipkart, JioMart and SoftBank-backed Grofers, which have been hitherto dominating the e-commerce space in the country.
The Competition Commission of India had, in April, approved Tata Digital’s offer of acquiring up to 64.3 per cent stake in Supermarket Grocery Supplies Private (SGS) which runs the online grocery delivery platform BigBasket.
Tata declined to provide further details on the deal, while BigBasket did not immediately respond to a request for comment, according to Reuters.
Meanwhile, the Tata Group has already announced plans to launch a super app that will provide a single-point access to a variety of Tata consumer businesses including Qmin (a food delivery platform), Tata CLiq (lifestyle online shopping site) and Croma (an electronics store). The super app will be launched by Tata Digital in financial year 2022.
