India’s Tata Group will buy a 68 percent stake in online grocer BigBasket for about 95 billion rupees ($1.3 billion), the TV network ET Now reported. The deal provides a full exit for China’s Alibaba Group, which owned 27 percent of BigBasket.
The action comes as border tensions between the two Asian giants have grown. BigBasket’s top management, including Co-founder Hari Menon, are likely to stay on, according to the report.
Tata, dubbed the salt-to-software conglomerate, has been looking to launch a “super app” that would offer a range of consumer goods. Tata is looking to compete with Amazon’s “Fresh” service, Walmart-controlled Flipkart and India’s Reliance Industries for the country’s eCommerce sales, which have boomed during the pandemic.
The app would offer food and grocery ordering, fashion and lifestyle, consumer electronics and consumer durables, insurance and financial services, education, healthcare and bill payments, Natarajan Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons, told the Financial Times. “The Tata Group, depending upon how you count, touches several hundred millions of consumers in India, if you take consumers who are walking in every day into a Tata facility,” he added.
Tata Capital, a division of Tata Group, introduced a new mobile app last May that can be used to obtain loans. The app enables business loan customers to do such things as check on transactions and repayment schedules.
Walmart has reportedly been looking to invest up to $25 billion in Tata’s super app project. If the deal was signed, it would represent India’s largest such retail action, eclipsing Walmart’s 2018 purchase of a 66 percent stake in Flipkart for $16 billion.
Such super apps have not caught yet on in India or in the west, but are popular in China and other Asian countries. Examples include Grab, WeChat and Alipay. PYMNTS reported that the burgeoning uper app trend has caught the eye of Amazon, Google, Apple and Uber.
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