admin
September 1, 2026
Pritha Pahari, The Core
1 September 2026
Reliance has spent more than a decade bringing together a long list of names such as Burberry and Tiffany & Co. to India. Its latest focus seems to be luxury celebrity brands, adding global pop star Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty and now media personality Kim Kardashian’s shapewear label SKIMS to its luxury brands portfolio.
Isha Ambani, executive director of Reliance Retail, has fronted most of these announcements herself.
Meanwhile, Nykaa, the beauty platform Reliance Retail keeps getting compared to, spent the last year going after some of the same celebrity founders.
In August 2025, Fenty Beauty moved from Nykaa’s platform to an exclusive deal with Reliance’s Sephora India and Tira. In June 2026, Nykaa answered by signing pop star Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty. A month later, Reliance landed SKIMS.
India’s luxury and celebrity-brand market is split between Reliance’s scale and Nykaa’s beauty expertise, with Fenty, Rare Beauty and SKIMS showing how ownership, reach and brand fit are shaping who gets the biggest names.
Big Brands, Different Bets
Reliance wins brands through scale (20,169 stores, 396 million customers) and ownership ties; Fenty’s move to Sephora India is less a market choice than an internal LVMH routing decision, given LVMH’s stakes in both Fenty and Sephora.
But Nykaa is holding its own by competing on specialism, not size; its beauty-literate audience and curated community pulled in Rare Beauty and Chanel.
The brand fit, not just distribution muscle, still decides who signs where, and some brands (like Birkenstock) skip both platforms entirely.
The economics behind these deals are harder to pin down than the headlines suggest. None of the three — Fenty, Rare Beauty, or SKIMS — have disclosed minimum guarantees, royalty rates, or sales targets for their India entries; these are announced as partnerships, not filed joint ventures.
SKIMS raised $225 million in November 2025 at a $5 billion valuation, nearing $1 billion in annual net sales.
Fenty tells a different story: $450 million in 2024 sales, now valued at $1-2 billion, down sharply from a $2.8 billion estimate in 2021, with Jay-Z’s MarcyPen Capital Partners in talks to buy LVMH’s stake.
Rare Beauty’s India entry rides on Nykaa’s own momentum; the company’s revenue from operations rose 29% year on year (YoY) to Rs 2,782 crore in Q1 FY27, up from Rs 2,154.9 crore a year earlier. In the last quarter of FY26, revenue stood at Rs 2,648.1 crore.
The Core has reached out to Reliance and Nykaa for their response, and will update this report if and when they respond.
Why Fenty Chose Reliance
Fenty’s move looks more like an internal one, according to Suumit Kapoor, a brand growth consultant.
LVMH owns 50% of Fenty Beauty through its beauty incubator Kendo Brands, a stake it has held since co-founding the brand with Rihanna in 2017. LVMH also owns Sephora globally, and Sephora in India is run by Reliance.
“When Fenty enters a new market through Sephora, LVMH is effectively distributing its own equity stake through its own global retail infrastructure,” Kapoor said. For a brand with that kind of ownership overlap, he added, the choice of partner is “close to an internal routing decision” and not a genuine trade-off.
That ownership overlap is itself now in a pickle.
LVMH has been exploring a sale of its 50% Fenty stake since October 2025, working with investment bank Evercore, according to Reuters. As of June 2026, American rapper and businessman, Jay-Z’s investment firm MarcyPen Capital Partners was reported to be among the parties in talks to buy it.
No sale has closed yet, so the Reliance-Sephora-LVMH alignment still holds for now, but it isn’t guaranteed to outlast the current ownership structure.
Fenty’s India journey backs this up. The brand’s first India listing wasn’t through Reliance at all.
It ran on Nykaa’s Cross Border Store, a low-commitment digital shelf that was discontinued before Fenty’s August 2025 relaunch, an exclusive omnichannel deal with Reliance spanning more than 50 stores across 16 cities on day one.
Kapoor doesn’t think of the switch as a deliberate strategic upgrade.
“The Cross Border Store listing may simply have underperformed on its own terms, without much marketing support behind it,” he said, adding that there is no clear evidence that Reliance stole the brand away.
Devangshu Dutta, founder of the research firm Third Eyesight, said celebrity backing only buys a brand little room.
“When a company or an investor buys into an early-stage celebrity brand, they are acquiring instant brand equity which acts as a top-of-the-funnel magnet and potentially lower CAC,” he said. “However, the ‘fame premium’ runs out if product and service execution isn’t compelling enough to drive repeat business and customer retention.”
Ownership decides the biggest deals before “competition” even enters the picture, Fenty landed at Reliance’s Sephora because LVMH owns half of each, though that alignment is shakier than it looks, with Jay-Z’s MarcyPen Capital Partners now the leading bidder for LVMH’s Fenty stake.
Beyond ownership, it’s a straight trade-off.
For brands chasing scale, Reliance’s tens of thousands of stores will get you reach. If brands want to chase community, Rare Beauty did by picking Nykaa specifically to tap its affluent, digitally engaged beauty shoppers and build loyalty. Some brands skip the fight altogether, like Birkenstock, which walked into India solo.
The Distribution Gap
Where Reliance doesn’t need an ownership story to make its case is scale. Reliance Retail closed the quarter ended June 2026 with 20,169 stores across 78.4 million square feet, 396 million registered customers, and 568 million transactions in that single quarter, up 46% year on year, according to the company’s Q1 FY27 earnings release. JioMart alone served 5,500 pincodes through its rapid delivery network in the same period.
Nykaa, by comparison, operated 324 physical stores across 105 cities as of its FY26 numbers, with a cumulative customer base of around 42 million, per its own disclosures and Business Standard’s reporting on the company’s results.
“That gap generally buys a brand not just bigger numbers, but reaches into places where a beauty specialist has no reason to be,” Kapoor said. For brands thinking beyond beauty into wellness, gifting, or lifestyle crossovers, he said that scale “is not a nice-to-have. It is the entire argument for choosing Reliance over a beauty-only platform.”
Satish Meena, founder of Datum Intelligence, a research firm, made a similar point on Reliance’s pull with brands weighing an India entry.
“With the kind of strength they have, they can always give a better deal,” he said, referring to Reliance’s ability to commit capital and guarantee scale that a newer entrant typically cannot promise on its own. He pointed to Reliance’s existing retail relationships, including Marks & Spencer, as part of the track record that makes brands comfortable signing with the group.
Experts say over the past two to three years, Nykaa has been the more prolific launch platform for major international beauty brands, while Reliance has had greater strength in international luxury and fashion.
According to experts, Nykaa reported more than 70 luxury-brand additions over the last three years, including names such as NARS, Prada Beauty, La Prairie, Chanel Beauty, Armani Beauty and Maison Margiela. Reliance, meanwhile, has built a luxury portfolio spanning Valentino, Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, Tiffany & Co., Burberry and others, and most recently brought SKIMS to India. Reliance’s public disclosures do not provide a comparable 2–3-year count of new international brand entries.
Reliance is arguably a major gateway for international luxury/fashion, but calling it the default gateway for international brands overall is too broad.
Where Nykaa Still Wins
Reliance’s advantage on raw numbers doesn’t fully explain why Nykaa keeps landing brands too.
Nykaa built its beauty audience before it built its stores, using tutorials and curated storytelling to create what Kapoor called “a beauty-literate customer base that arrives already primed to trust the platform’s recommendations.”
That specialism is what pulled in Rare Beauty. Nykaa’s June 2026 launch made the brand available through its website, app, and 30 stores nationwide, and came from a company reporting its highest quarterly profit since listing at the time, per its own disclosures.
In a company statement announcing the launch, Anchit Nayar, Nykaa Beauty’s executive director and CEO, said the brand fit a “new generation of highly informed and globally engaged consumers seeking elevated brand experiences.” Rare Beauty’s chief executive, Scott Friedman, said in the same announcement that India was “a very important market” for the brand, citing Nykaa’s beauty community in the country as the reason to partner with it specifically.
Nykaa has run a similar playbook before. Chanel strengthened its India fragrance and beauty presence on Nykaa in 2025, Obagi Medical entered India through the platform specifically for its clinically driven skincare positioning, and Estee Lauder’s incubation arm has run its India beauty programme, Beauty and You, with Nykaa as lead partner every year since 2022.
Dutta pointed to Kay Beauty, Nykaa’s own celebrity line with actor Katrina Kaif, as an example of why platform fit matters as much as platform size. Contrasting it with 82°E, actor Deepika Padukone’s skincare brand on Tira, he said Kay Beauty had two advantages: it was priced for a much larger audience, and it had “Nykaa’s active participation across channels for merchandising and visibility.”
Not The Only Door
Reliance’s pull is real, but it isn’t the only route into India.
Reliance benefits from international-brand partnerships through retail economics, distribution and, in some cases, ownership or joint-venture economics. The potential conflict emerges because Reliance can simultaneously act as a brand’s market-entry partner and control substantial retail and digital routes to consumers. Public filings, however, do not establish that Reliance uses this position to disadvantage partner brands or competing retailers.
Meena pointed to Birkenstock, which entered by opening its own stores rather than partnering with either platform. Birkenstock and similar labels operate as single-brand retail; they can use India’s foreign direct investment rules to set up shop directly, bypassing the need for a local partner altogether.
“If the brands think that they have enough pull in the market and they can bring customers, they are opening these stores without any partnership,” Meena said. He added that most global brands take the partner route anyway because India, for many of them, is still a small share of global sales, and testing the market with an established partner for a few years is lower risk than building from scratch.
Kapoor flagged one risk worth watching no matter which partner a brand picks. Exclusive deals give a retailer more control. But Tira has also started building its own private-label products, including a colour cosmetics line, and sells them in the same stores as the global brands it distributes.
“A retailer can be a brand’s distribution partner and, on an adjacent shelf, its competitor, at the same time,” he said, a tension he noted that Nykaa’s marketplace model, without a comparable private label push against premium brands, does not carry in the same way.
For brands already tied to Reliance through ownership, like Fenty, there isn’t much of a decision to make. For everyone else, Nykaa signing Rare Beauty and Reliance signing SKIMS within weeks of each other shows this fight for celebrity founders in India is far from over.
(Published in The Core)
admin
September 1, 2026
Vikash Tripathi, Outlook Business
1 September 2026
Eight decades ago, the ‘nationalist businessman’ GD Birla helped prepare the ‘Bombay Plan’, which asked the state to pro-vide for the bare minimum needs of its people. His plan asked for 2,800 calories of well-balanced food per day, 30 yards of clothing per year and 100sq ft of housing per person.
Today, seventh-generation Aryaman Vikram Birla is betting on an entirely different opportunity: premium dining. “We continue to believe in the remarkable potential of the premium casual dining space, spurred by rising disposable income and evolving lifestyles,” the 29-year-old said after Aditya Birla New Age Hospitality acquired KA Hospitality in 2023.
The Birlas are not alone in trying to cash-in on rising prosperity in India. In the past five years alone, India’s top 10 industrial groups have announced new ventures in consumer-facing sectors or doubled down on existing ones. A rough tally of these investments crosses ₹4.8 lakh crore.
For decades, these same business houses built their dominance in core sectors like steel, power, aluminium, cement and chemicals, laying the industrial backbone of the economy. This helped the nation become a large producer of such goods and, in some cases, an exporter as well.
But as India’s economic conditions changed, so has the focus of its largest conglomerates.
For the likes of Tata, Aditya Birla, Bajaj and Bharti, that journey started way back. “What has changed in recent years is the speed and openness of the amount of capital being invested,” says Jitender Kumar, associate professor and programme chairperson, retail management programme at Birla Institute of Management Technology.
“It is not ‘opportunistic’ reasons, it’s structural reasons.”
Two factors seem to be driving the shift: the first is the arrival of an affluent consuming class that can buy branded and premium goods, and the second is the attraction of consumer businesses as a way to diversify revenue and, in some cases, improve the quality of earnings.
The Rise of Affluence
A couple of decades ago, if an Indian household had some extra cash, it often meant buying more of the same. Today, it increasingly means buying better. Even salt is being upgraded, from iodised to Himalayan pink or rock salt. The same shift is visible in bigger purchases: sports utility vehicles (SUVs) over hatchbacks, and ₹1cr-plus homes over budget flats.
But India isn’t simply consuming more. It is moving from basic consumption towards discretionary, branded and premium consumption. This boom is most clearly seen in the rapid expansion of the financial infrastructure that enables consumption. Formal retail credit penetration has more than doubled over the past decade, according to a TransUnion Cibil report, driven largely by personal loans, credit cards and consumer durable loans. Meanwhile, the government-backed Unified Payments Interface has untethered spending from the cash in a buyer’s wallet.
The signs show up across the broader consumption economy. Homes priced above ₹1cr accounted for 54% of total sales in 2025, up from just 30% in 2023—the market that decorative paints and home solutions are chasing.
Out of 4.7mn cars sold in the financial year 2025–26, SUVs accounted for more than half.
“The consumer market has grown substantially—not only through rising incomes but also the dramatic expansion of branded consumption across product verticals,” says Devangshu Dutta, founder of management-consulting firm Third Eyesight.
The bets are also getting more varied, from Reliance Retail tying up with global brands like Fenty and Skims to the Bharti Group bringing Olive Garden to India.
The Lure of Returns
For a passenger walking through an airport, the flight is only one part of the journey. There is coffee before boarding, food between flights, a lounge, retail outlets, parking and a host of other things to spend money on. For Adani Airports, those non-aero businesses are increasingly becoming the more lucrative part.
Its non-aero operations already generate about ₹2,500cr, with returns in the high-20% range, against roughly 12% from regulated aeronautical operations.
Jeet Adani, director of Adani Airport Holdings, expects the share of aeronautical revenue to fall to around 10% of total revenue, with non-aero becoming the bigger growth driver. The motivation can be seen as an escape from a return ceiling as much as a bet on rising affluence.
As Kumar puts it, consumer businesses help the conglomerates in two major ways. First, they help insulate them from volatile and often punishing commodity cycles, and second, they often offer far better returns with lower capital intensity and faster cash conversion.
Reliance Industries (RIL) shows how significant that shift can become. By 2025–26, its consumer-facing arms, Jio Platforms, Reliance Retail Ventures and Reliance Consumer Products, together contributed over 40% of group revenue and nearly 60% of operating profit.
And there is another advantage. “A small business, when it wants to build a new venture, faces constant margin pressure and often has to build its supply chain from scratch. A large conglomerate can leverage its existing scale, infrastructure and supply chain to enter a new business far more efficiently,” explains Kranthi Bathini, equity strategist at WealthMills Securities.
Different Strokes
In chasing consumers, some conglomerates are following the fastest-growing categories, while others are using their existing industrial capabilities to enter consumer-facing businesses. One is trying to build an entire ecosystem around it. But the lines between these approaches are not always clean.
Tatas is doing both: building entirely new consumer brands while also using the industrial ecosystem it has built over decades.
For Tatas, the consumer opportunity has largely been about following where spending is moving. Their consumer ventures have followed this arc longest. It began decades ago with Lakmé (1952), Tata Tea (1962) and Titan (1984). Tanishq and the expansion of Trent under brands such as Zudio are only the latest examples.
At Tata Consumer Products, once largely a staples business built around salt, tea and pulses, the focus has been shifting towards value-added foods and beverages, with ₹7,000cr spent on the acquisitions of Capital Foods and Organic India in 2024. Across companies such as Tata Digital, Indian Hotels, Air India and Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles, the group has announced close to ₹93,180cr in investment over the past five years.
Aditya Birla’s jewellery chain Indriya and its move into premium hospitality belong to the same category of ‘pull-based’ diversification.
JSW is taking a different route. It is taking its existing industrial strengths one step closer to the buyer. The group, which has traditionally been focused on areas such as steel, energy and cement, has expanded into consumer-facing areas such as auto, paints and home solutions.
It launched JSW Paints in 2019, and acquired a controlling stake in paintmaker AkzoNobel India for ₹8,986cr last year. Its strategy is to leverage an established network of contractors, dealers, architects and builders to reach consumers.
The same strategy can be seen in its push into autos, acquiring a 35% stake in the Indian unit of China’s MG Motor in 2024, leveraging synergies with its established steel business.
At Tatas, too, group companies like Tata Steel, Tata Power, Tata AutoComp, Tata Technologies and TCS are doing significant businesses with Tata Motors.
Adani is also using an asset it already controls to move further into the consumer’s wallet. Adani Airports announced a ₹20,000cr investment in June to develop hotels, retail, entertainment and commercial infrastructure around its eight airports, and has signed hotel management agreements with IHG Hotels & Resorts for five hotels. City-side developments could contribute 30–40% of Adani Airport Holdings’ non-aero revenue.
Yet another example of the extension strategy is Aditya Birla Group’s attempt to diversify from cement, metals and textiles into decorative paints with Birla Opus.
RIL took a different approach: trying to connect multiple consumer businesses into one ecosystem. It expanded its retail network through new formats and acquisitions, added brands and partnerships, and then built a consumer-goods business around acquisitions such as Campa Cola and Lotus Chocolate.
That expansion was helped by billions of dollars raised by both Jio Infocomm and Retail Ventures from foreign investors in 2020. The group now plans to spend another ₹8,000cr expanding consumer goods manufacturing. The advantage of having that kind of scale is clear. If RIL has Ajio at a mall and, next to it, GAP and Herschel, it can negotiate better rental terms.
For conglomerates, Kumar points out, the next level of competition will not be based on investment, “but on the ability to create different consumer experiences, foster innovation and create lasting brand loyalty through the integration of these capabilities”.
Can Scale Win?
When Reliance Fresh opened its first stores in 2006, it was part of a rush by some of India’s biggest business groups to crack organised retail. Aditya Birla Group, RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group’s Spencer’s and Kishore Biyani’s Future Group were all betting that organised retail could transform the way Indians shopped. What followed was years of experimentation, losses and, for some, eventual retreat.
Birlas essentially gave up on grocery retail after a decade of heavy losses and exited entirely.
Future was pushed into insolvency after a controversial ₹24,713cr deal with RIL. Spencer’s is still trying to find its footing, with ₹249.33cr in net losses in 2025–26.
Conglomerates may have deeper pockets, but that does not automatically make them better at selling to consumers. India has seen some of those bets fail or take years to work. And even among today’s biggest players, the results are still mixed.
Tata Sons has been in this segment longer than the Ambanis, yet its consumer businesses still make up less than 40% of its total revenue —a share that has not changed since 2020.
These groups have what most standalone consumer companies don’t: capital, distribution, infrastructure, brands, scale.
But winning consumers takes something else entirely—reading what people want, building brands, innovating fast and earning loyalty.
“In B2B [business to business], it’s about manufacturing at scale, getting your costs down. Then you can compete. In B2C [business to consumer], it’s all about the product. With the right product at the right price, you have a chance to win in the market,” Parth Jindal, managing director of JSW Cement and JSW Paints, told Outlook Business in 2025.
Tata Sons’ chairman N Chandrasekaran hit the same wall while revamping the group’s consumer unit. “I have the money. But I don’t have the team to run it,” he had told Sunil D’Souza while hiring him to lead Tata Consumer Products in 2020.
Reliance and Tatas have had the longest head start, but even their journeys show how difficult it is to turn scale and capital into consumer businesses. Birla, JSW and Adani are now trying to make that transition in their own ways.
A longer tail—Bajaj in hospitals, L&T in retail finance and education, Mahindra in insurance and hospitality, Murugappa in electric mobility—is playing it safer, going deeper into what it already owns rather than chasing new categories.
What ties them together is a bet on consumers buying not just more but better, and on those consumers being worth more per rupee of capital than the industrial customers who built these houses.
The prize is growing, but so is the competition. Capital and scale may get these conglomerates through the door. They won’t guarantee a seat at the table.
(Published in Outlook Business)
admin
July 13, 2026
Sowmya Ramasubramanian, Vaeshnavi Kasthuril (MINT)
Bengaluru, 13 July 2026
India’s vertical quick-commerce startups across categories like baby care, medicines and fashion, backed by venture capital heavyweights, are beginning to redefine what “quick” means.
For some, the race is no longer about cutting delivery times by a few more minutes. Instead, founders are increasingly talking about better assortment, sharper curation, stronger supply chains and healthier unit economics as the factors that will decide whether the model survives.
Baby care platform Ozi, backed by Blume Ventures and RTP Global, has settled on a roughly 60-minute delivery promise. Founder Amit Sah told Mint the company would rather optimise for “quality selection” than chase ultra-fast deliveries, arguing that customers today are looking for reliable availability and curated choices rather than insisting on receiving products in 10 minutes.
Lightspeed-backed fashion startup Slikk is pursuing a similar path. Founder Akshay Gulati said the company’s focus since inception has been building a wide catalogue rather than aggressively acquiring users.
The shift comes as the sector enters a more pragmatic phase. Quick fashion startup Blip shut down within a year of launch last June, while rival Klydo has recently pivoted its business model, raising questions about the viability of firms in every category.
The crop of vertical quick commerce startups—focused on rapid delivery within a single, specific product category—has largely emerged over the past two years, inspired by the explosive growth of grocery-focused pioneers such as Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart and IPO-bound Zepto, which have accustomed consumers to receiving groceries and everyday essentials within minutes.
Other prominent startups include Plazza for quick delivery of medicines, Instafix for mobile repairs within minutes, and Dazzl for at-home salon services.
Kalaari Capital noted in its 2025 report that quick commerce had already captured about two-thirds of online grocery orders and around 10% of India’s overall e-retail spending in 2024, transforming consumer behaviour and building the infrastructure for specialised vertical players to emerge.
“Speed was never a real moat but became a hygiene factor once every significant player could promise 10-30 minute delivery,” said Devangshu Dutta, founder and chief executive of consultancy Third Eyesight. “Assortment depth, availability, trust, and sustained price-value have been, and will remain, the true differentiation levers. For categories such as medicines and baby products, credibility and compliance outweigh saved minutes, apart from urgent purchases.”
“Unit economics can become healthier only where there’s a clear reason for frequent and repeated purchases. Groceries and medicines are repeat, low consideration categories, while fashion is high consideration, driven by fit, styling and browsing. The best quick commerce categories have low or no returns and high order frequency, whereas rapid fashion delivery faces high return rates due to product mismatch against customer expectations (sizing, fit, fabric and colour),” Dutta said.
Different categories, different playbooks
While fashion startups are investing heavily in discovery and inventory refreshes, Ozi believes the opportunity in baby care lies in curation and premiumisation.
Sah said each sub-category within baby care presents a different operational challenge. Consumables require deep availability of long-tail brands, while fashion depends on filtering products for quality rather than listing everything available. Ozi, which delivers wipes, diapers, and baby food, deliberately curates brands instead of maximising assortment, targeting parents willing to pay slightly more for trusted products.
“The customer behaviour has shifted from discovery first to search first,” Sah said, adding that shoppers today are not necessarily looking for ultra-fast delivery, but nor are they willing to wait several days. “A modern-age customer values quality. They are happy to pay an 8-10% or 12% differential, but they need quicker access to better brands and better assortment.”
Fashion startups argue that their challenge is different altogether.
Gulati said Slikk has built its business around supply rather than customer acquisition, claiming that stronger assortment has helped steadily reduce acquisition costs. The company replaces 30-40% of inventory in every dark store each month and is expanding neighbourhood by neighbourhood instead of spreading rapidly across cities.
Slikk might also consider introducing private brands for apparel, given their higher margins, Gulati said.
Bengaluru-based fast-fashion e-commerce startup Knot, which raised $5 million from 12 Flags and Kae Capital in December 2025, is investing heavily in back-end technology. Its app captures user preferences through swipe-based interactions, while its dark stores carry much wider assortments than horizontal quick commerce operators – offering a vast, multi-category collection of goods – and customise inventory based on local demand.
“We look at fashion as a data science problem and not really an intuition problem,” co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Archit Nanda said.
Nanda said fashion’s long-tail nature—which relies on selling small quantities of several unique products rather than depending on a few popular items – means inventory commonality across dark stores is significantly lower than grocery, requiring specialised supply chains and hyperlocal merchandising.
The profitability test
The changing strategies also reflect growing investor scrutiny of unit economics.
Slikk’s Gulati said investors continue to back the category but increasingly want proof that businesses can balance growth with profitability rather than relying on heavy customer acquisition spending. He believes execution in neighbourhood-level operations, assortment and brand partnerships will ultimately determine the winner.
Knot’s Nanda said that fashion combines high average order values with healthy margins, making the category attractive despite its complexity.
However, analysts believe that not every vertical is equally suited to the model.
“Looking ahead, horizontal cross-subsidy will work better, with established, well-capitalised players (Myntra’s M-Now, Nykaa Now) including quick delivery into an existing catalogue and logistics network rather than building it standalone. For narrow, high-trust verticals (medicines, baby care) where the value is availability and authenticity rather than impulse, and where margins can support the delivery cost, quick commerce can work,” Dutta noted.
Kalaari Capital’s 2025 report on vertical quick commerce similarly argued that specialised players will win by solving category-specific pain points, with assortment depth, customer experience, and category expertise emerging as key differentiators.
(Published in MINT)
admin
July 12, 2026
Nivedita Mookerji, Business Standard
12 Jul 2026
Recently, fast moving consumer goods distributors posed some existential questions to the government: Have the rules changed for foreign-owned ecommerce firms? With that, the All India Consumer Products Distribution Federation made a plea to the government to examine if foreign-funded ecommerce and quick commerce players can run inventory-led businesses through warehouses and dark stores.
The question mark is around the operating model of the big daddies of retail — both from America — under the current foreign direct investment (FDI) guidelines. One of them is Bentonville-headquartered Walmart, which holds a controlling stake in e-commerce major Flipkart. And the other is Seattle-based Amazon. Both Flipkart and Amazon are upping their quick commerce play, a development that the Indian retail ecosystem players fear would hit them hard.
For context, foreign e-commerce companies are allowed to do business through the marketplace model as opposed to the inventory-led format. Marketplace operators such as Amazon and Flipkart (Walmart) are permitted to have sellers on their platforms and those sellers own the goods (inventory) which are sold to customers. Indian companies in the e-commerce business can own the goods and sell them directly to the consumers.
This is not the first time that there’s noise around the business practices of foreign majors and their alleged violations of the rulebook in relation to anything from the legality of the operating model to predatory pricing and deep discounting. The protests of the domestic traders against foreign players — that started decades ago with an agitation against the government’s multi-brand retail policy — have resulted in a series of amendments in the FDI rules, intervention of the competition watchdog CCI (Competition Commission of India), Supreme Court observations, making of laws and keeping them in abeyance. But, the complaints — from different quarters of the domestic business — have remained.
Devangshu Dutta, founder and CEO of consulting firm Third Eyesight, argued that since 1996-97, when foreign investment in retail was first banned, governments of different political hues have been walking the regulatory tightrope with respect to foreign investment in retail, whether offline or online. “The government’s caution on retail policy was aimed at protecting domestic interests, though it is arguable whether it was for the small retailer, or the larger corporates who had identified this as a growth sector at the time,’’ Dutta said.
(Published in Business Standard)
admin
July 9, 2026
Neethi Lisa Rojan & Vaeshnavi Kasthuril, MINT
Mumbai/Bengaluru, 8 July 2026
The collapse of the US-Iran peace deal in less than a month has rattled India’s consumer sector, reviving fears that higher oil prices and fresh supply-chain disruptions could squeeze demand just as companies were betting on a broader recovery.
The renewed uncertainty followed US President Donald Trump’s declaration on Wednesday that the peace deal with Iran was effectively over, alongside Washington’s decision to end a sanctions waiver on Iranian energy supplies. The market reaction was swift. The Nifty FMCG Index fell 2.49% on Wednesday, underperforming the broader market as all 15 constituents declined, led by Dabur India, Hindustan Unilever, and Tata Consumer Products, whose shares fell 3-4% each. The benchmark Nifty50 ended 2.12% lower after renewed hostilities in West Asia pushed crude prices higher.
Executives and analysts said companies have little room to respond immediately, leaving them to closely monitor devel opments as risks to costs and consumer spending mount. “I don’t think companies can react on this kind of a short notice,” said Arvind Singhal, chairman of consulting firm The Knowledge Company. “It takes 2-6 months to make any change in your plans and strategy. I think right now the Indian FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) companies will be watching the progress of monsoon more carefully than the Strait of Hormuz.”
Even after the US-Iran peace deal took effect on 18 June, consumer companies were unlikely to have expected immediate relief, analysts said.
“While everyone hoped for a cessation in hostilities, smart management teams would work on the realistic expectation that even with a ceasefire, pent-up supply chain input costs need to be absorbed over time, and pricing plans must be factored accordingly,” Devangshu Dutta, founder and chief executive of consulting firm Third Eyesight, said.
“Given that the conflict zone is active, I don’t think there is any immediate likelihood of pricing freeze or reductions, even though demand in rural areas as well as in lower-income urban segments is likely to be hit from both sides ― earnings and expenses.”
Large consumer goods companies including Dabur, Emami and Godrej Consumer had recently told investors they remained confident about consumer demand, including in rural markets.
But the renewed rise in crude prices, coupled with erratic monsoons marked by rainfall deficit in some regions and flooding in others, threatens to complicate that outlook. Higher fuel costs could lift prices of crude-linked raw materials such as plastic packaging and ingredients used in soaps and creams, while persistent inflation could push consumers to cut discretionary apne ding and trade down even on staples.
Major consumer companies had already raised prices or reduced grammage across packaged food, beverages and personal care products in the March quarter.
“As far as the crude prices are concerned, that is probably the only variable where the government has to decide as far as pricing of crude or the petroleum in India is concerned,” Singhal said.
That comes at an awkward time for India’s largest consumer companies, including Hindustan Unilever, which had earlier this year told analysts they intended to drive growth through higher volumes rather than price increases. A renewed bout of inflation could undermine that strategy.
(Published in MINT)
