India’s most powerful and most valuable brand: Tata has some big plans related with ecommerce business, and evidences are in supporting this claim. $104 billion net worth Tata, having a glorious history of 146 years, is now all set to venture into a new economy and a new dynamic market.
Earlier, when Ratan Tata personally invested in Snapdeal and Bluestone, speculations were rife that Tata as a company will also kick start their own ecommerce venture. But details were not clear yet, as these investments had been made on a personal level.
In September this year, when Alibaba offered its IPO, it successfully raised $21.8 billion, on a valuation of $168 billion, with some observers terming it as the biggest IPO US has ever witnessed. The news was certainly analyzed and evaluated by Tata, as reports emerged during that time that Tata is inspired by the incredible Alibaba success, and something was brewing up.
Alibaba’s biggest success stories are their B2B marketplace based ecommerce portal: Tmall.com and B2C marketplace: TaoBao.com as they both collectively generated sales of $246 billion last year, which is more than Amazom and Ebay combined. Technologists speculated that Tata will create their own ecommerce marketplace to replicate Alibaba success story in India.
The Management Reshuffle in Tata
As per reports coming in from ET, Tata has created a small team which will exclusively look into the marketplace based ecommerce model.
1) The ecommerce team will be led by Ashutosh Pandey, former COO of the book chain Landmark (which is part of Tata Group).
2) Sarvesh Dwivedi, who led the life style division on Ebay India has been roped in the team. He previously worked with Myntra and Reliance Retail.
3) Gurvinderjit Singh Samra, who has previously worked with Tata’s life science and Healthcare Units, Indian Hotels and Titan has also been roped in the ecommerce team created by Tata.
Ebay has confirmed the departure of Sarvesh, but hasn’t informed where he went.
In a statement, Tata officials have said, “e-commerce is of interest to the Tata Group, and we will share more information at the appropriate moment.”
Brand Vs Venture Capital: Who Will Win?
The report suggests that Tata will launch their ecommerce based marketplace next year, with products sourced from their Star Bazaar & Westside stores. They already have ecommerce stores for their electronic outlet Chroma and Landmark bookstores. It is expected that these will be merged with the new marketplace, thereby offering maximum choices for the consumer.
Once fully functional, Tata will be directly competing with existing players in this category: Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal, and this fight will be the bloodiest ever, Indian ecommerce has ever witnessed.
On one hand, there is the brand and trust factor of Tata dating back to 146 years, and on another hand, we have giant billion dollar ecommerce companies empowered by billions of dollars of venture capital, performing every marketing trick ever created.
Who will the Indian consumer chose?
The fight is on..
