When you can’t beat them, you join them. That’s the current industry trend. Atleast that’s what is seems as mega offline retailer, Future Group (Owners of Big Bazaar) breaks bread with the world’s largest e-tailer, Amazon Inc.
Mr Jeff Bezos is playing all the right cards. He seems to have planned his itinerary really well even before he was heading to India. Just prior to the BigBillionDay sale of Flipkart, Future Group cried foul for selling their products at unacceptably low prices and now has a deal with Amazon India! Now that was a real quick turn-around Mr Biyani!
It looks like Bezos knocked the right door, when Future Group announced that both the companies have entered a strategic partnership with each other. This is not the sole event of e-tailer and retailer alliance. Just a last month, Tata Group company, Infiniti Retail Ltd that deals in consumer durables and IT products, Croma tied up with Snapdeal to sell it’s products. Making Snapdeal offer a variety of range of products, Croma products are now available on Snapdeal at unbelievable prices. This deal seems to be a win-win for both, Snapdeal as well as Croma.
So what’s in it for Amazon and Future Group?
This strategic partnership is sure to build on the synergies and each entity has a huge customer base, online and offline. Kishor Biyani led Future group wants to start off by creating an online presence on Amazon with it’s private Fashion labels such as Lee Cooper, Converse, Indigo Nation, Scullers, Jealous 21 and etc being some among the 40 brands, Future Group holds.
“The bottom line in each of our retail success stories is ‘know your customer’. … Partnership with Amazon, which obsesses to be earth’s most customer centric company, will enable us to leverage their strengths, investments, and innovations in technology to reach out to wider set of consumers across India,” Future Group CEO Kishore Biyani said in a statement.
This is huge deal for Amazon which doesn’t have a lively presence in the fashion e-players with Jabong and Myntra eating up any chances of profit. The Fashion industry is the top most grosser among many online shoppers.
As it is already known, Amazon has announced launching the sale and delivery of F&B (Read: Amazon Fresh), this deal comes along at the right time, given that Big Bazaar is still has many home maker’s first choice.
Also Future Group wanted to launch it’s new beverage range called “Sunkist” and 3 food brands “Karmiq”, “So Fresh” and “Veg affair”, given this deal, there wouldn’t be a better time and platform for these newbies to take off.
Biyani was quoted saying,“Each of these will have its own range. Veg Affair will be ready-to-eat frozen vegetables, including peas and carrots. Karmiq is for canola oil and other such products as well as dry fruits.”
Future Group led Big Bazaar, Pantaloons, Foodhall, Brand Factory, Hometown and E-zone have been highly successful ventures. With groceries, food, furniture, stationeries, decorative home accessories, electronics, home needs etc, under the Future Group umbrella, it means to introduce a new category, Amazon needs to look no further to get vendors. The partnership will initially focus on Future Group’s fashion brands and will subsequently cover all other categories, Future Group said in a statement.
This hugely helps in cost cutting too. With Future Group products just one click away, the Future Group can shut down many of it’s loss making units and de staff too. With a readily available online e-portal, the cost of starting from scratch doesn’t arise.
As for Amazon, the goodwill of Future group will drive it’s already growing sales even further. Foraying into different streams and implementing different schemes, this may be said as one of the biggest e-tailer- retailer partnerships destined to win.
The year 2014 seems to be working pretty well for the one year old Amazon, that holds Junglee and introduced “pay with Amazon” and Amazon Fresh.
Mr Bezos surely knows his way around here in India!
[…] With such presence across India, the e-commerce step was quite predictable. However, it’s competitor Kishore Biyani led Future group had earlier said, “It’s all about money. The e-commerce guys have money to experiment – I don’t have this kind of money to blow” but later he gave in eventually by collaborating with Amazon Inc. […]
[…] a few days back Amazon formed a strategic alliance with the Future Group, Flipkart is still recovering from the Bigbillion Flop sale with show cause notices and now it’s […]