Tata Sons acquires BigBasket with 64.3% stake purchase; on road to building 'Super App'

In a key development, Tata Sons through its wholly-owned subsidiary Tata Digital on Thursday made a big acquisition in the e-commerce space dominated by Amazon.com Inc, Walmart's Flipkart, and Reliance Industries, by acquiring a 64.3% majority stake in online grocery seller BigBasket. The development comes after India's antitrust body approved the acquisition of up to a 64.3% stake in BigBasket by Tata Digital in the month of March. As per reports, the deal is worth about 95 billion rupees ($1.31 billion). 

"Grocery is one of the largest components of an individual's consumption basket in India, and Bigbasket is India's largest e-grocery player, fits in perfectly with our vision of creating a large consumer digital ecosystem. We are delighted to welcome Bigbasket as a part of the Tata Digital," said Pratik Pal, CEO of Tata Digital. "As a part of the Tata ecosystem, we would be able to build a stronger consumer-connect and accelerate our journey," said Hari Menon, co-founder, and CEO of BigBasket while adding that the company was "extremely excited" about its future as part of Tata Group.

Tata Group to launch a digital consumer ecosystem

Since September last year, rumours were rife that the Tata Group was planning to launch an integrated e-commerce platform, and the same were proved correct by the official statement released by the company. "Tata Group is building a digital consumer ecosystem addressing consumer needs across categories in a unified manner." Reasoning out its acquisition of shares of BigBasket, an online food and grocery platform, which is an integral part of any e-commerce platform, the group stated, "Accordingly, this acquisition presents an attractive opportunity for Tata Group in its overall vision of creating a digital ecosystem."

It is pertinent to mention here that the group already had in its ownership Qmin (a food delivery platform), Tata CLiq (lifestyle online shopping site) and Croma (an electronics store) before it acquired shares of BigBasket (Grocery selling app) and as per reports, it is going to integrate all of this and create a 'super' app in the financial year 2022. 

(Credit-@Tatacompaines/Twitter/PTI)