Spencer’s Retail, the supermarket chain owned by the Goenka Group, has acquired the online grocery store Meragrocer for an undisclosed amount, reports ET. Spencer’s will make Omnipresent Retail, Meragrocer’s parent company into a wholly owned subsidiary. The report cited Shashwat Goenka, ecommerce sales and sector head of Spencer’s as saying that the company was eyeing a gross merchandise value (GMV) of Rs 500 crore from e-commerce in the the next 5 years. Goenka added that apparently, the cost of acquiring Meragrocer was much lower than what would take to set up a greenfield operation for ecommerce. Meragrocer, which operates only in Delhi and Gurgaon, has a GMV of Rs 5 crore. Spencer’s Retail is running losses of Rs 2 crore every month, down from Rs 9.5 crore every month 5 years ago and with the acquisition, the company aims to break even sometime in the near future. The acquisition will allow the group to go omni-channel in Spencer’s present markets and may start selling on Flipkart and Amazon (and also hinted at in February) as indicated by another ET report. Spencer’s stores will become warehouses and servicing points. It is unclear if Spencer’s is looking to convert all of its stores into warehouses across cities. According to a Hindu report, Spencer’s’ online model will start operating on a full scale from April 2016, while DNA reports that Spencer’s will scale up Meragrocer by the first quarter of 2017. As of now, Spencer’s has 122 stores across 35 cities in India.…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...