The Battle For Indian Retail

How Mukesh Ambani, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Walmart’s Doug McMillon are fighting to get a bigger slice of India’s $850 billion retail market

- Ajita Shashidhar

Ostensibly, Mukesh Ambani, Chairman, Reliance Industries, and the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, are engaged in a court battle over ownership of the ₹26,000 crore debt-laden Future Group. But at the core of the fight is the struggle for supremacy in the $850 billion ( ₹62.8 lakh crore) Indian retail industry. Having been pushed into a corner by Alibaba, not only in China but also in South East Asia, Amazon sees India as its only hope of achieving scale outside the US. Bezos is doing all he can to ensure that the opportunity to buy India’s second-largest retailer does not go out of his hand easily.

But this isn’t a two-way fight. There’s a third, perhaps, even a fourth, player vying for leadership of what is projected to be a $1.3 trillion ( ₹96 lakh crore) industry by as early as 2025. The Walmart-Flipkart combination, led by global CEO Doug McMillon, acquired minority stakes in Arvind Brands and Aditya Birla Fashion Retail in quick succession. And one of India’s oldest and largest business houses, the Tata Group, is prepping to up its retail ante by bidding for India's biggest online grocery retailer Big Basket.

Big money is being committed for leadership of that lip-smacking trillion dollar pie. The top three have cumulatively invested $33.3 billion ( ₹2.46 lakh crore). The world’s largest retailer Walmart invested $16 billion to buy e-commerce giant Flipkart and recently announced an additional $2 billion ( ₹14,478 crore) investment. Reliance has invested ₹30,000 crore and is spending another ₹24,713 crore to buy Future Group’s retail assets. Amazon has pumped in $6.5 billion and is neck-and-neck with Flipkart in India’s e-tail landscape.