Good Morning Dear Reader, Nowadays, Grocery and electronics couldn't be more different as businesses. One has high-frequency and low-value orders. And the other, low-frequency and high-value.
But such is the scope of Reliance Industries' ambitions that it wants to rule both, and do so both offline and online. It already runs India's largest supermarket and electronics chains. And, as we wrote in an earlier story, its grocery-first e-commerce venture JioMart likely clocked a gross merchandise value of $375-395 million in its first year. But even as JioMart has made deep inroads into online grocery, it has struggled in its quest to become a supplier to mom-and-pop stores.
With electronics, it seems to be taking the opposite approach, we at mumbai multimedia studio try to overload that how the reliance offline push over the online smartphone transaction.
While it sells electronics on JioMart in some cities, Reliance's focus in electronics is on wedging itself between handset brands such as Samsung and OnePlus and small phone retailers. Reliance already has a relationship with 250,000 of these retailers thanks to the 2017 launch of its 4G feature handset, the JioPhone 2.
Now, with a low-cost smartphone avatar of the JioPhone set to be rolled out in September, Reliance hopes to yoke itself even more tightly to retailers. It hopes to sell 300 million units of this new device—3X the sales of the JioPhone 2. And that will help JioMart make a strong case to be large phone brands' alternative to traditional distributors or the likes of B2B e-commerce unicorn Udaan. Reliance is betting on this new initiative—JioMart Digital—as a prelude to taking aim at Amazon and Flipkart in electronics e-tailing. Reliance can never be faulted for thinking small. But its execution has not always lived up to its promise. So how is it looking this time?
