It seems to be a season acquisition and consolidation in the e-grocery segment. Just after the news of Tatas acquiring BigBasket comes the development that the Reliance group is all set to take over the online milk and grocery startup Milkbasket.
Reliance gobbling up Milkbasket has been doing the rounds since last year. But the deal did not go through for various reasons, not the least for some internal stakeholders issue within the Gurugam-based startup.
Now apparently everything looks sorted and the deal between the two companies is set to be signed soon.
According to an exclusive report in Entrackr, "the talks have reached the last stage and both parties have agreed upon contours of the deal. Reliance already offered a term sheet early this month and the transaction could be announced soon.”
The size of the deal is in the range of $40-43 million, the report added.
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What does Milkbasket do?
For the record, Milkbasket, which mostly operates in parts of Delhi, Gurugam, Noida, Dwarka, Hyderabad and Bengaluru, has reported a revenue of Rs 322 crore in FY2020.
Milkbasket was founded in 2015 by Anant Goel, Ashish Goel, Anurag Jain and Yatish Talvadia, and it caters to household grocery needs. The company claims to have set up an advanced technology across the full-stack supply chain from sourcing to last-mile delivery.
As per numbers available till June 2020, Milkbasket is said to serve over 130K households and offers over 9,000 products across fruits & vegetables, dairy, bakery and all other FMCG categories.
Will it help JioMart?
Aside from Reliance, Milkbasket was earlier in talks with BigBasket and Amazon for take over.
As and when the deal is formally announced, Reliance will hope to use Milkbasket's strength in subscription commerce platform for its own JioMart, which despite a big splash launch last year is still motoring along slowly.
For various reasons, the next big push has not happened. The much expected use of WhatsApp Pay to drive its business has also not happened in the way it was anticipated.
The acquisition of Milkbasket can help JioMart and Reliance Retail provide the bulwark of an established player in the key markets of Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Delhi and its vicinity.
In the last few years, Reliance has made strategic investments in multiple companies including in ed-tech startup Embibe, furniture company UrbanLadder, e-medicine company Netmeds, music streaming application Saavn, O2O commerce platform Fynd, logistics player Grab, AI-based chatbot major Haptik, local language services provider Reverie and small business platform NowFloats.
