Following the news that Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries is launching a grocery delivery app under the banner Jiomart in 200 towns and cities across India;

Thomas Brereton, Retail Analyst at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers his view on the situation:

“Ultra-convenience food delivery opportunities are booming amid the COVID-19 outbreak, and Reliance is clearly looking to turn fresh demand into revenue, following in the footsteps of similarly expanding operators such as Deliveroo, UberEats, GrubHub and DoorDash, across Europe and the US.

“India offers even more fertile ground for growth than Europe or North America. In 2019, only 0.8% of India’s $551.8bn grocery market was operated online – well below more mature markets such as the US (4.8%) or the UK (8.2%). Now, largely due to the impact of coronavirus, 35.9% of Indians* are buying food & grocery products online more frequently – second only to China (56.0%) out of the countries surveyed.

“In order to compete with the more established players in the region, such as Flipkart (predominantly owned by Walmart) and Amazon, Jiomart will be looking to leverage its backing from Facebook (which owns 10% of digital unit Jio Platforms), particularly in order to connect customers with smaller retailers via WhatsApp (highly popular in India, with c.400m users).”

*Data retrieved from week 8 of GlobalData’s global 5,000 respondent consumer survey, carried out 12^th – 17^th May across 11 countries.