Jignanshu Gor believes DMart doesn't need to join Q-commerce rush. Here's why
Amid rising competitive intensity from quick commerce (
Q-commerce
) platforms,
Avenue Supermarts
, the parent company of
DMart
, is not likely to join the rapid delivery race but is instead expected to sharpen its focus on
delivery timelines
, assortment depth, and overall value proposition.
In an interaction with ET Now,
Jignanshu Gor
of
Bernstein India
addressed the longstanding thesis around DMart's vulnerability to Q-commerce rivals and outlined how the retailer may respond.
Gor, whose research house tracks both Avenue and Q-commerce trends, noted that while investor concerns about the overlap between DMart's customer base and quick commerce users have persisted for months, this overlap might be overstated.
Addressing the possibility of DMart entering the Q-commerce space directly, Gor stated, 'Will they join them? I do not think so.' Instead, he pointed out that 'they have been working at it for the last nine months, but I do not think they should even plan to join it.'
According to him, DMart is more likely to strengthen its delivery capabilities and expand its product assortment, supported by greater
investment
that one can see in DMart this year or DMart Ready.
Gor stated that while Q-commerce will continue to evolve, 'I do not think the entire
grocery retailing
in India is going to shift online and if it does not shift online, then DMart is one of the two large big box retailers left and arguably given margin profile, etc., the better run retailer as well.'
Also read:
Who is Greg Abel and is he able enough to fill Warren Buffett's $1.2 trillion shoes?
'There is a reason why we think that when it comes to
pure FMCG
or grocery items, a big box retailer is able to provide value, which quick commerce will find it difficult to do on a sustainable basis,' he said.
He acknowledged that the thesis around competition from Q-commerce has been oscillating in the last six months, particularly after DMart's Q2 numbers, which were interpreted by some as indicating pressure from rapid delivery players.
However, Gor stressed that 'DMart can and will compete better on offering value to customers and offering choice to customers, so that overlap should get over and they will be able to survive or thrive in quick commerce.'
(
Disclaimer
: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time of India
2 days ago
- Time of India
Tesla not interested in manufacturing in India, minister says
Elon Musk 's Tesla is not interested in manufacturing in India, said Heavy Industries Minister Kumaraswamy on Monday, as per an ET Now report. The EV giant is unlikely to manufacture vehicles in the country anytime soon, he said. 'Tesla only wants to open showrooms and sell imported cars,' he said. Kumaraswamy also said India will soon invite applications under its electric vehicle (EV) manufacturing policy. The minister also said Europe's Mercedes Benz, and Skoda-Volkswagen (VW), South Korean Hyundai, and Kia, have shown interest to manufacture EVs in India. Speaking to journalists, he said the application window for the Scheme to Promote Manufacturing of Electric Passenger Cars in India (SPMEPCI) will open soon. After that, the government will start accepting formal applications. The government has announced a scheme that includes significant import tax cuts for foreign automakers that commit to investing in manufacturing electric cars in the country. Under a rewamped scheme, companies will be allowed to import a limited number of electric cars at a lower import duty of 15% versus the current 70% duty if they commit to investing $486 million to build EVs in the country, the Ministry of Heavy Industries said in a statement. Meanwhile, in February, U.S. President Donald Trump said he believes any plans Tesla might have to open a factory in India would be "very unfair." Tesla had recently finalised some showroom space in India and posted more than two dozen jobs, signalling it is getting closer to a launch. Tesla has been mulling an India entry for the past several years and Musk has spoken against India's high import duties, calling them a major barrier to Tesla's expansion in the country. Tesla's gigafactories could boost India's manufacturing and tech sectors by producing EVs, batteries and charging solutions locally. But would they go all in? Tesla also has to be accepted first, and that comes with some challenges. Their direct sales model may need to be adjusted for India's dealer-centric market. Aftersales service, a critical factor, has to be robust. Then there is pricing — India is price-sensitive, with the bulk of the passenger vehicle market below Rs 20 lakh. The cheapest Model 3 retails for $42,490 in the US (around Rs 37 lakh), placing it firmly in the luxury segment in India, even before duties come into play. Initially, at least, these cars will likely be imported from Germany, adding a similar amount to the sticker price in duties, unless US President Donald Trump arm-twists India into cutting tariffs. That limits their market Rajeev Chaba, CEO emeritus of JSW MG Motor India, the India unit of Morris Garages, believes price point will be a challenge for Tesla. Musk, in January, hinted at launching more affordable models in the first half of 2025. A $24,000 car, colloquially called Model 2, has been speculated for years, but that may not happen if news trickling out of China is to be believed, where Tesla is trying to reignite demand with a cheaper, stripped-down version of Model Y instead of a whole new car. If Tesla wants to have more than a token presence in India, it would need to have better pricing, and value-driven offerings, than even China. 'I think India is ready for more players, especially as EV penetration continues to grow. Also, India's EV penetration is still low, with electric passenger vehicle sales accounting for less than 3% of total sales. However, sales have grown substantially, from 5,000 units in 2020 to over 113,000 in 2024. It is this momentum Tesla could tap, especially in the premium segment, Ravi Bhatia, president of automotive consultancy Jato Dynamics earlier told ET.
Economic Times
2 days ago
- Economic Times
No betting on market till July; AI companies to take a couple of years to take off in India: Ajay Bagga
Ajay Bagga, Market Expert, says Agentic software adoption is growing, with Microsoft leading across platforms, which Indian companies are poised to capitalize. Economic headwinds in China and the US may impact IT spending, necessitating productivity and cost optimization through AI. Data centers are crucial for AI's expansion, presenting opportunities for utility companies and well-funded startups, especially those integrating solar power and storage solutions. ADVERTISEMENT What is your view on the markets because some people hold the view that this year markets could be tough. You have to be selective if you want to make money. What is your assessment? Ajay Bagga: All bets are off till July. July 9th is an important date as the tariff agreements start coming in that will help market sentiment. A 12-month view is quite strong. We will be quite okay on a 12-month basis. For the next 40-45 days, we have to wait and watch. We have seen a lot of back and forth on the Trump administration and those are the two big issues for the world. One issue is the global trade war and where tariffs will eventually settle in and the second big issue is the US fiscal deficit. These are the two things hurting global risk sentiment. In terms of flows, whenever there is a reduction in the tariff risk sentiment, we see flows coming to the US, otherwise we are seeing flows going largely to Europe and to Japan. Some amount coming into emerging markets as well, that also we are seeing. Can India become the services factory of the world? Gautam Trivedi explains ET Now: You just said that flows are likely to go to Europe and Japan and some to the emerging market space. So, within that space, where is India positioned? How do you see the outlook going forward for the Indian market?Ajay Bagga: The Indian market is positioned well, but for the global overhang, we would have seen even better inflows coming into the Indian markets. The issue is global. As far as the domestic macro goes, domestic earnings have been stable, they have not been great, but they have not been highly disappointing as well. It is a stable earnings outlook. Nearly eight months are over, and the ninth month is below the previous all-time high – so in a minor downside. Markets have had a good time to consolidate. Again, the issue has been global and we have seen a return of FIIs in May. We expect that to continue further as well. But more issue is global than domestic and that is why the favoured sectors are also more domestic for now. But in the next six months if we get some more clarity on the Trump policy format, then it could come back and we could see global sectors getting benefited. Otherwise, we are focusing more on the domestically-oriented sectors. ADVERTISEMENT We would love to deep dive more into your preferred sector. But firstly, how do you see the whole chatter around the AI transition because some of the experts also highlight that whenever we have witnessed a technology transition, the Indian companies have adopted it very well but at a later stage. Help us with your assessment of the AI boom because some of the US and even Chinese companies are taking the leap. How will Indian players transition to that? Ajay Bagga: It is catching up. You are getting the end use cases. Agentic software is being launched. A lot of it will be how Microsoft is approaching it, where they have put their software on every cloud platform. They are not only limiting themselves to Azure, but they are going across a lot of platforms and giving end use solutions to customers for that. I think Indian companies will jump start that. We will see a lot of that coming in. But the big issue is the Chinese slowdown and the US looming slowdown. We are looking at 0.5% growth in the US for this year, next year 1.6% as against about a 2.5% growth that the last three years were seeing. There is some amount of slowdown in the US and what gets cut is first marketing and then software development and that is what our companies are facing. We have to have a strong productivity push or a cost cut push that we are optimising or are reducing employment by bringing in AI agents. We have not transitioned to those kinds of things yet and nobody in the world has brought that singularity into AI yet. ADVERTISEMENT The agents are very poor in comprehension and in offering solutions. Wherever the customer can enter the data, as happens in finance which we have done and our IT companies enabled that over the last 30 years, that was a big change, like earlier customers would walk into a branch, it was costing you Rs 200-300 to serve a customer. Then, we took it to the phones. It became Rs 10-12. Then, we brought it online, when it became customer-centered. Today we are all making our own payments, we are all enabling our accounts to pay our utility bills, the cost has gone out of the banks totally and it is all reconciled, it is all done automatically, it has happened from industry to industry, so that was the boom over the last 30 years that our IT did. AI is just starting. So, right now the picks and shovel companies like Nvidia who make the chips are doing well. ADVERTISEMENT The next level is who sets up the data centre and the power suppliers for them. Power suppliers to those data centres will do well. Third is companies which bring the end use, but then the end user has to be ready for it, has to be able to fund it. They are not finding it so much right now. Another trend I am seeing is the GCC trend. Since there are now 2,900 captive and third party GCCs running in India, all our companies are looking at funding and manning that and offering that kind of service which is easier than AI. AI will be the big one, but maybe it will take another two years before we start seeing that difference coming on the revenues and the profit front. Though data centres are long-term stories, do you find good opportunities in the listed space for specifically Indian companies? Though a lot of companies are now talking about the data centre theme, how will it contribute? Some of these are MNCs and some of the companies came out with the recent earnings as well, but do you have much confidence there that these companies will be able to deliver? Are there enough players in the listed space? Ajay Bagga: Not enough. There are a few who are talking about it. We have not really seen that getting translated yet. But there will be utility level companies which will come in. So, running a data centre is not necessarily an IT company kind of a work, but it helps them to gain clients to have that capacity, like the Government of India mentioned they are going to buy some 12,000 more GPU chips for the Indian stack, for the weather programme and private players also linked into defence. ADVERTISEMENT That way data centres will be done by the large corporates in the country and the well-funded startups will be able to do it. It is a crying need. It will happen. And if you can link it up to solar along with storage, like last week we had a few days where the incremental cost on the electric exchanges went to zero because solar was really performing in the heat. We are going to see weekends where you will get a surge of free power coming in. If you can store that, along with data centres, that will become a business model. So, there are some players, I would not like to name them, but one has not seen on the ground movement coming through yet, but when it happens, it will be very big. Everyone will use AI. And we take it very simply like I was told by a Harvard professor, make sure whenever you are using any of these tools, you are thanking them because in 10 years the machine will remember who was rude and who was saying the please and thank yous. But then, OpenAI came out and said it is costing them millions of dollars every time you are saying thank you to AI or this craze of creating portraits is costing so much data centre capacity, so much cooling capacity, so much power, which we do not realise. We are asking AI to write our emails. That day I was talking to one of the doctoral guides. They had sent me a thesis to read and then they called me very fast and said, sir do not waste your time. I said, what happened? They have this software which tracks if the thesis has been pirated from somewhere or plagiarized and they said 92% of the thesis is written by ChatGPT, so do not waste your time. We are asking the student to rewrite it. So, we are seeing things like that happen and all at the back of it will be data centres. So, you need, they will be like electricity. You will need data centres to process all this. We take it very simply. Write me an email, write a thank you and put this and immediately it comes, but it costs a lot at the back end. (You can now subscribe to our ETMarkets WhatsApp channel)
Time of India
5 days ago
- Time of India
Why India's 1% are staking claims in the luxury concrete jungle; 10 biggest realty splurges
One of India's costliest residential transactions to date saw pharma billionaire Leena Gandhi Tewari, chairperson of USV Ltd, spend ₹635 crore on two sea-facing duplexes in Naman Xana, Worli. Spread over four floors with a combined carpet area of 22,572 sq ft, the deal works out to ₹2.83 lakh per sq ft, setting a new national benchmark , as per ET. Over the past few years, India's ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs) have ramped up investments in residential real estate, reshaping the country's luxury housing landscape. The headline numbers say it all. Tewari's ₹639 crore twin duplex deal in Worli, the Kotak family's ₹628 crore consolidation of nearly an entire sea-facing building in Mumbai, and DMart founder Radhakishan Damani's ₹1,000 crore heritage bungalow acquisition in Malabar Hill. The message is clear. India's wealthy are not limiting their investments to equities or startups. Increasingly, they are putting money into bricks and mortar. And not just any bricks and mortar but the most coveted addresses in the country. Play Video Pause Skip Backward Skip Forward Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration 0:00 Loaded : 0% 0:00 Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 1x Playback Rate Chapters Chapters Descriptions descriptions off , selected Captions captions settings , opens captions settings dialog captions off , selected Audio Track default , selected Picture-in-Picture Fullscreen This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Text Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Caption Area Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Drop shadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Also Read: Indian residential real estate hits new highs with record-breaking apartment deals in Mumbai What is driving the trend? Several factors are at play. First, there is growing conviction that luxury real estate in India is entering a golden phase. Demand for marquee properties is far outstripping supply, particularly in prime pockets such as Lutyens' Delhi, Malabar Hill, Worli, and Golf Course Road in Gurugram. That scarcity is pushing prices into uncharted territory. Tewari's purchase at ₹2.83 lakh per sq ft set a new national record. In Gurugram, DLF Camellias has seen rates reach as high as ₹1.17 lakh per sq ft according to Anarock and media reports. Furthermore, a recent Knight Frank report revealed that Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Delhi ranked among the top 15 global cities for prime residential price growth in Q1 2025, with Bengaluru placed fourth, Mumbai fifth, and Delhi fifteenth. The report tracked price movements across prime residential markets in 45 global cities, highlighting India's rising prominence in the luxury real estate segment. Live Events Also Read: This area in Delhi-NCR saw a 98% property price rise in the last 5 years, see how much property prices appreciated in your locality Many of these deals carry strategic value. Take the Kotak family's near-total ownership of a sea-facing building in Worli. It is widely seen as a redevelopment play. These are not just end-use homes but investment vehicles, with long-term potential for high-yield luxury apartments or mixed-use projects. India's top luxury residential deals Sl No. Buyer Location Deal Value (₹ cr) Highlights 1 Radhakishan Damani (reportedly) Malabar Hill, Mumbai 1,000 Heritage bungalow; 1.5-acre plot; redevelopment potential 2 Leena Gandhi Tewari Worli, Mumbai 639 Twin duplexes; ₹2.83 lakh/sq ft; 22,572 sq ft 3 Uday Kotak family Worli Sea Face, Mumbai 628 (426 + 202) 21 of 24 flats; potential redevelopment 4 Kumar Mangalam Birla Malabar Hill, Mumbai 425 Jatia House; 25,000 sq ft bungalow 5 J.P. Taparia family Three Sixty West, Worli, Mumbai 369 6 apartments; 5,000 sq ft each 6 Rishi Parti & others DLF Camellias, Gurugram 285 (190 + 95) Penthouse + apartment; ₹1.17 lakh/sq ft 7 Nadir Godrej Malabar Hill, Mumbai 180 3 apartments in Ruparel House 8 Vasudha Rohatgi Golf Links, Delhi 160 2,160 sq yd bungalow 9 Bhanu Chopra Golf Links, Delhi 127.5 11,000 sq ft bungalow 10 Gaurav Trehan Malabar Hill, Mumbai 88 5,381 sq ft flat with private deck (Sources: Industry data, media reports) What the numbers reveal According to the Knight Frank Wealth Report 2024, India's UHNWI population grew by six percent last year to reach 85,698. This number is expected to rise to 93,753 by 2028. Residential real estate now accounts for 32% of their investment portfolios, up from 25% in 2020. This is a notable shift towards tangible, high-value assets. India's real estate sector began 2025 on a strong note. CBRE's India Market Monitor Q1 report shows that equity investments surged to $3 billion in the January to March quarter, a 74% year-on-year jump driven by developer activity and increased interest in Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). The luxury housing segment stood out with sales up 28% year-on-year. Delhi-NCR led the surge, with a balance between new launches and demand. Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi-NCR together accounted for 67% of total equity inflows, showing their dominance as real estate hubs. Also Read: Looking to buy an apartment in Mumbai for Rs 1 crore? These areas in the suburbs look promising High-end deals continue to set records. Nadir Godrej spent ₹180 crore on three apartments in Malabar Hill. Rishi Parti paid ₹190 crore for a penthouse in DLF Camellias. Even relatively new entrants such as RateGain founder Bhanu Chopra are buying into this segment with his ₹127.5 crore Golf Links bungalow. Several other marquee transactions, including a reported ₹500 crore sea-facing bungalow in Mumbai's Cuffe Parade, remain confidential due to privacy clauses. This boom in ultra-luxury real estate is about more than just eye-popping prices. It reflects a structural shift in how India's wealthiest individuals are allocating capital. With global real estate markets stagnating and Indian equities prone to volatility, many billionaires are looking inward for stability and finding it in landmark properties with enduring value.
