No merger talk ever happened with Bigbasket: Grofers

Softbank-backed online grocery platform Grofers has denied holding any talks with rival Bigbasket for a merger. The company had reportedly explored merger possibilities with Bigbasket in April this year.

“It was not (merger) talks, there was just one meeting about how the business is going and it just got blown out of proportion because of different reasons,” said Albinder Dhindsa, Chief Executive Officer, Grofers to PTI.

So far, the company had raised $165 million from Tiger Global Management and SoftBank, among and others. During its last fundraising of $120 million in October 2015, Grofers was valued at $350-400 million.

According to the PTI report, the Gurugram-based company is eyeing to have revenue of Rs 1,000 crore in current fiscal. It’s also looking to invest in its warehousing and sprucing up infrastructure to process the order at a quicker pace.

According to Dhindsa, Grofers would invest $5 million in warehousing expansion in 2018.

Denying merger rumour with Bigbasket, Dhindsa added, “Right now, business is going well for us, we are going at a pretty good pace. So, why would we want to do any of that?”

Grofers claims to have about 30% market share of the $600 million online grocery market. It has tripled its revenue in the last eight months while company’s loses remained the same. Currently, it works with 1,400 brands and sells 10,000 products through its platforms serving about 4 lakh customers every month.

“We have tripled our revenue from February this year till now and maintained our top line in nine months while maintaining the same bottom line, not increasing our losses,” said Dhindsa.

The company had received DIPP (Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion) approval for food retail in India. Following the nod from the government, the company intends to invest $40 million in its food retail unit.