With $25 Bn GMV by 2021, Govt e-Marketplace sets to emerge bigger than Amazon-Flipkart together

Government e-Marketplace (GeM) will surpass e-commerce giants Amazon India and Flipkart in transactions in next three years, according to Minister of Commerce and Industry Suresh Prabhu.

At present GeM does transactions worth $1.5 billion, in three years it aims to reach $25 billion, which is double of the current transactional worth of e-commerce giants Amazon and Flipkart.

Prabhu sees the figure to touch $100 billion by 2025, Mint report quoted Prabhu as saying. GeM will be very valuable possession. However, the government is not in hurry to make it profitable anytime or list it in the equity market.

GeM is a Section 8 company, not-for-profit firm. To be listed or for making a profit, it has to be turned into a profit-making firm. Prabhu did not deny the possibility of changing the nature of the company

Earlier in Feb this year, GeM’s additional CEO HR Sharma had expressed the similar sentiment for growth. He said that the portal is expected to clock transactions of Rs 50,000 crore per year and will touch the figure of Rs 2 lakh crore in the next few years.

From April to February this year, the platform did total transactions of Rs 4,080 crore. In January this year, total transactions surpassed Rs 1,000 crore.

In August 2016, GeM portal was launched as a pilot of the government’s National Procurement Portal of India. Ever since GeM has recorded more than 725,000 transactions worth more than Rs 11,250 crore.

As per GeM site, it has around 27,053 buyer organizations registered on the platform and about 138,317 sellers and service providers offering more than 472711 products. GeM contributes to about 25 percent average overall savings to the government.

According to estimates, the government procures products worth around Rs 5-7 lakh crore a year for states and the central government put together. The finance ministry had amended the General Financial Rules to make it compulsory for all government departments to procure items and services from this portal.

Early this year, the Ministry of Commerce & Industry (MCI) announced a transformation programme – GeM 3.0, which would offer standardised and enriched catalogue management, real-time price comparison, template-based bid and RA creation, demand aggregation, user rating, analytics, and other services.

In addition to an effort to make a smooth transition from GeM 2.0 to GeM 3.0, the government had also launched the ‘National Sellers On-boarding Campaign’ to train sellers and service providers.

In July 2017, Intellect and Infibeam won the bid to run the government e-marketplace. Infibeam had to provide its expertise in e-commerce services while Intellect was to manage the operations. Whereas Tata Communications offered cloud services.