India’s Adani Group is plotting a move into e-commerce and digital payments, according to a Financial Times report, as the conglomerate seeks to diversify its portfolio and compete with Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance, Amazon, and Walmart’s Flipkart and PhonePe.
The energy-to-infrastructure giant Adani Group is considering applying for a license to operate on India’s Unified Payments Interface, a public digital payments network that has become the most popular way Indians transact online, said the report. Adani Group, among India’s biggest three conglomerates, is also finalizing plans for a co-branded credit card with banks, the report added.
This isn’t the first time Adani Group has shown an interest in digital offerings. In 2022, the firm launched Adani One, a consumer app through which it sells travel tickets. Gautam Adani, the Indian group’s chief executive, also recently hinted at “future collaborations” with Uber following a recent visit to India by Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.
Adani Group is planning to offer online shopping through the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) platform, one person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
At stake is India’s retail market, which is estimated to balloon to $1.27 trillion in size by next year, according to analysts at Bernstein. Reliance Retail, run by Asia’s richest man Ambani, operates the nation’s largest retail chain and last year raised capital that valued the venture at $100 billion.
Walmart’s Flipkart leads the Indian e-commerce market, which is estimated to account for 10.4% of overall retail in the country by next year, according to Bernstein. Flipkart, valued at $36 billion, secured $350 million in new funding from Google last week. (Amazon, a close rival to Flipkart in India, plans to deploy about $3 billion in its Indian e-commerce venture over the next few years.)
Walmart’s PhonePe and Google Pay lead the mobile payments market in India. Together they process over 86% of all payments on the UPI network, which handles over 12 billion transactions monthly. Some government bodies — as well as many ecosystem participants — have expressed concerns about Google and Walmart’s growing dominance in India’s mobile payments market, but the quasi-regulator operating the network currently has no plans to intervene, TechCrunch reported recently.
Adani’s planned e-commerce and mobile payments services would be accessible through Adani One, according to FT, which also reported that Adani Group will initially seek to market its new products to its existing customer base of hundreds of millions of users.
The consumer push follows a tumultuous year for Adani, with allegations of market manipulation and fraud by the U.S. short seller Hindenburg Research, resulting in a $150 billion rout in its listed stocks. Adani has denied any wrongdoing.
