India’s biggest retailer Reliance will acquire dozens of small grocery and non-food brands as it targets building its own $6.5bn consumer goods business to challenge foreign giants like Unilever, two sources familiar with the plan told Reuters.
Reliance, run by Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, plans to build a portfolio of 50 to 60 grocery, household and personal care brands within six months and is hiring an army of distributors to take them to mom-and-pop stores and bigger retail outlets across the nation, the sources added.
The consumer goods push under a vertical named Reliance Retail Consumer Brands will come on top of Ambani’s brick-and-mortar store network of more than 2,000 grocery outlets and ongoing expansion of “JioMart” e-commerce operations in India’s nearly $900bn retail market, one of world’s biggest.
Reliance is in the final stages of negotiations with around 30 popular niche local consumer brands to fully acquire them or form joint venture partnerships for sales, said the first source familiar with its business planning.
The total investment outlay planned by the company to acquire brands isn’t clear, but the second source said Reliance had set a goal to achieve 500bn rupees ($6.5bn) of annual sales from the business within five years.
