Amazon in talks to buy BigBasket

According to Bloomberg.com, Amazon.com, world’s largest online retailer is in preliminary talks to buy Indian online grocer BigBasket to expand its presence in the Indian market. Bloomberg.com cited that, “The discussions are at an early stage and may not lead to a sale, the people said, asking not to be identified as the negotiations are private. BigBasket, run by SuperMarket Grocery Supplies Pvt, is India’s largest online grocer and operates in about 25 cities across the country.”

BigBasket is India’s largest online grocery chain and if one of the few to survive in this extremely competitive market. There were speculations around Amazon trying to acquire BigBasket in February as well; however, those were cited on twitter by some industry insiders.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, has pledged to spend US$5 billion in India in coming years to compete with the local players. Interestingly, this competition from Amazon has led to merger of two of India’s biggest e-commerce firms – Flipkart and Snapdeal.

Bigbasket was co-founded by Hari Menon, Abhinay Choudhari, V S Sudhakar, Vipul Parekh and V S Ramesh in 2011. During its first three years of operation, BigBasket relied only on word-of-mouth for advertising. Increase in ticket sizes led to bigger investments which gave its founders the confidence to go all out and undertake large-scale expansions.