Like the Telecom sector, Predatory pricing and Deep Discounting has been a norm in FMCG sectors in the past few years. Idea Cellular completed its merger with Vodafone India on 31 August 2018 and thereby became largest telecom company in terms of subscribers and revenue, surpassing Airtel, competing with Jio. The once market leader BSNL has almost become extinct. Business models both in Telecom and FMCG is such that competition is being eliminated. In May 2018, Walmart's largest investment in history was announced with Flipkart in India. Soon after Amazon-Samara Capital had a joint bid to acquire Aditya Birla Retail Ltd that owned 'More' super market' that was ventured in 2007 with the acquisition of Trinethra Super Retail. There were violations to the revised FDI policies, finally Competition Commission of India approved the bid; indicating another mockery of a policy in day light. One interesting point that fascinated me, was both sectors had key industrial player the Birla's and the Ambani's.
Hope our Commerce and Industry minister Piyush Goyal's partnership and working with Current United States Trade Representative, Ambassador Robert Lighthizer bring positive results, given the rift and conflicts today, inspite of the assurance of running e-commerce as an agnostic marketplace, wherein all suppliers get equal opportunity to offer their products and buyers have a choice to buy certain or any products on that marketplace.
There were some complaints about circumvention of the e-commerce policy and multi-brand retail laws, as the Offline market is trying to survive by approaching the customers, brands & the Government through various legitimate forms of protests with the help of associations, meetings. Malls, the modern temples are loosing prominence. Though we do find crowd there, fifty percent of them are window shopping, avoiding the hassles of transportation.
India one of the top three markets in the world has 1.3 billion people and an economy approaching $3 trillion, yet it's eCommerce business is less than 3%. It’s evident that data science and artificial intelligence are the key for the e-commerce industry. Amazon launched robots developed by a US firm known as Kiva Systems, in its warehouses 5 years back in 2014 and later on funded and acquired this company. They further named it as Amazon Robotics. These robots do most of the tasks, from sorting to picking and stacking. Amazon’s drone delivery program, would be delivering packages to customers. For now, India has a huge demand, for people delivering goods, but this should enter India too soon. Flipkart employed little orange cuboids as robots and call them bots or perhaps automated guided vehicles (AGVs), those transfer products within a fenced location bereft of humans. These robots are carrying anything with them, from publications to appliances to mobile phones. Indian e-commerce majors are engrossing the benefits of AI right from customer segregation, sales, and delivery to after-sales and further recommending products to the customers.
This is a period of critical change, the pace and magnitude of our changes are critical to the future as we adapt to an environment that is changing more quickly all the time. As we change, the way we buy, how we work and what we do, it is critical and the need of the hour is to ensure that the automation and ease of operation is spread across all the sectors, and everyone reap the benefit of mechanization. To be precise, it is saddening to see laborer’s still carrying heavy loads for mere wages in construction, farming and some mechanical industries. Hope this sales war boost the economy - and the offline marketers and even other sectors are able to cope up by undoing and redoing to cope up with time.
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