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August 6, 2026
Pritha Pahari, The Core
5 Aug 2026
Saurav, a 27-year-old resident of Navi Mumbai, has bought the same tub of whey protein for three years, same brand, same 1kg pack, same monthly ritual after his gym membership renews.
Last month, at checkout, the price had jumped by nearly a thousand rupees. He assumed it was maybe a limited-time markup. But when he checked his order history, he noticed that the price had been going up for two to three months until it crossed a threshold that made him realise that whey protein has gradually become more expensive.
India is the world’s largest milk producer, yet it imports most of its whey protein because its dairy sector was never built to make cheese, the one thing that whey needs to exist.
That gap is now colliding with a global protein boom, driven partly by weight-loss drugs that leave patients needing more protein.
The result is a price rise that is now reaching the local pharmacy and fitness stores, and one that is unlikely to recede.
The Price Move
Research firm, The Daily Datum analysed Keepa price data for 11 whey protein SKUs on Amazon and found an average price increase of 32% and a median rise of 27% across varying tracking periods.
Keepa is a third-party price-tracking tool for Amazon, it logs a product’s price history over time by continuously scraping Amazon’s listing pages, so you can see a graph of how a specific SKU’s price has moved (sales, hikes, restocks) going back months or years.
Prices of different types of proteins i.e. blends, isolates and concentrates have all moved by similar amounts, and so have Indian D2C brands and long-established imported ones.
In protein powder terms, concentrates are ~70-80% protein (less processed, retain more fats/carbs), isolates are ~90%+ protein (more filtered, less lactose/fat), and blends mix two or more protein types (e.g., whey + casein, or whey concentrate + isolate) to combine benefits like fast and slow absorption.
The one outlier, MuscleBlaze’s premium Biozyme Performance line, has roughly doubled, but excluding it, the category average is still 26%, about five times India’s headline food inflation, which stood at 5.32% year-on-year in June 2026, according to government data.
The retail prices are only a reflection of what is happening with the raw ingredients needed for whey.
Imported whey protein concentrate landed in India at roughly Rs 700–800 per kg in 2024; by mid-2026, the industry estimates put it at Rs 2,300–3,000 per kg, a rise of over 200%.
Brands have absorbed much of that shock through smaller pack sizes and blended formulations rather than passing it straight through, which is why retail prices have risen a fraction of what the raw material has.
For scale, India’s protein supplement market (powders, bars and ready-to-drink shakes together) is put at roughly $860 million to just over $1 billion in 2025, though the exact figure depends a lot on which research firm and which product categories you ask (IMARC Group and Grand View Research land in that range but don’t agree closely). That compares with a global protein supplements market well above $30 billion.
Not A Farmed Commodity
“You don’t milk a cow for whey. You milk a cow for milk. And then you have to make cheese,” said Rajiv Mitra, Strategic Advisor, Sonai Dairy, a Maharashtra based dairy.
Whey from cheese-making is “sweet whey”, protein-rich and further processed through filtration and expensive drying infrastructure into the 80–90% protein concentrate that ends up in a gym-goer’s scoop.
“This is a structural bottleneck,” Mitra said. “It’s not a kind of seasonal commodity up and down.” New filtration and drying plants can take two to four years to build, with much of the machinery imported.
This is where India’s dairy habits work against it.
Devangshu Dutta, founder of the retail consultancy Third Eyesight, while speaking to The Core explained that globally, about 95% of whey protein comes as a co-product of Western-style hard and semi-hard cheeses such as cheddar and mozzarella. India’s dairy sector, by contrast, is built around paneer, curd, khoya and ghee.
Paneer is made by acid coagulation, which produces “acid whey”, lower in protein and higher in minerals, and not suitable for concentration into protein powder.
“Unless consumption of western-style cheeses grows dramatically in India, co-production capacity will remain low,” Dutta said.
Mitra makes the same point from the kitchen rather than the factory floor: squeeze lemon into milk to make paneer at home and the liquid that separates out simply gets drained. “Traditionally, for years, while we have been the highest producer of milk, our consumption pattern is such that we do not harness the whey that is produced,” he said.
That liquid is easy to overlook because it looks like nothing more than watery runoff, but it isn’t a waste.
When milk curdles, the solid part becomes paneer or cheese, and the yellowish liquid left behind, the whey, still carries a meaningful share of the milk’s protein along with lactose and minerals.
Filtered, concentrated and dried at an industrial scale, that liquid becomes the powder sold in tubs as whey protein concentrate or isolate. In most Indian kitchens it is simply poured away; in a cheese-and-whey-processing economy like the US or Europe’s, it is captured and turned into a saleable ingredient.
That gap between what gets thrown out and what gets processed is the crux of the shortage.
Why It’s Getting More Expensive
India imports an estimated 80–90% of its supplement-grade whey, mostly from the US, Europe, New Zealand and Australia, in dollars. The rupee has weakened sharply against the dollar over the past few years, from around 74 to nearly 97 by July 2026, adding another 10–15% to landed cost before customs and tax.
India’s own import policy adds a further layer of cost. Dairy is among the most protected sectors in the Indian economy: duties on whey, cheese and milk powder run 30–60% depending on the product, India offers no duty-free quota for dairy, and the government has repeatedly kept dairy outside trade negotiations, including in the interim India–US trade agreement reached in early 2026.
US suppliers, the world’s largest whey producers, also frequently fall short of the vegetarian-rennet certification Indian food rules require, which further narrows where Indian buyers can import from. None of this caused the current price spike, but it does mean India pays a built-in premium over the raw international price, and there is no sign of that premium being negotiated away soon.
Global demand, meanwhile, keeps climbing while milk output in the US and Europe grows only slowly. The global whey protein market is put at roughly $9.7 billion in 2025 by one widely cited estimate (Grand View Research).
It has clearly grown a lot over the past decade, but market-research firms disagree fairly widely on the starting point and pace of that growth.
Mitra pointed to a newer driver on top of the usual sports-nutrition demand: GLP-1 weight-loss drugs.
“Doctors have asked patients to consume more protein” to offset muscle loss from the drugs, he said, and as patents expire and generics spread to India and China, “the demand-supply gap is definitely going to increase further.”
(Some industry commentary points to semaglutide patents lapsing in markets including India and China around 2026, which would open the door to cheaper generics, though this detail comes from a single industry source and is worth treating as a general trend rather than a confirmed date.)
He laid out what he called a three-pronged squeeze: India’s own GLP-1 users will need more protein even as domestic production stays constrained; the US and Europe, which used to export surplus whey, will increasingly consume it themselves as their own GLP-1 use grows; and India’s roughly 30% vegetarian population, which depends on dairy for protein, will lean on it even harder.
Ingredient suppliers and dairy processors abroad broadly back this account, at least directionally, though they are careful not to call GLP-1 the sole cause. In wire-service and trade-press interviews, executives at FrieslandCampina and Lactalis have cited the weight-loss drug trend by name as a reason for new investment in high-protein whey processing, and StoneX’s dairy consulting head has said the food industry simply lacks the capacity to turn whey into the concentrates and isolates the market now wants. Those are real, on-record statements, but they’re a handful of quotes, not a market-wide survey, so it would be a stretch to read them as proof that GLP-1 is now a dominant driver.
The macro numbers, where they exist, suggest a more modest picture: one investment-bank estimate (cited secondhand rather than pulled from the original research note) put GLP-1’s impact on total European calorie demand at around a quarter of one percent, since only a low single-digit percentage of the population is on the drugs so far.
Separately, some retail-data providers have reported that households with a GLP-1 user spend noticeably more on protein-rich products than matched non-user households.
Taken together, traditional sports-nutrition and everyday-fitness demand almost certainly remains the larger base of whey consumption, GLP-1 use is a real and fast-growing add-on that industry executives say is starting to show up in sourcing decisions, but nobody has published a solid, independently verified number for how much of the current price spike GLP-1 specifically accounts for. Anyone who tells you an exact percentage is guessing.
Who Feels It First?
Large manufacturers are better insulated than small ones.
“The bigger players always get into long-term contracts,” Mitra said. Smaller brands and contract manufacturers, reliant on buying at spot prices, “get squeezed first.”
Big companies can also cross-subsidise from other product lines for a while, he said, but that isn’t a permanent fix: “Businesses are not there to absorb cost. Businesses are there to make profit.” Margin compression, in his words, “is never sustainable.”
An executive at HealthKart, which owns MuscleBlaze, was quoted saying in an Financial Express article that whey concentrate costs have more than tripled in two years and are “quickly approaching 4x,” and that the company has raised prices while absorbing part of the increase itself.
The founder of Wellbeing Nutrition was quoted in the same Financial Express article saying whey isolate prices have roughly tripled over the same period, and that whey, which makes up 15–20% of the company’s revenue, is now being promoted less actively as a result.
The founder of The Whole Truth, a clean-label brand that also uses cashews and cocoa, was quoted in the same article in Financial Express, saying input costs across its ingredient list have surged and that the company has pushed through several price increases, including a 15–20% hike on protein bars, rather than change its recipe.
Budget-focused brands such as Nakpro, AS-IT-IS and Avvatar have not made similar public statements, but their pricing sits in the same band as the rest of the market, and their category positioning, cheaper, no-frills whey aimed at price-sensitive buyers, looks consistent with the same cost pressure, even without a direct quote confirming it.
Smaller sachet and single-serve formats, which let a brand hold a lower shelf price even as the cost per kilogram rises, have also become more common across the category over the past year, though this is more an observed pattern than something brands have explained on the record.
Consumers shouldn’t expect quick relief either. “Commodity prices normally fall before retail prices,” Mitra said.
Existing contracts and retail pricing cycles are sticky, so the consumer will see relief much later than any drop in the raw material.
Some Headroom, No Quick Fix
Both experts see room for India to produce more eventually.
Dutta noted that rising protein-consciousness and GLP-1 adoption are giving Indian manufacturers “headroom for growth,” though feedstock constraints will remain a challenge.
Mitra talked about the scale needed: new capacity requires a couple of hundred crores of investment and years to commission, on top of a slow, generational shift in how Indians eat dairy. Cold storage for hard cheeses, which need months of ageing, is also still being built out.
Some of that investment is already happening.
Amul has launched a whey protein line priced well below imported brands, part of a broader push by Indian dairy majors to move into higher-margin, value-added products; cheese and whey can carry margins of 25–45%, against much thinner margins on liquid milk.
Parag Milk Foods already sells whey protein under its Avvatar brand and has positioned itself as a nutrition company rather than a pure dairy one.
Milky Mist, which is preparing a stock market listing, has said it will use part of the proceeds to add new production lines for whey protein concentrate, yoghurt and cream cheese at its Tamil Nadu plant.
Cheese-focused players including Schreiber Dynamix, Britannia Bel Foods and Lactalis India are separately expanding capacity, since more cheese production is what generates more whey as a by-product in the first place.
None of these projects will materially add to supply in the next year or two; dairy-processing plants of this kind typically take two to four years from investment to commissioning, and most industry estimates suggest India’s domestic whey production still covers only a small fraction of what the country consumes.
Neither expert expects plant-based protein to substitute for whey in a hurry. “Whey still offers a superior amino acid profile” and better digestibility, Mitra said, predicting diversification and hybrid blends rather than replacement.
What Could Break the Cycle?
Globally, the shortage is widely described by dairy analysts as a processing bottleneck rather than a milk shortage: milk supply itself has been broadly stable, and cheese production, which generates whey, has continued at normal levels. The constraint is the specialised filtration and drying capacity needed to turn liquid whey into the concentrated, dried powder the supplement industry uses, and that capacity takes years to build.
Major producers, including Glanbia, Fonterra, Arla, Tirlán and Idaho Milk Products, have announced billions of dollars of new whey-processing investment in the US, Europe and New Zealand over the past year. Most of these projects are expected to come online through 2027, not before, so global analysts generally don’t expect meaningful supply relief until late 2026 at the earliest, and more likely 2027.
US milk production is forecast to keep growing gradually into 2027 as well, which should help at the margin, though rising input costs (energy, feed, financing) are also squeezing dairy farmer margins in exporting regions, which cuts the other way.
For India specifically, easing would most likely need several things to move together over the next two to three years: new domestic processing capacity from players like Amul, Parag, Milky Mist and the cheese-focused majors actually coming online, rather than merely being announced; global WPC and WPI supply catching up with demand as the 2026–27 capacity wave lands; a stabler or stronger rupee, since a large share of India’s whey is still imported and priced in dollars; and some change to India’s own tariff and certification structure on dairy imports, which currently adds cost on top of the global price and shows no sign of loosening given how firmly successive governments have kept dairy out of trade deals.
GLP-1-driven demand would also need to plateau rather than keep accelerating as drug prices fall and generics spread.
Even if all of that happens, retail prices in India are unlikely to fall quickly. Brands are currently absorbing part of the cost increase rather than passing all of it through, which means a chunk of any future relief in the raw material would likely go toward rebuilding margins before it reaches the shelf.
Contracts, inventory cycles and psychological pricing (brands are usually slower to cut prices than to raise them) add further lag. Mitra’s framing captures this: raw material costs typically fall before retail prices do, and the gap between the two can run into quarters, not weeks.
What experts keep coming back to is that this has stopped being a niche fitness-industry story. “
This is no longer just about dairy,” Mitra said. It is now about healthcare, pharmaceuticals, nutrition, overall food.
(Published in The Core)
admin
December 3, 2024
Writankar Mukherjee, Economic Times
3 December 2024
Flipkart is set to shortly start delivering medicines within 10 minutes, likely becoming the first quick commerce service to do so, intensifying competition in this red-hot market.
The Walmart-owned company’s Flipkart Minutes service has started enlisting local chemists in the metros from where the products will be sold using its last mile delivery partners, said a senior industry executive aware of the plans.
Flipkart is hurrying since it wants to be the first quick commerce service to sell prescription medicines. To be sure, the company’s partnerships with local chemists needs to be in sync with India’s drug norms for foreign-backed e-commerce operators which bars owning inventory. Also, Flipkart can forge tie-ups only with registered chemists.
“Flipkart wants to develop Flipkart Minutes into a full-fledged quick commerce platform. Medicines is a hitherto untapped opportunity since existing platforms deliver products in an hour to even 3-5 days,” said the executive cited above. “Flipkart will provide the platform for these orders and undertake the last mile fulfilment with its logistic partners, while the product will be sold by the local pharmacies who have all the valid licences,” the executive said.
Flipkart did not respond to ET’s email queries. Analysts said quick commerce for medicines is an untapped area so far but has high potential with healthier margins than food and groceries.
Devangshu Dutta, chief executive at consulting firm Third Eyesight, pointed out that undertaking quick commerce for pharmaceutical products would be a logistics-based issue and would need partnering with a broad network of stores.
“There are no real demand-side or supply problems for quick commerce in medicines in cities. Players like Flipkart have the edge of being a high traffic platform and a robust last mile delivery network. However, critically, the medicine business is also about discounts which can make a real difference for chronic patients or for long-duration and expensive treatments,” he said.
With the latest venture, Flipkart will deepen its presence in quick commerce and the online medicine segment, currently dominated by Reliance Retail-owned Netmeds, Tata 1mg and Apollo Pharmacy.
In 2021, Flipkart took a majority stake in Kolkata-based SastaSundar Marketplace, which owned and operated an online pharmacy marketplace and digital healthcare platform. Through this deal, Flipkart ventured into the health segment and integrated it into its main e-commerce platform selling medicines and other healthcare products.
Flipkart is a late entrant into India’s thriving quick commerce market that has the presence of Zomato’s Blinkit, Swiggy’s Instamart, Tata Group’s BigBasket and Zepto among others. Flipkart rival, Amazon, sells grocery and other products through its Amazon Fresh service but it has yet to foray into quick commerce.
Flipkart Minutes went live in Bengaluru this August and it is currently operational in Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR and Mumbai. The company is preparing to extend the service to launch it in a total of top 8-10 cities including Kolkata, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai.
Flipkart has partnered with local grocers, kirana stores, besides adding its existing sellers in the marketplace for fulfilling grocery orders under Minutes. It is betting on free deliveries besides having a wider selection than existing quick commerce operators across most categories.
“Almost 60% of the orders are fulfilled by local grocers and some of the large sellers in the platform are also moving for quick commerce deliveries. Apart from opening new dark stores, Flipkart is also repurposing its existing city warehouses for grocery deliveries and as dark stores for Minutes,” the executive said.
According to a recent report by Grant Thornton Bharat, India’s quick commerce market is expected to surge nearly threefold to $9.94 billion by 2029 from $3.34 billion at present. The market expanded 76% year-on-year in 2023-24.
(Published in Economic Times)
admin
November 14, 2024
Economic Times
14 November 2024
The Swiggy IPO is making news for being the most successful in a decade in its category. The food and grocery delivery firm yesterday listed at a 5.6% premium to its IPO price of Rs 390, making it the first company with an issue size of over Rs 10,000 crore in the past decade to have listed above its offer price, ET has reported. The stock closed 17% above its issue price at Rs 455.95 in a weak market, surpassing analysts’ expectations of a tepid debut. The company’s market capitalisation at close on Wednesday was Rs 1.02 lakh crore.
Swiggy’s impressive debut also indicates the incoming deluge of cash in an emerging business, quick commerce. Swiggy plans to plough more cash into its quick-commerce business, Swiggy Instamart. Swiggy’s bigger rival, Zomato, is also planning to fatten its war chest. Zomato plans to raise fresh funds through a qualified institutional placement (QIP) despite sitting on $1.5 billion, or about Rs 12,600 crore. The money will also fuel its quick commerce business, Blinkit. Zepto, another quick commerce player, is also raising money. ET reported last month that Zepto is in talks to raise $100-150 million from a group of domestic family offices and wealthy individuals. It last raised $340 million in August. Swiggy Instamart, Blinkit and Zepto are the top three players with over 85% market share.
The floodgates of capital opening into the quick commerce sector would worry the big e-commerce platforms which have already started feeling the heat from quick commerce.
The quick rise of quick commerce
While quick commerce becomes the preferred medium for immediate needs and impulse purchases, e-commerce is favoured for more planned purchases like home, beauty and personal care. But now quick commerce firms are diversifying beyond groceries, small-value items, etc. and invading the home turf of e-commerce players.
Quick commerce is already conquering kirana, the neighbourhood small retail business, as well as hitting modern retail. As consumer preferences shift towards the convenience of last-minute grocery deliveries, quick commerce companies are outpacing traditional retailers, with 46 per cent of consumers surveyed reporting a cut in purchases from Kirana shops, a recent report has said. The quick commerce market size is expected to reach $40 billion by 2030, a jump from $6.1 billion in 2024, according to the report by Datum Intelligence.
Quick-commerce operators such as Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart and Zepto are aggressively trying to lure away consumers from large ecommerce platforms like Amazon and Flipkart by matching their prices across groceries and fast-selling general merchandise, triggering a price war in the home delivery space, ET reported a few months ago. This is a departure from the earlier pricing strategy of quick-commerce players who typically charged 10-15% premium over average ecommerce marketplace prices for instant deliveries, industry executives had told ET.
A recent ET study of prices of 30 commonly used products in daily necessities, discretionary groceries and other categories, including electronics and toys, in both ecommerce and quick-commerce platforms reveal the pricing disparity has been bridged. “The pricing premium which quick commerce used to charge for instant deliveries is gone with these platforms now joining a race with large ecommerce to offer competitive pricing to shift consumer loyalties,” B Krishna Rao, senior category head at biscuits major Parle Products had told ET.
The increasing competition is putting pressure on ecommerce majors to reduce delivery time.
“Price matching by quick commerce is to acquire market share and is part of market acquisition cost even when it might not be profitable at a per unit transaction level,” Devangshu Dutta, CEO of consulting firm Third Eyesight, had told ET. “They may have to sacrifice margins in the short term to get customers shopping more frequently.”
After challenging kirana and modern retail, e-commerce is the next frontier for quick commerce companies.
The challenge shaping up for e-commerce giants
With Swiggy, Zomato and Zepto raising a huge amount of money, the war between quick commerce and e-commerce is likely to turn bloody, besides increasing internecine competition among quick commerce players themselves.
Quick commerce, which began with the delivery of groceries and essential items, has now expanded to include a diverse range of products. This includes electronics, clothing, cosmetics, household goods, medicines, pet supplies, books, sporting equipment, and more.
E-commerce sector offers a vast opportunity for growth of quick commerce business. The Indian e-commerce market is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21% and reach $325 billion in 2030, as per Deloitte’s report released on Monday. This huge potential is luring big players. The Tata group’s ecommerce venture Neu is set to enter the quick commerce segment branded as Neu Flash, rolling it out to select users selling grocery, electronics and fashion, ET reported last month. Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance, leveraging its vast network of supermarkets, is expanding into the 10–30 minute delivery segment. Ambani wants to ensure quick commerce helps bolster its business ahead of an IPO of Reliance Retail, which was last year valued at $100 billion, and has backers including KKR, sources told Reuters recently.
Besides entry of big ones like Tata and Ambani, the deluge of fresh investment into business by the incumbents such as Swiggy, Blinkit and Zepto will pose a big threat to large e-commerce players Amazon and Flipkart. Swiggy has recently hired two Flipkart executives to boost its senior leadership. They have joined two other executives that Bengaluru-based Swiggy had hired from the Walmart-owned ecommerce major in the past few months.
Swiggy and Zomato are both assessing several new services as they diversify beyond their core businesses, ET has reported a few days ago. Swiggy is all set to launch a pilot programme for a services marketplace, labelled ‘Yello’, which will host professionals such as lawyers, therapists, fitness trainers, astrologers, dieticians, according to sources. It is also testing a premium membership service called ‘Rare’, for affluent customers providing them access to high-end events such as Formula 1 races, music concerts, upscale art exhibitions, in addition to VIP hospitality and priority reservations at luxury restaurants.
Zomato has previously been bold in its diversification moves by buying Paytm’s events and ticket business for Rs 2,048 crore. It is now trying out a concierge-like service to help users place online food orders over WhatsApp. Human customer relationship agents will provide the Gurgaon-based company’s new service instead of its usual approach of deploying chatbots, a person familiar with the move has told ET recently.
Apprehending challenges by quick commerce players, Flipkart has already started its own quick commerce business Flipkart Minutes. While still far behind its established rivals, Flipkart Minutes hit daily orders of 50,000-60,000 during its Big Billion Days sales, people with knowledge of the matter told ET last month.
Further investment and bigger players entering the sector will heat up competition among the quick commerce companies even as they will grapple with new challenges such as logistics as they expand. But a bloody war could soon be seen on the e-commerce battlefield as emboldened by huge popular response the quick commerce companies start invading on the well-guarded turf of Flipkart and Amazon.
(Published in Economic Times)
admin
May 16, 2023
Viveat Susan Pinto, Financial Express
May 16, 2023
The country’s top two organised retailers, Reliance Retail and DMart, are shifting focus to the large but fragmented pharma retail market in India in their quest for growth. The Rs 2-trillion domestic pharma retail industry is largely dominated by mom-and-pop stores, much like the fast-moving consumer goods market and kiranas.
On Saturday, Avenue Supermarts, which runs the DMart chain of stores, said it had set up a new subsidiary called Reflect Healthcare and Retail to launch pharmacy shop-in-shops. Reliance Retail, on the other hand, proposes to step up the launch of offline pharmacy stores under Netmeds, the e-pharmacy company it acquired in August 2020. Netmeds is now a subsidiary of Reliance Retail.
The plan with Netmeds, according to persons in the know, is to open around 2,000 standalone pharmacy stores in the next few years. Reliance Retail already has around 1,000 shop-in-shop pharma stores across Reliance Smart Bazaar and Smart Point outlets.
During Reliance Industries’ fourth quarter earnings call last month, Dinesh Taluja, chief financial officer of Reliance Retail, said standalone pharmacy stores by the company would be positioned as destinations for pharma and wellness products. The aim, Taluja said, was to leverage omni-channel capabilities to serve customers better.
DMart, on the other hand, has launched one pharmacy shop-in-shop in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) for now. But the future plan, according to industry sources, includes rolling out at least four to five more of such outlets in the MMR region in the next few months.
“While e-pharmacies are a growing concept, there is a large population out there that still prefers to go to a nearby pharmacy or medical store to purchase drugs or medicines prescribed or buy over-the-counter products,” said Devangshu Dutta, founder and chief executive of retail consultancy Third Eyesight.
“The number of organised retail chains in the pharma space in the country are limited. This presents an opportunity for organised players like DMart and Reliance Retail to expand their presence in the market,” Dutta said.
Apart from Apollo Pharmacy, which is India’s largest omnichannel pharmacy chain with over 5,000 outlets, the organised pharma retail space in India largely has regional chains or popular standalone outlets within cities catering to a captive market, say experts. So, organised retailers such as Reliance Retail and DMart can disrupt the market if they begin growing their presence.
Analysts at brokerage firm Kotak Securities, however, see DMart’s foray into pharma retail as a pilot programme, which could be scaled up in the future. “This is another pilot that is expected to boost footfalls in DMart’s brick and mortar business using existing store infrastructure,” they said.
(Published in Financial Express)
