We have attained breakeven in Delhi, to boost supply chain in southern cities, says Grofers co-founder Albinder Dhindsa

We are very excited to have Softbank Vision Fund on board. It is great for the team. We have put in a lot of hard work in the last three years, even going against conventional thinking. We are indeed growing really quickly in the space and that is great for us.

We have kind of a double plan and strategy in cities such as Delhi and Kolkata, which are our profit centres. We are expanding around these cities, and recently have launched in Rohtak, Bhiwadi and Meerut. So we will continue to expand around our existing cities. In addition to this, we are putting a lot of focus on building supply chain in some of the southern cities. We are tripling warehouse capacities in Hyderabad, Chennai and Bangalore.

I don’t think that you should necessarily change your strategy altogether, just because you get slightly more money. Our strategy for the last three years has been very consistent targeting middle class India and building value for them and the strategy is going to remain the same. We are not looking to change any of that.

That has not been a conversation that has been active for a very long time. We are happy that our efforts as a team to take the lead in this space are getting acknowledged. We have raised the largest primary capital round in online grocery in India and this would be great for our team to really build great scale in this business.

No, I don’t think so.

Our competitive pool keeps changing. We are fairly confident that a lot of the competitors, especially the larger companies, have been trying to venture into this space. They don’t really understand what they are actually trying to achieve here. So we will stay focused on our customers and hopefully the competition takes care of itself.

Our stance is pretty much the same. I think they are still trying to figure out how it is going. However, I think their livelihood does not hinge on figuring this out whereas ours does. I think that is why we will always be better at doing this job. We still wish them the best, and hope that they are also worthy competitors in the space.

Absolutely. For my team, we often say that a lot of companies try to build search, but there is only one Google.

 We have been expanding our focus there. When I talk about building more supply chain muscle, that is closer to our manufacturing partners. Currently we are working with 140 small and medium manufacturers across the country. We are going to add a lot more to that and we have been helping them scale up. A lot of these businesses had run into financial trouble in the past, so we are actually helping them with working capital with guaranteed offload. So, I think north of 40 percent is now Grofers’ own brands of products.

Our biggest city is Delhi; Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Hyderabad are the top five cities for us within the country. These cities jointly account for almost 80 percent of our sales. However, cities such as Kanpur, Lucknow and Jaipur have really started ramping up very quickly, especially as more of our manufacturer base is located around these cities. It has allowed us to get value-for-money products into these markets.

Delhi does break even for us. Kolkata is very close, and we are expecting that by the end of this quarter. We plan to invest a lot more in the southern cities, so we do not expect them to be profitable anytime soon. After Kolkata, our focus would be on making sure that the western cities of Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Pune also start moving towards profitability.