Tata Group’s presence across categories with marquee brands like Titan, Westside, Zara, Taj Hotels, and Croma gives it a unique opportunity and deep category expertise to bring in a unified Tata Digital, president Mukesh Bansal said.
Speaking with Rajan Anandan, MD, Sequoia Capital India, at the Nasscom Technology & Leadership Forum 2022, Bansal said, “The Tata Group already has a phenomenal consumer presence, starting with the brand itself. It is one brand which Indians have been trusting over generations. On top of that, across categories it has marquee brands like Titan, Tanishq, Westside, Zara, Taj Hotels, Croma and now three airlines providing nearly 30-35 per cent market share in the aviation sector. Tata Sky is also the number one DTH service. Tata Group is also leading three strong digital assets including BigBasket which is the category leader and 1mg which is number two in its segment. Then it has Tata Cliq.”
He added, “The group has brands, relationships and deep category expertise across much broader spectrum categories, which gives us the ability to play for the endeavour of Tata Digital to bring in these assets together and stitch a unified value proposition. In the coming months or quarters, we will go public about how we are thinking about it.”
Bansal had co-founded Cure.fit, an online-to-offline fitness brand which was later acquired by Tata Digital last year. Bansal earlier also co-founded Myntra which was acquired by Flipkart in 2014. At present, Myntra is the largest online retail platform for fashion.
From being an agile start-up founder and now joining a legacy conglomerate, he says, Tata Digital brings in the best of both worlds.
“We have our team members from the Tata Group who understand scale and how to build a profitable business. It’s a fairly independent set up. There’s a lot of autonomy, independence, freedom to experiment and fail. In many ways, I feel like home in the company with the opportunities to learn from things that have really worked. There’s a lot of awareness about building sustainable businesses,” Bansal said.
Start-up sectors to watch out
Bansal believes direct-to-customer brands across FMCG and electronics categories will see a boom in terms of profitability and innovations in 2022. According to him, clean energy, healthcare, upskilling education will likely be the stars in the coming years.
“I think clean energy has exponential potential to become big and will see this snow ball into something major. There are enough and more signs of that and depends on regulatory regime,” Bansal said.
He added, “I deeply believe healthcare will also go through a transition; pandemic has accelerated people’s awareness. People’s desire to stay healthy have increased. Also, the idea of continuous education is something that excited me. The whole model of you get educated once in life and then go on for 60 years have busted. Entrepreneurs and start-ups have started to take a crack and those models are yet to fully emerge but it will be quite integral to modern lifestyle and pace of change.”
Published on
February 16, 2022
