Swiggy, India, goes beyond food with products delivered to local stores – TechCrunch



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Swiggy, Indian food delivery service, announced the launch of its new product "stores".

The movement has been speculated since 2017, but recent developments have brought the company closer to expansion. Last September, Swiggy purchased the SuprDaily delivery service on an acquisition, while the company raised $ 1 billion in December. This round was led by Naspers, it raised Swiggy's valuation to $ 3.3 billion and saw Tencent, the Chinese Internet giant behind WeChat, become an investor.

Money in the bank? Check. Expertise in the team? Check. Swiggy now seems well placed to make this major decision.

Shops will be available in the basic Swiggy app and will cover fruits and vegetables, kiranas and supermarkets, florists, health supplements, medications, baby care products, etc.

But society is moving slowly. The initial roll out is progressively taking place in Gurgaon, where it has partnered with retailers to cover 3,500 stores in the city. Deliveries are expected to last an hour or less, and early partners include The Marches, Guardian Pharmacy and Zappfresh.com, the company said.

This expansion increases Swiggy's competitive advantage with rivals in the food distribution sector FoodPanda (owned by Ola), Zomato and UberEats by giving consumers more reasons to turn to the Swiggy service. It is an initiative that, hopefully, will increase revenues and commitment at the expense of competition, which now includes Amazon.

The move from food deliveries to general deliveries reflects the strategy of Meituan, another Chinese investor in Swiggy. Meituan generates most of its business from food products, but although it has experienced impressive growth, it is not yet profitable. Yet he works with large numbers. The company was floated on a stock exchange listing in Hong Kong last year, raising more than $ 4 billion. its current market capitalization is approximately $ 40 billion.

Swiggy co-founder and CEO Sriharsha Majety said in a blog that the company has long had the ambition to grow beyond food.

Starting in 2014, we imagined a world where restaurant delivery would be amazing and great. A world where you did not only have a handful of restaurants to offer. A world without high minimum orders and, what is very important, where it was not necessary to call the restaurant every 5 minutes to ask the dreaded question of "ladka nikal gaya kya". We envisioned a world in which we could democratize deliveries in 35 minutes to all restaurants in the country and introduce a convenient and enjoyable food order experience for every consumer.

Four years and hundreds of millions of orders later, we can confidently say that we bring convenience to consumers across the country. Despite millions of Indians having ordered food, we believe that food delivery is still in its infancy. So, as we continued to create more magical realities in the area of ​​food orders, many consumers, retailers and retailers other than restaurants were asking us when we would extend this superpower (convenience) to needs outside of product orders. food.

With the largest active fleet of the last mile in the country and a consumer-centered paranoid orientation, we started asking ourselves the same question. We realized that we could bring food delivery as a magic and practical reality to many other local business needs. Just as we have democratized transparent delivery in more than half a lakh restaurant in the country, we can democratize the convenience of millions of merchants / businesses in our cities.

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