NEW DELHI/AHMEDABAD: In a strategic move that marks billionaire Gautam Adani’s foray into India’s booming e-commerce space, the Adani Group has inked a pact with Walmart-owned Flipkart to build one of India’s largest logistics hubs and data centres.
While the Flipkart-Walmart alliance will give US retailer Walmart a leg-up on arch rival Amazon in India’s closely contested e-commerce battle, it will also pit the new partners against Asia’s wealthiest man, Mukesh Ambani, who is prepping up to take the fight to Flipkart and Amazon with Jiomart, Reliance Industries’ digital retail arm.
Fuelled by fear of the Covid-19 pandemic that has led to frantic online shopping of groceries, apparel and white goods, the size of India’s e-commerce market is expected to balloon to $100 billion by 2024.
As part of the partnership, Adani Logistics, an arm of Adani Ports & Special Economic Zone, will build a 5.34 lakh square-feet fulfilment centre in its upcoming logistics hub in Mumbai that will be leased to Flipkart.
“Homegrown e-commerce giant Flipkart is our new strategic partner. In the two-prong partnership, AdaniConneX will build their new Tier 4 data centre and Adani Logistics, India’s leader in logistics, will build their 534,000 sqft fulfilment centre. Thousands of new jobs in Mumbai,” Gautam Adani, chairman of Adani Group said on Twitter.
The deal marks yet another stride by the Adani group, which has business interests across sectors ranging from commodities to infrastructure.
Set to be operational in the third quarter of 2022, the warehouse will have the capacity to store one crore units of inventory, the companies said.
In addition, Flipkart will build its third data centre at Adaniconnex, a joint venture between EdgeConneX and Adani Enterprises in Chennai, which is expected to help the Bengaluru-headquartered e-tailer store its data locally within India.
“This broad-ranging partnership across our logistics and data centre businesses is a unique business model, and we see this as a great opportunity to serve Flipkart’s physical as well as digital infrastructure needs,” said Karan Adani, CEO at Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone (APSEZ).