Asia’s richest man to take on retail giants Amazon and Walmart

This appeared in The Millennial Source

Indian business tycoon Mukesh Ambani has launched a service that aims to compete with Amazon in the South Asian nation. Reliance Industries, an Indian multinational conglomerate company owned by Ambani, began inviting people to sign up for its grocery delivery service called JioMart on December 30.

JioMart will cater to online shoppers in three Indian cities, namely Navi Mumbai, Thane and Kalyan, with plans to scale it up gradually. The app will work on an online-to-offline (O2O) marketplace model, which means that it will source grocery items from nearby merchants, a similar model to Amazon’s delivery service, Prime Now, and India’s retail service, Grofers.

JioMart will offer customers free home delivery, with no minimum order value and a no-questions-asked return policy.

Protests against foreign business practices

When Amazon and Walmart first entered Indian shores in 2018, local merchants felt they were being put out of business, claiming that the US-based retailers were trying to monopolize the industry. More than 50 merchants gathered in the capital New Delhi, with around 700 similar protests against the e-commerce giants’ business practices…