BigBasket is looking to slash its geographical presence amid rising competition in the quick commerce sector, with plans to restrict its operations to 40 profitable cities from 76 currently.
The company’s recently appointed CEO Amit Nanda has been tasked with ensuring that the company achieves profitability as competitors scale their offerings and dark store density, ET reported, citing sources.
“The focus will be on larger cities where BigBasket will tap the higher density of population and rising usage of quick commerce. A sort of cluster strategy to tap a denser user profile in big cities will be more profitable than spreading out across markets,” one of the sources was quoted as saying.
The new CEO is focusing on key areas like customer, pricing and assortment, with faster decision making, higher accountability and day-to-day execution in focus.
Inc42 has reached out to BigBasket for comments on the development. The story will be updated on receiving a response.
This comes after Tata Digital-owned Big Basket was reprimanded by Tata Sons chairman Noel Tata for its high cash burn and mounting losses.
In FY25, BigBasket’s loss surged 42% to ₹2,006.8 Cr from ₹1,415.2 Cr in the previous financial year. Operating revenue for the fiscal declined 2% to ₹9,866.7 Cr from ₹10,062 Cr in FY24. The company is yet to file its financial statements for FY26.
Left Behind In The Quick Commerce Race
Founded in 2011 by Hari Menon, Vipul Parekh, VS Ramesh, VS Sudhakar and Abhinay Choudhari, BigBasket disrupted the traditional grocery market by having the first mover’s advantage with its online delivery service. In 2021, Tata Digital acquired a majority stake in the company.
Despite having the upper hand, the company was unable to pivot in time when the quick commerce boom first emerged. Cofounder and CEO Menon, who recently stepped down from his post, along with Parekh, admitted in a LinkedIn post that he underestimated quick commerce when it first emerged. He noted that customer preferences changed very swiftly in a way that he had not anticipated.
BigBasket pivoted to the quick commerce model in 2022 with the launch of BBNow. By August 2024, it fully transitioned with delivering orders within 15-30 minutes.
However, its average daily orders and dark store count are far behind those of competitors like Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart. BigBasket currently clocks in 5-6 Lakh daily average orders, compared to 30 Lakh for Blinkit, 24-25 Lakh for Zepto and 12.5 Lakh for Instamart.
Its current dark store count stands at 700, compared to Blinkit’s 2,243 and Zepto’s 1,139. Even newer entrants like Flipkart and Amazon, who were late entrants to the segment, are swiftly scaling up since last year and have 1,000 and 500 stores, respectively, with plans to add more.
While Amazon Now is planning to expand to 300 cities, Flipkart Minutes has been adding around 100 dark stores a month.
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