Sundeep Malhotra, CEO of HomeShop18
E-commerce is booming in India, and as you read this very blog post, money is being spent online in India. There are a couple of major players in the India e-commerce field, most notably Flipkart, Amazon, SnapDeal, and HomeShop18.
HomeShop18 in particular has been pretty smart and bold with its expansion and branding approach. The big news last month was its acquisition of CoinJoos, an online bookstore to help it lay a new product vertical — books — within the HomeShop18 range of products.
Considering that Flipkart (which began as an online bookstore) is expanding its verticals and the fact that Amazon is coming to town, is this acquisition a defensive/reactionary move made by HomeShop18? It seems like it. But Sundeep Malhotra, the CEO of HomeShop18 tells me no. He feels that the Indian e-commerce market is large enough for everyone to grow. In his view, the acquisition is solely focused on expanding its portfolio of products and to cover the lack of books offerings. He explains further:
HomeShop18’s strategy has been to expand the portfolio in a structured fashion, for our customers. Book [selling] was a gap in our enhanced online portfolio and we could clearly see its potential in enabling faster customer acquisition as well as high repeat rates among customers. All of these factors played a part in our strategy to look at the books category more aggressively than we had in the past.
In short, our acquisition in the books category has absolutely nothing to do with competition.
With the acquisition, HomeShop18 effectively now offers over 10 million book titles to its customers online. Malhotra also told me that the e-commerce giant has also set up warehouses in Delhi and NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Kolkata to ensure users get the books they ordered faster. Regarding expansion, HomeShop18 maintains that it is still very focused on the local market and for now there will be no more acquisitions to announce and there is no overseas expansion plan. He concluded:
We are totally focused on achieving leadership in the [Indian] market. If there is a business need tomorrow and acquisition makes more sense than building any capability in house, then we would certainly explore an acquisition option. For the immediate term, now, we have no other acquisition to make.
Our immediate focus is clearly to keep making serious investments in customer experience and our brand.
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