India’s Tata Digital to launch super app by December this year

India’s Tata Digital is reportedly launching its own integrated “super app” that will combine the company’s consumer services into a single platform.

Tata Sons chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran / Photo credit: www.weforum.org / Eric Miller

Tata Digital operates ecommerce service Tata CLiQ, online grocery store StarQuik and online electronics platform Croma. The company is owned by Tata Group, one of the country’s oldest conglomerates.

Natarajan Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Group’s holding company Tata Sons, told The Financial Times that the new app would support food and grocery ordering, ecommerce features, insurance and financial services, education, healthcare services, and bill payments, among others.

Tata Digital’s new app is slated for a December 2020 release, the FT report said. Once the app goes live, it’s expected to go head-to-head with offerings from rivals Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) and Amazon, among others.

The move comes less than a month after Jio Platforms, the digital services arm of RIL, finished its fundraising spree with over US$20 billion in commitments. These include investments from Silver Lake, General Atlantic, Intel, Qualcomm, and Google.

Jio’s first and biggest investment in its four-month fundraise is Facebook, which poured in US$5.7 billion in April. In the weeks leading up to that commitment, Facebook and RIL were said to be in talks to form a WeChat-like super app that combines a plethora of digital services, including social, digital payments, and gaming.

US-based Amazon, which counts India as one of its most important growth markets, is also joining the fray. The ecommerce titan previously announced a US$6.5 billion commitment in the country, of which US$1 billion will be deployed to help digitize local small and medium-sized businesses.

It was also earlier reported that Amazon was eyeing a US$2 billion stake in Jio’s telco rival Airtel, but a deal has yet to be formed.