 "Tata's love for e-comm: After Snapdeal, Ratan Tata buys into jewellery etailer Bluestone")
Ratan Tata,former chairman of salt-to-steel Tata conglomerate, for sure is betting big on India’s e-commerce sector. After making a personal investment in online retailer Snapdeal.com, Tata has reportedly invested in an e-jewellery company called Bluestone.
According to a report in The Times of India, Tata has subscribed to fresh shares of the three-year-old e-commerce player but the value of the investment is not known.
Bluestone was founded by Gaurav Singh Kushwaha, a graduate from IIT Delhi who had earlier also co-founded Chakpak, an online entertainment portal in 2007. Chakpak’s digital content was later acquired by Flipkart.
The company has been seed funded by Meena Ganesh, who is the former CEO of Tesco’s operations in India. In March 2014, venture capital firm Kalaari Capital led a $10 million investment into Bluestone. The etailer’s other investors include Accel Partners and Saama Capital.
Bluestone, which sells pendants, rings, bangles, earrings, etc, has a collection of about 2,000 designs. The website even runs a gold deposit scheme through which buyers can pay monthly instalments.
In August, Tata had said that e-commerce was a hot business proposition in the country with over a billion people trying to access products and services without difficulty. “You can just walk away with what you want. This adds new dimension in a huge market,” he had saidwhile on avisit to Kolkata last month.
The $3 billion Indian e-commerce market is witnessing aggressive competition from global giants as well as home-grown players. Led by increasing Internet penetration and youngsters shopping online, India’s e-commerce market has seen huge growth in the past few years.
Tata said that given the country’s large consuming public, people do not have the required access to goods. “But e-retailing today is one of the hottest form of marketing and has a good potential in the country as 500 to 600 million people of the country are the consuming public”, he said.
In July, e-commerce giant Amazon said it will invest $2 billion in the country to grow the business in a market that is dominated by homegrown players like Flipkart and Snapdeal.
The US-based firm’s announcement came less than 24 hours after rival Flipkart announced raising a whopping$ 1 billion funding, the largest in the e-commerce space in India.
In January, PremjiInvest, the private investment venture of billionaire Azim Premji, invested in Myntra.com-an online clothing retailer subsequently acquired by Flipkart.
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