BigBasket eyes 40% revenue; to launch beauty as category in a few days

Chinese retail giant Alibaba-backed online grocery player BigBasket that aims to be a billion-dollar company by the next fiscal year, is expecting 40 per cent of its projected revenue to come in from its private labels, a top company official has said.

"Private labels are around 34 per cent of our business now and we plan to scale this to 40 per cent in about a year. The incremental 6 percentage points of revenue will come from non-fruits and vegetables and non-staples," BigBasket co-founder and chief executive Hari Menon told PTI.

The company aims to clock Rs 35 billion in sales this fiscal year, up from Rs 20 billion last year.

He added that the Bengaluru-based company will add a lot of categories to the private labels vertical.

BigBasket that aims to raise up to $ 200 million over the next few months, said, the FMCG sales overall (food and non-food) contributes over 50 per cent of its business, 30 per cent from staples (including 14.5 per cent from private labels) and 18 per cent from fruits and vegetables.

It is going to launch beauty as a category in the next few days, with imported products as well, Menon said.

The company has a presence in 25 cities and plans to launch its operations in Kochi soon.

"Having gone deeper into the existing consumer base already, which has been our growth driver, we are now planning to get into the upper middle class and middle class segments," he said.

BigBasket, founded in December 2011, claims 10 million subscribers and close to 1 lakh orders per day. The company expects to break even in the 10 large cities by next June.

BigBasket last month acquired Pune-based RainCan and the Bengaluru-based Morning Cart to deliver milk to 20,000 customers. It has already launched this service in seven cities and expects to roll out to other three cities among the top 10 metros.

Menon expects the milk delivery business to clock Rs 10 billion by next year and plans to grow this business as it will give access to many homes.

He further said the company will look at scaling up the fresh meat segment and increase its contribution to 5-6 per cent from 1-1.5 percent at present.

BigBasket has 30 warehouses now and will touch 45 by next year. According to a report by Franchise India, the online grocery market is expected to be $ 2.7 billion market by the end of the current fiscal year.