The report says Adani wants to take on Reliance, Walmart in India’s e-commerce and payments race

Indian energy and infrastructure giant Adani Group is planning a move into digital payments and e-commerce as the conglomerate seeks to diversify its portfolio and compete with Reliance, Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart and PhonePe, according to a Financial Times report.

The report said Adani is considering applying for a license to operate on the Indian Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and is also finalizing plans for a co-branded credit card with banks. UPI is a public digital payments network that has become the most popular way for Indians to transact online.

This is not the first time that Adani, one of India’s three largest conglomerates, has shown interest in digital offerings. In 2022, the company launched Adani One, a consumer app through which it sells travel tickets, and the company’s CEO Gautam Adani recently hinted at a “future collaboration” with Uber following Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s recent visit to India.

The conglomerate plans to offer online shopping through the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) platform, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

At stake is the Indian retail market, which is estimated to be worth $1.27 trillion next year, according to Bernstein analysts. Reliance Retail operates the country’s largest retail chain and raised around $100 billion in capital last year.

Flipkart is the largest player in the Indian e-commerce market, which, according to Bernstein analysts, is expected to account for 10.4% of total retail sales in the country next year. Last week, $36 billion Flipkart raised $350 million in new funding from Google. Amazon, for its part, plans to allocate about $3 billion to its Indian e-commerce venture over the next few years.

Walmart’s PhonePe and Google Pay are leaders in the mobile payments market in India. Together, they handle over 86% of all payments on the UPI network, which handles over 12 billion transactions per month. Some of their competitors – as well as government bodies – are unhappy with the growing dominance of Google and Walmart in the country’s mobile payments market, but regulators have no current plans to intervene.

According to the FT, which also reported that Adani’s planned payment services will be available through Adani One, the Adani Group company will initially look to promote its new products to its existing customer base of millions of users.

The entry into the consumer market comes after a turbulent year for Adani, which the American company Hindenburg Research accuses of market manipulation and fraud. Adani has denied any wrongdoing, but the research firm’s reports still caused the group’s listed shares to lose $150 billion in value.