Adopting a Group Identity: AceVector

Retail in India is evolving rapidly with technology playing an integral role in helping expand the size and scope of India’s digital retail opportunity. Witnessing and contributing to the evolution of the digital retail ecosystem in India over the last 10+ years has been quite exhilarating. Through this journey, we have built various capabilities to address different parts of the digital value chain. As the ecosystem has grown, many of these capabilities have broken out to become full-fledged business enterprises, with their own distinct markets and growth trajectories. For a considerable time now, these have operated as independent businesses within the company, pursuing their own business plans and run by their respective management teams.

Given the scale already achieved by these individual businesses and the size of the opportunity that lies ahead, it is appropriate for us to formalise a group structure that highlights the broader scope of opportunities we have been pursuing as a company along with the distinct nature of each business, beyond our e-commerce marketplace - Snapdeal.?

Towards this, our businesses will be housed under our group brand, AceVector. The AceVector Group will bring together innovation in distribution channels, digital-first consumer brands and SaaS platforms, setting ourselves up for an exciting journey in India’s immense potential digital retail sector.

The AceVector Group comprises of three key businesses:

Snapdeal: A pioneer of Indian e-commerce, Snapdeal exclusively serves India’s value commerce segment, with quality products designed to meet the requirements of mid-income, price-conscious buyers. More than 95% of the products sold on Snapdeal are priced below Rs 1000 and it receives more than 86% of its orders from outside metro cities, with more than 77% of its business coming from repeat customers.

Snapdeal’s focus is on providing comparable levels of quality, convenience and predictability associated with branded retail to purchase decisions beyond the world of well-known brands. It consciously works with a curated base of reliable and quality sellers, who have a high bar on product quality, to deliver delightful experiences to our customers.

Snapdeal is advantageously positioned to benefit from India’s fast-growing value commerce market, which is poised to grow from USD 88 Bn in FY 21 to USD 175 Bn in FY 26. While the number of online buyers is expected to grow from 150 Mn to 350 Mn in the same period, more than 250 Mn of these buyers will be in the value segment - Snapdeal’s core audience.

With its asset-light operations and focused strategy, Snapdeal has grown rapidly. Our delivered volumes in FY 22 grew 88% over FY 21. In the same period, our Net Merchandise Value also grew 65% annually.

Given the focus on categories like fashion, home & general merchandise, and its optimised supply chain, Snapdeal has been positive unit economics for the last four years and is steadily approaching profitability.

Unicommerce: Unicommerce is well known in the industry as the leading integrated retail-tech SaaS platform that processes more than 450 Mn orders annually, amounting to a sizeable share of India’s e-commerce volumes. A complete suite of SaaS solutions from Unicommerce enables marketplaces to seamlessly plug in third-party inventory from thousands of sellers and helps brands sell across multiple marketplaces, all from the convenience of a single-window.

Unicommerce’s solutions help brands run automated, paperless warehouse operations. 2000+ stores, 7000+ facilities and 160+ network integrations are proof of Unicommerce’s wide reach in the retail ecosystem. Over 3000 brands and retailers are powered by Unicommerce including majority of India’s D2C brands and e-commerce brand roll-ups. Interestingly, 99% of Unicommerce revenues come from outside the group.

Unicommerce also enables leading retailers to offer a unified purchase experience to end consumers interacting with the brand in an omni-channel world.

Unicommerce is now present in 14 countries, including India and countries in the Middle-East, South-East Asia and Africa and expanding rapidly across newer geographies. With long-standing client relationships, over 100% growth in enterprise clients in FY22, Unicommerce continues to grow rapidly, while being profitable for the last 5 years.

Stellaro Brands: In its initial years, India’s e-commerce sector was dominated by big brands, which offer predictable quality, but at significant brand premiums. In recent years, as more and more budget-conscious users have started to shop online, demand for merchandise that offers similar predictably good quality & contemporary styling, but priced for value sans significant brand premiums has started to grow rapidly. Stellaro Brands is a House of Brands focused on meeting this demand by developing brands that are designed around the needs of these buyers.

These brands are built basis consumer insights gathered through live discussions, customer feedback and via extensive use of data sciences and analytics to capture and understand the preferences and needs of a wide heterogeneous customer base through their online behaviour. Bedsheets to cater to custom-sized beds in Indian households, wallets with large pockets to hold coins, beauty products that combine natural ingredients with science-backed skincare are just some of the needs that Stellaro Brands is serving.

Adopting a group identity aligns external understanding of how we operate internally

While our group structure appropriately demarcates each of our businesses, it does not require us to make any organisational or team changes. This announcement helps us externally highlight the way these businesses are already set up and being run internally for some time now.

Snapdeal and Stellaro Brands will continue to be led by its President, Himanshu Chakrawarti and a sterling, highly experienced leadership team.

Unicommerce will continue to be led by its CEO, Kapil Makhija and its passionate, outstanding leadership team.

Rohit and I will continue to be involved with all the businesses, guiding the overall strategy as well as shaping further growth opportunities for these existing businesses and identifying new avenues of growth for the AceVector Group, leveraging the many capabilities we have built over time.

As we work towards continuing our journey of revolutionising retail in India, our group structure and identity is a recognition and delineation of the immense growth potential that lies ahead within each of the businesses that we operate.