Daily Pulse India: GOSF Bids Adieu, Adidas Can Set Up Stores, Ola-Nissan Tie Up

The Great Online Shopping Festival is no more. Google India has officially announced that it will be shutting down the annual shop-fest where online and offline retailers get to offer crazy discounts and lure customers. In a way, it was the predecessor to Flipkart’s Big Billion Sale and other similar sales by Amazon and Snapdeal. It began in 2012 as the Indian version of Cyber Monday and was aimed at getting Indians to shop online. But, three years hence the Indian shopper is as savvy as they come and the online big boys are now running their own sales. And so the GOSF rests. Read Google’s blogpost on the decision here.

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Adidas has won government approval to set up its own single brand stores in India, but we have to wait till H2 2016 for the first one. Other brands such as Ikea are also in the pipeline, although a similar bid by rival Nike was rejected by the government last year. Right now, their stores are franchised or owned by joint ventures, which gives the companies less control on quality of service and other soft factors.

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The relentless push for cutting down illegal money in the system continues. The government is now looking for shell companies, by looking for multiple companies with the same address, or a single person as director of many companies, for black money transactions.

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Tinyowl, the popular food ordering startup is going through a cash crunch and is firing over a 100 employees in its second such round of cost cutting as its next round of fund raising is delayed.

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The crunch in the auto components business seems to be hitting the coffee business as well. Amtek Auto, which owns the Barista chain of coffee shops through a unit, is now looking to exit, a year after it bought the business from the Italian parent. Amtek is staring at a 8 billion-rupee loan that it defaulted on and the sale of a non-core business may just bring in some cash to help it tide over the bad phase.

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Newspaper Mint analysed the September quarter results of 161 of the BSE 500 companies and found that 108 of them have missed their sales forecast. Most of them were hit by the poor rains and the weak investment climate in the country. Clearly, a pick up in domestic demand has some way to go.

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Ola has tied up with Nissan Auto to lease cars for its drivers. Under the pact, Ola will buy the cars through a unit and lease them to drivers on their platform to bring more drivers to its platform.

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Cover Image: Burning tyres by protesters to block the Nepal-India border. 

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