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Showing posts from May, 2018

Patanjali: From how they made it to what went wrong

Patanjali Ayurveda is known as one of the fastest company to reach the 10000 crore revenue mark in product sales, major FMCG firms like took years and even decades to reach this mark. Patanjali has its presence in almost every category of FMCG today. Their exponential growth story was the talk of the town until March 2018 when they faltered from their promise of doubling their revenue figures of 2017 in the year 2018. There are many reasons which might be the cause of the stunted revenue, I think the major ones are: 1) Entry of other FMCG majors in the Ayurveda category of products : Unilever has revived its erstwhile ayurveda products brand Lever Ayush, Colgate Palmolive has started making new ayurvedic variants of their toothpaste and Dabur is also planning to roll out new products in the segment. HUL has shown good growth figures after this and colgate has also started regaining its market share. 2) FSSAI inquiry for post-dating products and products under scanner of Food Regul

UNITE AND CONQUER: THE SOFTBANK STRATEGY

Three Recent Happenings which involve Softbank: 1)Flipkart and Snapdeal hold merger talks both have Softbank as their investor, although talks failed. 2)Uber sells its China business to Didi both have Softbank as an investor 3)Uber sells its Singapore business to Grab both have Softbank as an investor. The strategy of Softbank looks pretty clear from these, it buys stake in competitor firms in the same sector and then merges them forming a single entity which gets substantial control over the sector's market. It is not investing in startups based on performance but with the ultimate aim of getting control of the market through one entity. The Snapdeal investment is the best example to explain this, Softbank first bought a stake in Snapdeal then it went on to buy stake in Flipkart and then the merger talks give a hint about what was going to happen next, the talks did not workout and also Amazon was not leaving India at any cost. Also there were talks of selling