Either a lot has transpired in the past few days, or maybe I’m overthinking things (that’d be very much in line with my personality). I’d like to start our conversation this week with a simple question – are quick commerce players taking on the biggies, Amazon and Flipkart? You may context this with comments made a few days ago by Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal in which he called out Amazon in particular for a number of reasons – predatory pricing to gain market space, hurting offline small retailers as a result (100 million is his estimate) and that the billions of dollars that Amazon has invested in India are “not coming in for any great service or investment to support the Indian economy” considering losses make up its foundation.
How did Amazon respond? By reducing the ‘selling fees’ it charges from sellers on the platform (the range is now between 3% and 12.5%; sellers will have to part will a smaller cut for Amazon, for every order that’s completed). Too little, too late? Maybe – if you break the resistance of habit, there may be better deals awaiting elsewhere. The contours of how you shop online, themselves are changing very rapidly.
Minister Goyal’s comments may have provided the spark, but its time you assess how exactly you shop these days (of course, offline shopping has reduced; traffic, parking hassles and potentially even crowded malls or markets play a dissuading role). Have you realised, you’re probably relying less on traditional large format ecommerce platforms such as Amazon and Flipkart for many purchases and end up ordering via quick commerce apps (lovingly also called Q-commerce, if you insist) instead. Is it because quick commerce and their ~10-minute delivery promises are more attractive? Perhaps.
That isn’t the only reason. Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart now stock and sell much more than groceries, fruits and vegetables. The Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy flagships and Sony PlayStation availability on Blinkit and Zepto was just a trailer. We had spoken about this in April, refresh your memory here.
What Amazon or Flipkart are dealing with (quick commerce startups are nimble, they layer up incredibly fast) isn’t going to be easy to simply wish away by throwing money at the problem. In just the last month, Blinkit has added something called passport photo print delivery, international orders (this was timed with the Raksha Bandhan festival) and Hawkins Cookware has found a store partner in Swiggy Instamart. Indian tech company Noise says they clocked a 4x surge in sales on quick commerce platforms on Father’s Day, this summer. Those are real world observations.
I am absolutely not surprised that Flipkart is trying to compete in a somewhat different space, with a product called Flipkart Minutes (not as widely available at quick commerce apps, but I’d not bet against it getting that scale eventually). If you can have a laptop delivered to your location in about 10 minutes, why would you wait two days for Amazon to deliver your order? This generation is okay with some pricing variation, if instant gratification is part of that bigger picture. As I survey this changing landscape, Amazon’s lack of activity leaves me considering either eventuality – either they have a trick up their sleeve waiting to be unveiled soon (timing is right, ahead of the festive season), or they weren’t really considering quick commerce platforms as competition till now and the market realities have proved to be a rude shock. Either way, consumer is king. Or are we?
LAW
For a while now, we’ve seen tech platforms get into regulatory crosshairs worldwide. Those were sparks, with a bigger blaze inevitable at some point. Any political reasons, if you may (whether right or biased, I’ll leave that to you), too would figure eventually. Pavel Durov, the CEO of popular messaging platform Telegram, was arrested at a French airport over the weekend. Mentioned initially among the reasons for his arrest are Telegram’s content moderation policies and the alleged criminal activities on the platform. I am certain we’ll soon hear about Telegram being used for drug selling, sharing porn and all types of fraud – that’s a given, because the scale of content quality problems (I put that mildly, and I’ll illustrate what I mean).
Telegram has been quite factual in its public statements. They raise a few important points, including “It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.” They insist on complete compliance with the EU laws including the Digital Services Act, clarifying Telegram’s moderation is as per industry standards and “constantly improving.” Of course, they mention that Durov has nothing to hide and travels frequently in Europe, whilst Telegram with almost a billion users globally is a “means of communication and a source of vital information.” Beyond all that, they’d need to actually defend factually, and prove Telegram as a platform is clean. It won’t be easy.
None of it changes the fact that Telegram was slowly beginning to resemble a repository of everything you’d otherwise find taking the steps down a long and dingy, dodgy staircase into the depths of the dark web. I’m not a Telegram user (never really fell for the whole privacy pitch; that includes Signal too, but I digress). Illegal file sharing? You’d easily find “t.me/…” links on the world wide web. Porn on X (that’s a multi-level problem, which X also hasn’t been able to solve)? You’d find accounts sharing “t.me/” links. ‘Finfluencers’ and their dicey stock and mutual fund recommendations? They’d inevitably have a Telegram link. These are some real-world examples.
But that isn’t it. The French authorities, the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office, in the finalised list of charges, details a lot more. Complicity in enabling and allowing illegal transactions, possession and distribution of pornographic images of minors, sales of narcotic substances, organized fraud and providing cryptology services without necessary certifications or declarations. On an individual and organisational scale, the Section J3 – JUNALCO (Fight against Cybercrime) is also classifying this as “Criminal association with a view to committing a crime or an offense punishable by 5 or more years of imprisonment.”
A context Durov and geopolitics is important. He is Russian by birth, but fled Russia in 2014 after refusing to cooperate with the Russian authorities and provide access to encrypted user data (the political inspiration was to shut down the opposition voice) of a social platform quite popular in that country (in case you’re wondering, that platform is VK). He had to sell his stake as well. Telegram as an app is based in the UAE, is globally very popular – with close to 900 million active users as of May this year, according to research firm Statista. That makes it the fourth most popular IM in the world, behind Meta-owned WhatsApp, China company Tencent’s WeChat and Meta’s Facebook Messenger. That’s no mean feat.
Albert Camus, a French Algerian philosopher’s famous quote reads, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” Durov tried walking this road, having not cooperated in opening doors of access to data to the government in his country of birth. And now, the French are claiming something is up, though they’d have to detail clearly what they mean (for which I’m sure they have all the necessary charges detailed and ready).
Of Note: I must share another one of Camus’ quotes that I do believe has a deeper meaning towards decoding existentialism, if one bothers with the finer details of life. It goes like this – “I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.” Gets you to think, doesn’t it?
INTELLIGENCE
I usually don’t talk about enterprise focused tech solutions, but a few developments have happened on that front in the past few days, that you must know about. The blurring lines between workplace, B2B tools and what we interface with as employees and consumers. Companies are proving to be more than interested in deploying new solutions, with a generous AI underlier. Latest is this broadening partnership.
Tech giants HCLTech, for instance, have developed something called the HCLTech AI Force, which is a suite of GenAI (or generative AI) solutions quite flexible and relevant for any software-based workflow. These full stack platforms are becoming quite relevant for businesses, not just for internal workflows, but also those that we as consumers interface with. The latest to join in is Xerox (a name that’s become synonymous with a particular task for years now), which will use HCLTech’s solution for multiple processes within the organisation. Both companies say this includes automation and sustenance engineering. A key element to the foundations for Xerox’s newly formed Global Business Services organization (GBS).
This is a change we as individuals or organisations can resist as much as we want, but the path must be walked before results become clear-er.