Opinion: Can Gautam Adani, Asia's Richest Man, Win India With An App?
NDTV
The mobile app will connect passengers at Gautam Adani's network of airports with other services offered by his group.
Gautam Adani is ready to unveil his much-hyped super-app, made by an in-house startup he wants to be "the Ferrari of the digital world."The portal will take off in the next three to six months, Asia's richest tycoon told the Financial Times in a recent interview. But Adani seems to have missed the sweet spot when demand for online services boomed during the pandemic. Now, the tech industry is in turmoil globally. Meanwhile, competition in Indian e-commerce is intense. Will Adani's Ferrari get stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic?
The mobile app will connect passengers at Adani's network of airports with other services offered by his group, the FT said. That could be the easiest way to build up downloads. Adani runs seven Indian airports, and is currently building a new terminal and runway for Mumbai's second facility. Overall, 20 per cent of the nation's aviation traffic goes through him. If Adani were to throw in a free ride home - he's also investing in taxi fleets in cities where he has airports, according to media reports - he potentially gets to install his as-yet-unnamed app on millions of phones.
That's just the first battle. The second will be trickier - to make consumers come back for other things.
Aggregating shopping, payments, entertainment, social media and finance in one place is the Chinese model. The likes of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Meituan perfected it before Beijing got nervous about the dominance of its tech titans and made them a target of strong antitrust action. Last year's tech crackdown may be easing, but China's Covid-19 policies continue to be drag on consumption: Alibaba recently posted a surprise quarterly loss. In Southeast Asia, where the template was copied successfully, investors are now demanding profitability ahead of expansion. GoTo Group, the Indonesian behemoth formed through a merger of ride-hailing provider Gojek and e-commerce firm Tokopedia, is cutting 12 per cent of its workforce.
