Tata Is Working On A Super App For Shopping, Financial Services, TV And More

The Tata Group is working on a new super app that will attempt to offer the group’s wide range of products and services within one smartphone application for consumers. It is expected that the super app that the Tata Group is working on will be ready for launch by early next year. This comes at a time when Amazon has been expanding its product offerings in India, with the latest addition being the ability to buy digital gold via Amazon Pay. Reliance Industries Ltd has also aggressively raised around $20 billion from as many as 13 foreign investors, including tech companies Facebook, Google and Qualcomm, and has significantly upgraded the MyJio app to offer a lot more functionality and features over the past few updates.

The Financial Times reports that Tata’s new super app platform will combine the group’s services in one place. “It will be a super app, a lot of apps in apps and so on . . . We have a very big opportunity,” says Natarajan Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons, which has businesses in Financial Services, Automotive brands, Telecom, Tourism, Aerospace and Defence as well as Consumer and Retail spaces. These include the car brand Jaguar Land Rover. The Tata businesses are valued at $113 billion in terms of revenue, and the businesses include direct to home (DTH) satellite TV service Tata Sky, home broadband service Tata Sky Broadband, the jewelry business Tanishq, the Indian Hotels Company which runs the Taj Hotels & Resorts, consumer appliances brand Voltas Beko, offline stores under the Croma brand, financial services Tata AIG and Tata Capital as well as retail brands Zara and Starbucks.

It is believed that the Tata Group wants to put a variety of their services, including food, groceries, fashion and lifestyle, consumer electronics, consumer durables, financial services and insurance as well as education, healthcare and bill payments within one app. The latest numbers by CounterPoint research suggest India has as many as 620 million internet users and that number is expected to use to around 850 million by the year 2022.

“The Tata Group, depending upon how you count, touches several hundred millions of consumers in India, if you take consumers who are walking in everyday into a Tata facility,” says Chandrasekaran. Tata has recently created a new consumer goods company which looks after the food and beverage offerings, which includes Tetley Tea along with coffee, spices and salt, and also launched Tata Digital platform to push new tech ventures.