Just Dial’s acquisition will help Reliance Retail to gain access to thousands of small businesses which has been one of its core focus areas over the past year.

Reliance Retail aims to expand across cities, and will onboard over one crore merchant partners over the next three years. “The deal with Just Dial will certainly help Reliance in building the merchant base which they are targeting aggressively for the e-commerce and payments stream. They could integrate this further with the Whatsapp ecosystem which they are building along with Facebook,” said Satish Meena, an E-commerce analyst.

Reliance had announced a deal with Facebook last year which will enable Jio's new commerce platform to connect 3 crore kirana stories through WhatsApp to digitally transact with every customer in their neighbourhood.

“The Reliance Retail & Jio Platforms juggernaut continues to make many interesting strategic moves. Investment in one of the earliest e-commerce company Just Dial further adds to the already many pearls in Reliance Retail's string. For Just Dial, it would give an opportunity to move into a much stronger growth trajectory with Reliance as a partner,” said Arvind Singhal, Chairman and Managing Director, Technopak Advisors.

Expansion

While the new commerce strategy under Jio Mart has predominantly focused on groceries so far, the deal with Just Dial will allow Reliance Retail to expand into other areas. Just Dial has an existing database of 30.4 million listings and its existing consumer traffic is around 129.1 million quarterly unique users.

Harminder Sahni, founder and MD, Wazir Advisors said, “From Reliance’s perspective, it’s very clear that they are looking to grab a larger share of the digital ecosystem. Just Dial, from being yellow pages classifieds, has become a place to search for every need of the users. Just Dial-like companies are willing to get acquired as they will be able to give exit to the investors while ensuring financial security.”

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