agribazaar
August 17, 2020
Mumbai, India: 17 August, 2020
Amid rising retrenchments and salary cuts driven by the pandemic across sectors, agritech platform Agribazaar is more than trebling its headcount as it plans to double geographical footprint, a top company official has said.
The agri-tech platform currently employs just 150 and it is aiming to add 350 more this fiscal, and will be expanding its geographical coverage to 75 cities from 32 now, Agribazaar co-founder and chief executive Amith Agarwal told.
Set up in 2016, Agribazaar, which claims to be the largest agritech marketplace in the country today, is trading in 52 agri-commodities apart from fruits like grapes, mangoes and apples.
The pandemic-driven lockdowns and the June 5 ordinance amending the APMC Act – which allowed farmers to sell their produce anywhere outside their pre-designated mandis – have been a big boost to its business as its gross merchandise value (GMV) grossed to Rs 5,500 crore in the first quarter alone, against the FY20 GMV of Rs 4,000 crore.
Boosted by this, Agarwal has set a target of Rs 20,000 crore GMV this year.
“After the Ordinance alone, our volume crossed 50,000 tonne, while our Q1 GMV crossed Rs 5,500 crore. If this trend continues, which I believe we will, I am confident of closing FY21 with a GMV of Rs 20,000 crore. Since our launch the cumulative GMV was only Rs 14,000 crore,” he said.
Agarwal claimed that selling through his platform offers a farmer an average price gain of 8-10 per cent. While the gain from fruits is more at around 20 per cent and on dry fruits it is over 10 per cent. In grain segment, a farmer gains more than 5 per cent per kg.
Following an aggregator model, Agribazaar allows a farmer to sell online through his platform and once a buyer purchases it online, the platform facilitates logistics of picking up the grain from the farmer’s doorstep and delivers it to the buyers’ warehouse. Since the lockdown began, Agarwal said the company saw an average 400 per cent month-on-month growth in farmer registrations and turnovers.
Agribazaar connects around 2 lakh farmers in 32 districts with around 10,000 traders and processors and over 100 farmer producer organizations. It has over 700 warehouses.
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