Beacon to expand its retail presence to 50 cities

Having successfully established its foothold in 20 top cities, including the six metros, demand sensing and aggregation platform Beacon is now set to increase its pan-India footprint. The tech-enabled platform, which has made buying for small retailers in the country faster and smarter, will look to expand its presence to 50 cities across India.

Incepted with the vision of plugging the glaring gap between FMCG players and India’s 8.5-million retailers, Beacon has been leveraging state-of-the-art technology to drive better efficiencies within the retail supply chain. It utilises machine learning algorithms to identify the precise demand from smaller retail stores, thus enabling brands to fulfil inventory requirements in real-time and optimizing stock movement.

Mayank Premi, Co-Founder and Director, Beacon, said, “The Indian retail industry currently suffers from major fragmentation and service bottlenecks, but creating an alternate retail ecosystem is not the answer to this problem. What needs to be done instead is to leverage technology to optimize the existing efficiencies within the retail supply chain. This is what we at Beacon have been working towards. Our endeavour is to help brands connect swiftly and directly with retailers across the nation. The robust market traction that we’ve received so far is indicative of the relevance our solutions have in the country’s retail ecosystem. Expanding our services to more cities will allow more retailers and brands to benefit from our tech-led services.”

Beacon’s differentiated approach has been reaping rich dividends for all stakeholders. Brands are provided with a unique opportunity to rapidly increase their market reach, which was hitherto limited to 10% of the country’s overall retail stores. Retailers, on the other hand, benefit from greater agility of scale and better profit margins. The news of its imminent expansion, as such, comes as exciting news for both retail stores as well as brands.

Abhinav Jain – CO-Founder and Director, Beacon, added, “Beacon has already generated immense traction in the cities it is present in, thanks to its extensive distribution linkages that cover over 350 districts across India. We are now poised to take the benefits of our tech-enabled platform and demand aggregation capabilities to newer cities. With the expansion, retailers in 50 cities will be able to ensure accurate on-shelf availability of products that their customers wish to purchase and do this while enhancing margins for the last-mile retailer. We have also been getting a lot of interest from mid- and large-size CPG players, as well as from other sectors like white goods, pharma, and agro-chemicals. We are targeting diversification of our operations with domain expansion in the near future.”

In order to better assist retailers, especially those from non-metro cities, Beacon also has a dedicated team of agents, comprised mostly of women professionals, to offer support on the phone. This team, in addition to recording retailer requirements, also helps them in translating the analysed data from their own outlets into implementable, actionable decisions for brands.