Online grocery and food delivery major BigBasket has concluded the acquisition of DailyNinja, an app-based fresh milk and food delivery platform, strengthening its base in the space.

The talks with DailyNinja have been going on for some time. The monetary value of the deal has not been disclosed. The addition of DailyNinja will bring into the basket, 110,000 customers who have subscribed to its service and with BigBasket already having a subscription-based service bbdaily, the two will get merged in the coming days.

More importantly, DailyNinja has a supply chain arrangement with 2,000 milkmen across the country and this would further make the bbdaily subscription deliver better service to the customers of BigBasket.

Hopefully, DailyNinja and BigBasket can together take full advantage of the current lockdown imposed by the government and scale up their door-delivery service of milk, bread, fresh eggs and other essentials.

It is also not very clear if after the deal, DailyNinja will be operated as a separate entity or all its infrastructure will be merged with BigBasket. Whatever the situation, this deal should prove to be useful to BigBasket’s plans of turning profitable faster and perhaps even think of going public when feasible. The company has been holding on to the leadership position in the segment and has to be ready to ward off serious competition from the likes of Amazon and Flipkart besides the homegrown Reliance Retail.

At present, BigBasket is making 160,000 daily deliveries. This will definitely go up with the 100% nationwide lockdown for the next three weeks. The delivery executives of almost all e-commerce companies have been facing issues on the road with the local law enforcement stopping them from making deliveries. Unless this is fully sorted out in each state, the going could get tough.