Retail – Sector Update – QC pricing dynamics to curtail MT/Ecom
Published on 30 Dec 2025
We conducted a price comparison on select products for D’Mart Ready against peers such as Blinkit, Instamart and Zepto across key categories like packaged foods, beverages, personal care, dairy and home care. We note that QC platforms are reducing the price gap with D’Mart ready steadily. D’Mart still has price advantage over peers, but the price gap has reduced by 100-500bps. The price gap has vanished in personal care and zepto has even lower prices than D’Mart Ready. Zepto seems most aggressive in product pricing amongst QC platforms with price lead of 4-6% over Blinkit and Instamart.
We believe availability of cheap gig workers, closeness to last mile delivery, instant service, strong cash position and reducing price gap with Modern retail and Ecom does pose a shadow on the growth prospects of non-QC players in the industry. We believe rising clout of QC industry in groceries will prevent any meaningful margin recovery for both modern trade and Ecom players like D’Mart. We believe lower cost dark stores (versus modern trade) and higher inventory turns will enable superior ROCE for QC player’s over medium term.
We expect D’Mart to report sales/EBIDTA/ PAT growth of 14.5/12.7/10% for 3QFY26. We have HOLD rating on the stock with a TP of Rs4111.
