The market size for construction industry is $300 billion in India. It’s expanding at 7 to 8 percent per annum and is poised to become the world’s largest construction market by 2020 and will count for 15 percent of our GDP.
mSupply is also looking at possibly deploying their ecommerce technologies in this segment across Asia Pacific, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. This will Enable global manufacturers in China, Europe and Far East to sell in the India markets as well.
The mSupply business model has been validated: their
Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) in 8 months and current annual run rate of $100 million. They report that they have already signed contracts worth $100m worth to be executed in next 18 months. The profit margins for these contracts is expected to be between 2 and 6 percent, from around 500 local, regional and national manufacturers and wholesalers.
Mr. TGC Prasad, founder CEO of mSupply answered a few questions for us. He was CEO and board member for Misys Software Solutions, a $4 billion software product company. Mr. Prasad has founded 3 construction companies and delivered two large residential projects of about 1 million square feet. Part of the startup team of Mindtree, a $750 million software company, where he was vice president for enterprise services. With Coopers & Lybrand, he was principal consultant for SAP, enterprise, supply chain Ssolutions. Mr. Prasad’s educational journey features s B.Tech (Civil) from NIT Calicut and a MBA fromTata Institute.
What is mSupply.com? mSupply.com is a B2B commerce marketplace for construction, finishes, interiors and decor related products and materials. mSupply.com connects customers such as builders, SMEs, corporates, infra companies and homeowners, as well as with suppliers wholesalers, and manufacturers) with products online.
Our endeavour is to unify the ecosystem by bringing suppliers, customers, financial institutions, service providers and logistics companies on one platform to facilitate transparency and simplicity in doing business.
As a commerce marketplace, with the core methodology which consists of right price; right time delivery; right quality materials and right quantity of materials, we help our customers with requisition management; procurement; logistics and fulfilment; receivables and payables management and analytics. In addition, mSupply.com helps with securing credit via supplier networks or from banks and NBFCs.
For our customers, we provide three major products: mProcure (an enterprise procurement technology solution) – It’s an end to end solution for purchase; fulfilment; payments; financial reconciliation; analytics; reporting and MIS.
mSupply.com marketplace – This will give customers access to a large pool of verified suppliers and manufacturers across more than 200 categories.
mCredit (an enterprise credit system) - Providing access to secured or unsecured credit for buyers and suppliers through financial institutes, banks and NBFCs.
Did your U.S. investors help the brand rope in big clients in India? Yes, our Investors connected us with some of the big names in the industry. They also played an important role in devising our model and defining our key audience segments to go after.
mSupply raised their series A round from
Artiman Ventures of Silicon Valley, USA.
What will be the impact of GST bill on the company and the sector? GST roll out would have a positive impact on mSupply.com as well as on the sector. This will eliminate state barriers currently present while buying or selling materials across boundaries. This will open up more business opportunities for suppliers and manufacturers registered with us and will make it easier for customers to source materials from anywhere.
With GST, the construction inventory market would become uniform, breaking state barriers. This would lead to re-engineering of warehouse strategy by various manufacturers. Decisions on location of warehouses will no longer be driven by tax considerations.
GST will eliminate multiple state taxes and encourage companies to consolidate warehouses instead of maintaining one in each state to avoid GST. Implementation of the GST will lead to greater flexibility in manufacturing sector, better trade-off between cost and customer service and will bring improved efficiency in pricing.
BW Reporters
Regina is a reporter for BW Businessworld. In her previous assignments, she has worked with Independent television Network as a news anchor and reporter in Sri Lanka
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