Porter completes divestment of Modern Trade business to COGOS Technologies

Porter, an intra-city logistics company announced the divestment of its FMCG Modern Trade business segment to COGOS Technologies, a leading tech-logistics startup. This strategic divestment has been undertaken, realigning Porter’s business priorities and strengthening focus on on-spot demand services and technology amelioration.

During the pandemic keeping up with the market requirements, Tiger Global and Sequoia-backed Porter diversified its service offerings to cater to the requirements of FMCG companies. 

“During Covid we started multiple lines of business, including Modern Trade,” said Pankaj Shroff, CFO, Porter. “After due deliberations, we decided to focus on our core business and found an able alliance with COGOS Technologies for the continuity of the Modern Trade business.”

This move aims at ensuring continuity of the business vertical with COGOS, an enterprise-led business model and strengthening Porter’s focus on its core business solutions. Porter’s Modern Trade servicing team accounts for close to 5 per cent of the total workforce and all the employees have been absorbed based on the business needs of both companies. 

Modern Trade is usually a chain store such as hypermarkets, supermarkets, and minimarkets whose operations (inventory, logistics, merchandising) are more organized than general trade.

“The penetration of tech-logistics in this space has been minimal leading to loss of opportunity and higher costs for FMCG companies and Modern Trade,” said Prasad Sreeram, co-founder and CEO, COGOS. “With this investment, we are looking forward to organising and optimising the supply chain of the sector with our tech platform and advanced delivery system.”

COGOS has been aggressively working towards organising the city-logistics market. With this investment, they further aim at strengthening their platform in order to suit the demand of city logistics. They also aim at expanding their fleet to 50,000 vehicles in order to meet the demand. Post this, COGOS would have the FMCG vertical operations in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, and Hyderabad, and will eventually expand this to over 300 cities that they are already present. Specific staff, vendors, partners, and customers involved in this division of Porter will be moving to COGOS now.  

Porter is currently present in 15 cities across India and looking at expanding its base by creating newer use cases for its various business verticals including Packers and Movers and On-Spot demand service. The company plans to enter top 35 cities by 2023 with a focus on tier 2 and 3 cities.