Ace The Case 2.0
A live case competition hosted by 180 Degrees Consulting — a full acquisition-threat analysis for BharatMart, India's retail challenger, against a simulated IndoMart–GangaBazaar merger. Led a 7-person team from brief to final deck.
Three angles on the same brief — click through.
IndoMart, a global retail giant, is planning to acquire GangaBazaar, a leading Indian volume retailer — a simulated deal that would reshape the competitive landscape overnight. The case asked us to assess how much of a threat this poses to BharatMart, a mid-tier Indian retail challenger caught between the two.
It wasn't enough to say "this is bad for BharatMart." The brief demanded a real financial teardown of all three companies, a regulatory read on how fast the deal could realistically close, and — critically — a concrete, numbers-backed counter-strategy BharatMart could actually execute.
- Financial teardown first: sized all three players on revenue, profit margin, and store count before proposing anything, to ground the threat in real numbers rather than assumption.
- Regulatory lens: mapped FDI caps on multi-brand retail and likely CCI antitrust scrutiny to judge how much runway BharatMart actually has before the merger closes.
- Guesstimate modeling: built bottom-up revenue models for two separate counter-strategies — Kirana network partnerships and apparel customization — rather than leaving them as narrative ideas.
- SWOT framing: stress-tested the final recommendation against BharatMart's actual strengths and weaknesses, not a generic template.
Turn India's dense Kirana (local grocer) network into BharatMart's structural advantage — using ~2,500 local stores as micro-fulfillment hubs and franchise partners instead of competing head-on with IndoMart's discount-volume model.
Our model showed current delivery costs eating roughly 52% of online order value. A 66/34 revenue-split partnership with local vendors flipped that ratio, projecting online revenue rising from ₹67.6cr to ₹93.9cr in the model — alongside a secondary apparel-customization play projected to add ₹158cr+ in incremental revenue.
Six workstreams stress-tested across the case, not just the headline number.
Comparative Teardown
Sized IndoMart, GangaBazaar, and BharatMart on revenue, margin, and store footprint before proposing any response.
FDI & Antitrust Read
Mapped multi-brand retail FDI caps and CCI scrutiny to judge how much time BharatMart realistically has.
Kirana Network Model
Modeled a 66/34 revenue-split partnership turning 2,500 local stores into fulfillment and franchise hubs.
Customization Pricing
Sized the 18–29 demographic and modeled tiered customization pricing for a projected ₹158cr+ uplift.
Dead Stock Recovery
Cross-category bundling model to recover ~15% of otherwise sunk unsold inventory cost.
Domestic Positioning
Framed BharatMart's domestic-first narrative against Atmanirbhar Bharat priorities as regulatory leverage.
As Team Lead, my role was less about the case content itself and more about process — splitting a tight-turnaround brief across financial modeling, market research, design, and content, keeping seven people aligned on one narrative, and resolving direction disagreements fast enough that they didn't stall the team.
Roles were split across business analysis, research, market sizing, design (two co-leads), and content — with the final deck pulled together under my direction to read as one coherent argument instead of seven disconnected sections.
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