“If you acquire customers primarily through discounts, that’s what the business becomes.”
Albinder Dhindsa said that on Eternal’s June quarter earnings call on 22 July, at the precise moment his largest competitors were going the other way. Amazon and Flipkart have both announced heavier investment in quick commerce over recent months. Zepto had filed an updated draft prospectus. The industry’s answer to competition was to spend more on customer incentives, and the chief executive of the company that runs Blinkit told analysts he was not going to do it.
The refusal, and the reasoning behind it
Dhindsa’s case is not that discounting is immoral, only that it has run out of room. “Q1 so far was the peak of competitive intensity that we have seen till date, both because the number of players were higher and everybody was more aggressive,” he said, and then made the arithmetic explicit: “We don’t think there is a lot of wiggle room for people to go much deeper than what they are currently doing because that would pollute losses very significantly.”
The second half of the argument is about what a discount buys. A customer acquired by price has been given no reason to stay once the price returns to normal, so the acquisition has to be repeated indefinitely or written off. Most executives who say this are describing somebody else’s mistake. Dhindsa was describing his own. He cited Blinkit’s expansion into southern India, where a discount-led push failed to produce durable growth, and said the numbers only improved once the company put money into infrastructure, service quality and execution instead.
What he is spending it on instead
Blinkit added 200 net new dark stores during the quarter, taking the network to 2,443. Akshant Goyal, Eternal’s chief financial officer, wrote in the shareholder letter that the company has put about ₹3,000 crore of capital into stores and warehouses over the past four years and will keep doing so as long as the returns hold up. The stated theory is that supply infrastructure is a more durable advantage than a subsidy, because a rival can match a price on the same afternoon and cannot match a warehouse.
The quarter gave him something to argue from. Blinkit’s revenue grew 18.4% sequentially to ₹15,664 crore and net order value rose 19% over the quarter to ₹17,132 crore. That made five consecutive quarters of adjusted EBITDA improvement. Eternal’s operating revenue rose 182% over the year to ₹20,211 crore.
The part the call did not lead with
Eternal’s consolidated net profit for the quarter was ₹92 crore. That is close to 3.7 times what it made a year earlier and it is 47% below what it made three months earlier. Profit nearly halved sequentially in the same quarter that revenue rose sharply, which is what heavy investment looks like while it is still being paid for.
The revenue line needs one more caveat. Blinkit moved to an inventory-led model in September 2025, which changes how sales are recognised, so a sequential revenue comparison is not a clean read on demand. And the position is a great deal easier to hold from where Dhindsa is standing. He is telling the market that his competitors cannot afford to cut prices any further while running the business that reached adjusted EBITDA improvement first. A refusal to fight is a different thing when you are ahead.
Still, this is a stated bet with a date attached, which makes it gradeable, and very few executives offer one. Dhindsa expects discounting to normalise over the coming quarters. If he is right, the ₹3,000 crore becomes a moat and every rupee his rivals spent on incentives becomes a sunk cost. If he is wrong, he has carried a large fixed cost through a price war he chose not to enter, and the customers went to whoever was cheapest that week. Zepto, the closest of those rivals, has since pulled its listing.
Sources
- Inc42, on the earnings call, the Dhindsa quotes, the dark store additions, the ₹3,000 crore capital figure and the Akshant Goyal comments, 22 July 2026
- Eternal, Q1 FY27 shareholders’ letter
- Inc42, on the ₹92 crore consolidated net profit and the 47% sequential decline, July 2026
- Inc42, on Blinkit’s quarterly adjusted EBITDA, July 2026
