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It's not been a great year to be in the business of delivering groceries quickly in Saudi Arabia.
Nana, which raised north of $200 million and was once the category's national champion, is in court-supervised reorganisation. Careem has retreated barely 13 months after launching grocery in the Kingdom. Rabbit, the Egyptian fifteen-minute upstart that arrived promising to do to Riyadh what it had done to Cairo, read the wind early, folded its Saudi business and went home.
And in the middle of all this, one company is still sprinting the other way, into the fire the rest are fleeing, Ninja, the grocery pure-play that continues its charge toward a Tadawul listing on a capital base funded less by the institutional names you'd expect than by an unusual, crowdfunding-flavoured route, which raises the question of whether its dash to list is born of conviction or of a need to hand its backers an exit and itself the oxygen to keep fighting.
The natural thing to do with a pile-up like this is to look for who's doing the killing, and the obvious candidate is Keeta, the Meituan-backed aggressor that's spent the past 18 months bludgeoning the Kingdom's food-delivery incumbents on price, a campaign fierce enough that Shgardi has since hung up its helmet and Jahez has handed the competition regulator data on suspected predatory pricing by a rival.
On groceries, though, that's the wrong answer, because Keeta's quick-commerce arm, Keemart, has barely dented the category. Saudi's grocery players aren't dying because Keeta out-sold them on milk and eggs, they're dying because of who else has wandered into the aisle and started throwing bags of cash at each other.
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In truth, quick commerce in Saudi is no longer a fight between grocery specialists at all. Increasingly, it's a contest between two horizontal e-commerce giants, Amazon and Noon, for whom groceries are never the point, only a thin-margin hook into a far more valuable relationship and the subscription they're really there to defend.
That's a game a pure-play will struggle to play indefinitely, hence the tumult quietly remaking the category around the behemoths who can.
But none of this is new, the same fight is already well underway in India, a year or so ahead of Riyadh and a long way from settled.
There, homegrown players Blinkit, Swiggy and Zepto, with Walmart-backed Flipkart and then Amazon scrambling in behind them, have turned fast grocery into a war the giants now treat as existential.
And although India is bigger and far denser than Saudi, it's still the most analogous preview of where the Kingdom is heading, which is why, to understand Saudi quick commerce, you have to look to India.
For paying subscribers: what the India precedent shows, right down to how Blinkit has quietly made the model pay in Delhi, all seven Saudi players mapped by what they're actually selling (rarely groceries), how Jahez cut its delivery costs by bringing its fleet in-house but saw its margins fall regardless, the bull case for why big Saudi baskets and cheap fulfilment could make money where India's players never quite have, and the bear case for why the pure-plays are hostage to rivals who treat the vertical as a loss-leader.
The India precedent
Amazon is trying to spend its way out of a hole, which, as any husband who has remembered his wife's birthday at 6pm and rushed home with petrol-station flowers and a frantically booked table can attest, is a tactic with a decidedly mixed record.
Thankfully I've not yet had occasion to test it at home, but if anyone has the pockets to make it work it's most likely Amazon. And in India it’s spending precisely like a man who forgot, roughly $300 million of fresh capital on top of an earlier $230 million, all inside a $35 billion pledge to 2030, and a scramble to put micro-fulfilment centres into 100 cities…
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