Tata Digital CEO Naveen Tahilyani focuses on profitability, technology in first townhall

Naveen Tahilyani, CEO of Tata Digital

About 60 days after taking the helm of Tata Digital, the company’s new chief executive officer, Naveen Tahilyani, hosted his first townhall with employees earlier this week. The message from the top boss was clearly focused on profitability and technology, according to people close to the developments.

Tata Digital, is an arm of the sprawling conglomerate that houses its super app Tata Neu, apart from its acquired consumer internet businesses such as online grocer BigBasket and online pharmacy 1mg.

“Naveen had addressed all the employees together when he joined as the CEO to do introductions. But this was the first time he spoke at length about the business. The main message was about focussing on profitability,” said a person close to the developments.

Sources said that Tahilyani also congratulated the team about their achievements in FY24 such as improving the Tata Neu app’s user ratings and driving the growth of its loyalty programme. He also cracked a few jokes here and there to lighten the mood.

An alumnus of IIT Madras and IIM Ahmedabad, Tahilyani spent over 17 years at consulting firm McKinsey before joining Tata AIA Life Insurance in 2015. He briefly joined Axis Bank in 2020 before being roped in again by Tata AIA later that year. In the first week of February this year, he was deputed by Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran to lead Tata Digital.

“At the townhall, he touched upon the importance of being an omnichannel player and strengthening the company’s leadership in categories like fashion and e-commerce,” said another source.

To be sure, it was a virtual townhall that employees across three cities — Mumbai, Bengaluru and Gurugram — attended through videoconferencing in large meeting rooms at the company’s offices. Most of the company’s 1,000 employees participated in the townhall event, which is organised fairly frequently and is called ‘NeuHuddle’ internally.

As Tata Neu recently completed its two-year anniversary, there was also a celebratory treat and cake cutting by employees after the townhall ended.

Tata Digital did not respond to Moneycontrol's queries about the Townhall.

New avenues

Although the Tata Group super app went live in April 2022 amid much fanfare, industry players say it has not lived up to the hype. While some are of the view that it lacks the ‘move fast and break things’ culture of the internet world, others think that the ‘super app’ idea was flawed to begin with.

Amid reports of the conglomerate planning a fresh billion-dollar fund infusion in Tata Digital, the company’s net loss widened to Rs 5,553 crore in FY23 from Rs 2,945 crore in FY22. Its revenue rose 69 percent to Rs 26,984 crore in FY23 from Rs 15,996 crore in FY22, according to its annual financials filings sourced from PrivateCircle Research.

One of the platform’s newest bets is on the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC). Over the last one week, Tata Neu has launched a food delivery service through ONDC in multiple metro cities like Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Pune. According to sources, the food ordering feature is set to go live across India by the middle of May.

The idea behind the entry into food ordering is to develop a ‘high-frequency use case’ to bring consumers back to the app regularly.

This will give a chance to Tata Neu to cross-sell its other products on the app — across categories like apparel, jewellery, grocery, electronics and flights. The app might eventually be integrated with ONDC for other categories, depending on how consumers receive it.