Platform businesses in India - Modern Monopolies?

My whole life effort, is to explain how every business is platform business.

The correct question to ask is not “Is JF platform business”, it is “How scalable are JF distribution value-addition and supply chain”:
Answer is: It is not at all scalable: making pizzas (value addition) will always be a linear process. 0.1/1 on being a platform business due to scalability being limited. JF could never grow 100% in a year, true platforms (1.0/1.0) can.

Also we should not confuse moat/durable competitive advantages with platformness of a business. Jubilant has a brand moat. But it is not a platform. The whole point of going over the motherson sumi example was to say that no, we cannot just apply that definition to any and every business and claim they are platform businesses. We need to carefully evaluate scalability. You know what would be a platform business?

If Jubilant could enable pizza makers to match to pizza buyers. But that is exactly what zomato and swiggy do and are platform businesses (aggregators). I havent covered zomato/swiggy in my posts, but as i have said i dont have high opinion of aggregators unless they can create differentiation the way amazon did. Zomato is trying, 100/100 for that. But havent seen any success yet.

To conclude, no, dominos and motherson sumi are not platforms (platformness = 0.1/1.0 or something very low).

The picture is not yet complete. I will add 1 more post which will complete the picture. We are missing the most key element, the value addition of the business.

18 Likes