Ocado Collaborates With Japanese Retailer Aeon to Develop Japanese Online Grocery Business

The world’s largest UK-based e-commerce grocery retailer Ocado has announced to join hands with the Japanese retailer Aeon, this Friday, to develop the online grocery market in Japan. Ocado is registered with the London Stock Exchange (Ticker OCDO) and it is very focused on the execution of each project that the company signs. When the world has become a narrow place, why would the grocery business be left outside the online market periphery? To boost up this sentiment, Ocado has inked this integrated partnership with Aeon with the help of the Company’s (Ocado) smart platform called “OSP” called the “Ocado Smart Platform.” This year in February, Ocado has also entered into a joint venture with Marks & Spencer Plc to widen its horizon for making online groceries available to eons of customers.

With this collaboration, Ocado has pledged to provide Aeon, with its patented end-to-end software support services, to ensure the smooth launch of its e-commerce grocery business. Though the deal will not have any financial impact in the current year, some operating costs might creep up in 2020 due to some infrastructure investment.

Aeon has plans to launch its first depot in 2023 with an expectation to hit a sales capacity of £1.4bn by 2035. Once the first depot goes live, Aeon, the Chinese conglomerate running around 21,000 stores across 14 countries all over the world, has promised to clear all the group upfront fees to Ocado during its development phase. The first bot-operated warehouse of Aeon will be built in the Kanto region that includes some parts of Turkey. The warehouse is named as “customer fulfillment centers,” following the actual prospect for which the warehouse was built, that is, to develop a national fulfillment network to serve the entire Japanese market with an expected sale of 600bn JPY by 2030, and to 1tn JPY by 2035.

The CEO of Aeon, Motoya Okada, said,

We see Ocado as a state-of-the-art, exciting and transformative partner aligned with our strategy of accelerating Aeon’s Digital Shift to serve Japan’s consumers. We will be able to give consumers the convenience and, more importantly, “time” to let them fulfill other, more meaningful aspirations. We will forge stronger relationships with our customers by offering a more personalized service driven by the capabilities of the Ocado Smart Platform, coupled with Aeon’s capabilities to curate an exciting and compelling product mix centered on serving the lifestyles of our consumers. We will actively partner with Ocado to create a smooth, seamless digital experience thereby speeding up our efforts to reform the online customer experience.