Daybreak - Why Tata 1mg thinks speed is the wrong bet in pharma

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Tata 1mg just reported revenue of nearly 3,000 crore rupees for the last financial year, roughly ten times what it earned when Tata took control, and it is turning a profit while much of the sector bleeds cash. In an e-pharmacy market obsessed with 10-minute delivery and deep discounts, 1mg won by doing the opposite. It capped its discounts and built its own labs and supply chain, and it treats fast delivery as a minor add-on. In this episode, we unpack why patience beats blitzscaling in Indian healthcare and what 1mg means when it calls healthcare longitudinal.Take The Great Rewiring survey hereDaybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In 2025, at a party marking 10 years since the company became 1MG, one of Tata 1MG's founders, Vakas Johan, walked up to his co-founder Prishan Tundan and handed him something in a frame. It was a note Tundan had himself drawn back in 2012. On it was a rough sketch of what the two of them wanted to build over the next five to seven years, and it included a diagnostics business and a chain of retail clinics. Taken together, it was the outline of a company that, that would sit at the center of a patient's health.

Now, here is the striking part. More than a decade later, they have built almost exactly what was on that page. That kind of patience is rare anywhere, and it is close to unheard of in the Indian consumer internet landscape where the usual game is to move fast and grab the land before anyone stops to check whether the business actually works.

One M.G played it the other way. It kept its discounts modest, while rivals slashed their prices, and it stayed out of the delivery sprint that the rest of the market treats as the future of selling medicine. And it worked. When Tata took control, 1MG was doing about $309 crore rupees in revenue. Five years later, that has grown roughly tenfold to nearly $3,000 crore rupees in the last financial year, and the business turns a profit. Inside Tata Digital, a group of internet companies that has mostly struggled, 1MG is. is the rare bright spot.

So why does slow and patient win here when it loses almost everywhere else online? The answer sits on that hand-drawn page because the people who built 1MG never really thought that they were building a pharmacy. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from Le Can. I'm your host, Nick Dhaas Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle.

Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargheese and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Thursday, the 20th of August. Gora Vagarwal, one of 1MG's co-founders, has a line that he keeps repeating. He says he is tired of explaining that 1MG is not an e-pharmacy but a healthcare company. To understand what he means, you have to go back to where it all started. Before it was 1MG, it was HealthCard Plus, built in

2011. Back then, it was just a database of medicines. You could look up a prescription and find comparable alternatives with the same composition. It existed because Indian healthcare tends to hide information from patients and the founders wanted to open that up. Then people started asking why couldn't they simply order the medicines that they were looking up. As co-founder Vikas Chohan put it to my colleague, the Ken reporter Sudhashna Rui, a patient does not experience their health in silos. So the company decided to take on the whole thing. Medicine was only the start. It wanted the diagnostics and the doctor consultations around it too. That choice shaped everything that followed, especially the things 1MG refused to do. When it got into diagnostics, it could have outsourced

the testing the way that many rivals did. Instead, it built its own labs and hired its own phlebotomists because it wanted to own the quality. Today, it runs 21 labs across 75 cities. And then there was the discount question. The sector runs on thin margins already. Around 12 to 14%, and most players were giving back close to 10% in discounts, which swallows almost all of it. One M.G held far tighter at 5 to 8% on most orders. Colleagues remember Prashan Tundan, the other co-founder drawing a hard line that they would not discount beyond a point. His logic and Chohan's too was that a discount cannot hold a customer because a rival can always undercut you. What holds a customer is trust, and that is the moat.

There is a reason that 1MG can afford to be this patient, and it comes down to how strange the pharmacy business really is. More on that in the next segment, but before we get there, my colleague Praveen, has something to tell you. Hello, everyone. I am Snigda, and I am the co-host and producer of Daybreak, which is the Ken's Daily News podcast. And I am Praveen. I am the host and producer of 2x2.

Ken's Business Strategy podcast. And Praveen is working on something super exciting and he's here to tell us all about it. Yes, it is actually a project that we are calling the Great ReWiring, which is the third edition of the Ken's case competitions. Snickda, you remember the first two case competitions. Yes. Of course I do. And every year, you're getting bigger and better and more popular PGK. Well, I certainly hope so. This year, we are actually doing this thing where we are asking students all over India to tell us what happens when agents take over India and how they're going to

rewire the lives of Indians all over. Give me an example. Oh, let me tell you this thing. We are actually finding out examples by asking subscribers like you, what are the strange, annoying and weird things that you do that frustrates you? Maybe things that you procrastinate, maybe things that you don't do, maybe things that you do, but they're very repetitive and very manual. What are the things that you wish

you had a digital assistant who could just take over from you? Tell me an example of... Oh my God. I have a big example that everybody can relate to it is paying bills. Interesting.

It is so annoying, especially the subscriptions and your phone bill because I don't like the idea of auto pay because I want to have some sense of control over my money and also getting out of

auto pay as a hassle. So every month end or beginning. I'm always procrastinating and then I'm getting 10 reminders from Vodafone and like 20 reminders from Spotify and it's just really annoying. Yeah. Wouldn't it be cool, Snigda, if you had an agent that basically looked through all the places that you were spending money on subscriptions and all of these other places and would come and tell you maybe every few weeks, a very friendly agent would come and say, Snikda, I think you should stop doing this. I don't think you're using this anymore. oh, you should probably stop doing this other thing or you should replace it.

There's a cheaper plan that I think you would like. Wouldn't that be really cool and very helpful? This would be mind-blowing amazing and also so helpful. Yeah, but I think there are going to be other weird things. In fact, subscribers have written to us and told us about things like how they struggle to manage their parents' health or how they're essentially using WhatsApp as a way to store all their documents. So there are all these weird workarounds that people do and you're nodding. so I'm guessing you're one of them.

And order to find out, we are running a survey right now. It's a survey called the Great Re wiring survey. The link of it is in the show notes. And we're going to ask you, if you're listening to this, take the survey. It's a fun survey. It's just going to take you five minutes. And we are even going to tell you what are the weird things that other people confessed. And if you take this survey, you will find out what are the weird things that you're doing.

And we're going to ask thousands and thousands of student teams all over India over the next two to three months to build solutions that solve these problems. And how long do we have to wait to hear these weird problems? Maybe just a couple of weeks. We'll be done. All right. Looking forward to it. Yeah.

The survey is here. I would recommend you take it. Yes, please do. Link is in the show notes. And please do share it with your friends and family. Yeah, it's very easy to share. And tag us on social media if you're sharing it on social media. A former Apollo examiner.

put it quite well. There is no dopamine in a strip of medicines. Whether you deliver someone's tablets in 10 minutes or in a day, they are not thrilled either way. At best, they're simply not annoyed. Medicine is a planned purchase. You buy it when you need it and once you find a channel you trust, you rarely switch. That undercuts the whole logic of speed. The quick commerce apps want a big share of Indian farmers market by being fast. But the maths fights them. The average person orders medicines only a handful of times a year. And a pharmacy is not a grocery dark store. It has to keep a licensed pharmacist on the premises at all times and it faces inspections that judge it like a full retail chemist. The inventory is punishing as well. To serve prescriptions

quickly in a single neighborhood, you have to stock 16,000 to 18,000 different products at that location and many times it is what a grocery dark store holds. One executive put the cost of of a single such store at upwards of one and a half crore rupees. And then there is barely anything to upsell. You cannot talk someone into an extra strip of blood pressure pills to lift the bill. So when one MG holds back from the delivery race, it is to make a calculated choice. It does offer 30 to 90 minute delivery intensities, but it keeps its weight on physical stores and its wider network. and its founders are clear that they will scale quick commerce only when it actually makes money.

What 1MG is really chasing sits somewhere else. It believes that healthcare is longitudinal. It wants to follow a patient across years tracking the whole arc of their health. Picture someone living with diabetes. The relationship a pharmacy usually has with them is thin. They run out of the medicine and then they reorder and that is the whole of it. One MG wants something deeper. It wants to know when their next blood sugar test is due before they do

and to flag the reading that matters before anything goes wrong. The idea is to always keep watching. That is the bet that Tandan drew on a single page all those years ago and it is still the plan today. As Agarwal puts it, they believe nothing happens quickly in healthcare and they do not care how long it takes. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform.

What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague, Niktha Sharma, and edited by Rajiv CN.