TheCapTable
Subscribe

Stories

About Us

Home

Stories

Explore

Sign In

Stories

About Us

Food and Beverage

The new cola wars: Reliance rides IPL and predatory pricing to Campa glory

thumbnail
April 11, 2025  |  7 Min Read
Campa’s re-emergence has disrupted India’s cola market and is also denting the fruit juice businesses of homegrown FMCG majors. Reliance has now unleashed a Rs 200-crore Campa splash via IPL, while also expanding pan-India distribution for the 10-rupee beverage.

Reliance Industries is doing to India’s ~$9-billion soft drinks market what it did to telecom and OTT streaming—disrupting it Rs 10 at a time.

The Mukesh Ambani-owned conglomerate, which acquired storied cola brand ‘Campa’ for a paltry Rs 22 crore from Pure Drinks Group and relaunched it in 2023, has turned Campa into a Rs 1,000-crore beverage juggernaut in less than two years.

This has come on the back of the phenomenal success of Campa’s 200 ml PET bottle. Priced at just Rs 10, it has undercut the market and put the two “MNC colas”—Coke and Pepsi—in a fix. So much so that Coca-Cola’s Global President and CFO John Murphy told the media in January that India’s local beverage brands were doing "a darn good job” when asked to comment on Campa’s disruptive growth.

What Campa has managed to do, despite its presence in only select markets, including Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Bihar, UP, and a few cities in the East, is restrict the ability of the MNC colas to slash their prices even if they wanted to, an FMCG brand analyst told The CapTable. “Every time either Coke or Pepsi wants to lower its price, there is resistance in the market from within their own dealer networks as their margins are hit. And when the most important middleman is against you, you can't do too much,” he said, adding that Campa, which is an all-new cola for these dealers, “faces no latent disgruntlement and is gaining traction in this bargain”.

“The proof of concept has been laid out, now it’s a question of Reliance going out to widen the market and capture each one of the bottler destinations,” the analyst added.

Campa’s biggest public splash came in February this year when it replaced Thums Up (a Coca-Cola brand) as IPL 2025’s co-presenting sponsor, coughing up north of Rs 200 crore for the privilege. The ‘co-presenting’ category is regarded as the most premium sponsorship slot in IPL, right after the title sponsorship (currently held by TATA).

sign_in_article
Read this article for free

In addition, access 50+ archived articles and 3 new articles every month

Sign In

Join our community of 100,000+ top executives, VCs, entrepreneurs, and brightest student minds

company1
company2
company3
company4
company5
company6
company7
company8
company9
company1
company2
company3
company4
company5
company6
company7
company8
company9
Trusted by the best
Headshot of Karthik Reddy from Blume Ventures
Karthik Reddy

Blume Ventures

quote

The CapTable brings a refreshing set of insights for us at the Blume team, highlighting stories that bring together the underlying business and founders with that of investors' journeys with these startups. It's an important perspective that very few bring to startup ecosystem enthusiasts.

Latest Articles

subscribe_graffiti

Convinced that The Captable stories
and insights will give you the edge?

Subscribe Now

If you want to see more, Sign Up for access to our Crux newsletter and several free articles

Sign Up Now