Nikita Yadav
BBC News, Delhi
Bbc
Shein was relaunched in India by Retail Reliance
The Chinese application Fast Fashion Shein relaunched in India five years after its ban by Delhi, as part of an agreement with the Indian company Reliance Retail.
A Retail reliance official, who did not want to be appointed, told the BBC that the company had concluded a long-term license agreement with the parent company to sell products manufactured and purchased in India on the platform. The group has not yet made an official announcement.
The return of Shein on the Indian market comes with strict terms, in particular to save all data in the country, said Indian Minister of Commerce Piyush Goyal in December.
In 2020, India prohibited Shein and dozens of other Chinese applications, including Tiktok.
He indicated that this was in response to data security problems and that he followed a peak in tensions with China after the clashes between the armies of the two countries in a disputed Himalayan border area.
The application has been launched in India on Saturday and has so far been downloaded by more than 10,000 people. It offers fashion clothes for as little as 199 rupees ($ 2.30; £ 1.90).
Shein currently only delivers to consumers in the cities of Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, but will soon offer services across India, according to a notification on the application.
Over the past decade, Shein has gone from a little -known brand among older buyers to one of the largest fast fashion retailers in the world. Today, it is delivered to customers in 150 countries around the world.
Before the ban, it became a great success in India because it gave people a variety of options to buy fashionable conceptions at an affordable price. The ban initially left a vacuum on the Indian market which was then filled by many local players.
Experts say that with Shein India, Reliance Retail – belonging to the Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani – is diversifying from its existing international brands strategy through its Ajio online retailer.
The renewal is delivered with strict conditions which give reliance a total control over its operations and its data while Shein will be a technological partner, Goyal said in the Indian Parliament in December.
All customer and applications data will be stored in India and Shein will have no right of access, he said.
Goyal also said that the application has been prohibited in India, not the “sale of Shein brand products”.
Shein will use India as “source of supply for its global operations” and will help retail reliance in “network construction” and to the formation of Indian clothing manufacturers because it aims to promote the export of textiles and Clothes from India, said the manager.
The return of Shein under the agreement with Reliance Retail is a rare exception to the ban from India to more than 200 Chinese applications in the past five years.
At the time, Indian officials declared that the ban had followed many complaints against applications to “steal and surreptitiously transmit user data in an unauthorized manner”.
Bytedance Tiktok and the popular fighting and survival game Playerunknown’s Battleground (PUBG) were also prohibited.
However, PUBG was then renamed and launched for the Indian market under the name of Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI), which is held by Krafton India.
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