The world this wiki

The idea of LLM Wiki applied to a year of the Economist. Have an LLM keep a wiki up-to-date about companies, people & countries while reading through all articles of the economist from Q2 2025 until Q2 2026.

DOsinga/the_world_this_wiki

companies|Sari state

Meesho

Indian e-commerce platform backed by SoftBank, a Japanese tech investor. It competes most directly with unbranded street vendors, offering goods at rock-bottom prices (a sari for as little as 266 rupees, including delivery). Unlike Amazon or Myntra, which mostly cater to big cities, Meesho targets the mass market: nine in ten of its shoppers live outside India's eight biggest cities.

Business model

Meesho does not take a commission from sellers and instead charges fees for delivery and advertising. This allows it to undercut street vendors on price while offering the convenience of home delivery.

Growth

The number of people buying goods on the platform in the past 12 months hit 199m in 2025, up from 2m in 2020. In October 2025 the company filed paperwork to go public at a hoped-for valuation of $7bn-8bn.

Market context

Four-fifths of India's $1trn in retail spending—and three-fifths of the $100bn spent on fashion—still takes place in informal shops and stalls. E-commerce platforms doubled their share of the fashion market to nearly 15% between 2019 and 2024, according to HSBC. That is still well below China and America, where 40% of fashion is purchased online. Meesho's prospectus forecasts that by 2030 the share of informal retail will fall from 85% to around 66-68%.

Your best consolation is the hope that the things you failed to get weren't really worth having.