Flipkart Minutes edges past Instamart in CLSA count
A CLSA note puts Flipkart Minutes 12 stores ahead of Swiggy Instamart across India's top 10 cities, in a count that leaves out Amazon and JioMart entirely.
- CLSA counts 627 Flipkart Minutes dark stores against 615 for Swiggy Instamart across India's top 10 cities, a lead of 12 stores.
- The CLSA calculation excludes Amazon and JioMart, so the ranking describes a five-player field rather than every quick commerce node in those cities.
- CLSA puts Blinkit at around 30% of dark stores across the top 10 cities and more than 34% nationally, which are two different denominators.
- The city split runs from Bengaluru at 735 stores down to Ahmedabad at 137, and that spread is what a brand actually plans coverage against.
A CLSA note reported by Entrackr on 26 August 2026 puts Flipkart Minutes ahead of Swiggy Instamart on dark stores across India’s top 10 cities, 627 against 615. That is a lead of 12 stores inside a base of 3,536. It is a real crossover and a narrow one, and writing it up as a rout would misstate what changed.
The larger caveat sits in the method. CLSA excludes Amazon and JioMart from its calculations, so the ranking compares a five-player field of Blinkit, Zepto, Flipkart Minutes, Swiggy Instamart and BigBasket. Any store network Amazon or JioMart operates sits outside these numbers. Read the table as a comparison between those five names, not as a census of quick commerce capacity in the top 10 cities.
Within that field, the August 2026 counts are Blinkit 969, Zepto 828, Flipkart Minutes 627, Swiggy Instamart 615 and BigBasket 497, summing to 3,536. CLSA says Blinkit “remains well ahead of its rivals, accounting for around 30% of dark stores across the top 10 cities and more than 34% nationally”. Those two share figures rest on different denominators, the top 10 cities in one case and the country in the other, so they are not the same measure. Blinkit leads in six of the ten cities and Zepto leads in three of the remaining four. Dark stores are present across 477 cities in total.
The city split, which also totals 3,536, is Bengaluru 735, Delhi 531, Hyderabad 484, Mumbai 372, Chennai 365, Pune 293, Kolkata 248, Gurgaon 225, Lucknow 146 and Ahmedabad 137.
For a brand, dark store count is a rough proxy for how many pin codes can physically hold your stock, and the city column is the part you plan against. Claiming availability in Bengaluru means getting a SKU into a node base roughly five times the size of Ahmedabad’s, with the replenishment and working capital that implies. If your fill rate is already thin, the honest sequencing is to saturate the smaller metros where full coverage is reachable, then fund Bengaluru and Delhi once supply can hold. A platform-wide coverage percentage hides exactly this difference.
Zane’s analysis draws on original reporting by Entrackr. Read the original report.