Business giants ITC is set to launch the ‘ITC MAARS’ app, which seeks to offer a wide range of agricultural solutions to farmers, while creating new revenue streams and providing better markets for advanced agriculture and rural services. The company said that the app is set to benefit around 10 million farmers across multiple crop clusters. The company is also collaborating with farmers to develop robust models for value-added segments, such as better quality and organic chillies, mango pulp traceable to farms, specialty coffee certified for fair trade, wheat flours, and medicinal and aromatic plant extracts.
“ITC MAARS is a transformative business model, a very creative monetization model which will be built on the strength of e-Choupal 4.0. The physical aspects, whether it’s the demonstration farms, the lead farmers and the information highway connecting all the players come from the e-Choupal. ITC MAARS will provide better markets for advanced agriculture and rural services,” Sanjiv Puri said during an investor meeting. Puri added, “There are about 1,000 or more agri-tech startups in India. MAARS will plug and play with agri-tech start-ups, create a hyper-local personalized solution at the farmer level." “Sanjiv Puri’s analyst meeting address on ITC next, sustainability, margin expansion, new vectors of growth, MAARS are showing results now for the company and the stock price. The fundamentals and the strategies will help the stocks and the firm reach new highs,” Rahul Sharma, the Research head at Equity 99 said. ITC's stock recently reached a 52-week high of Rs 273.15. Experts attribute this increase to the economy's opening up, which has encouraged the recovery of the hospitality and education sectors, as well as opportunities for exports. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, the company has also concentrated on the FMCG, direct-to-consumer, and digitalization sectors.