Imagine you are the most popular kid in school. Everyone knows your name. The teachers love you. The canteen aunty saves you the last samosa. You have spent 14 years becoming the undisputed king of your school, and life is good.
Then one day, you decide to transfer to a new school. A fancier school. A school where the kids have imported stationery and eat sushi for lunch. You walk in on Day 1, fully expecting a standing ovation, and discover — with gradually dawning horror — that absolutely nobody has heard of you. That, in essence, is the FirstCry story in the Middle East. And it is costing somewhere in the neighbourhood of ₹600 crore to learn.
The Part Where the Gulf Looked Like a Golden Ticket
To be fair to FirstCry, the logic made complete sense on paper. Gulf parents are not messing around when it comes to spending on their children. While an Indian parent spends roughly ₹8,000 per child on childcare products annually, a Saudi parent drops approximately ₹60,000 — nearly eight times as much — on the same category. UAE parents spend about $19.32 per capita on children’s apparel, compared to $16.21 in India. Saudi Arabia’s childcare market alone was valued at roughly ₹49,400 crore in 2022, growing at about 4% annually.
Read those numbers again. Eight times the spending. A multi-billion-dollar market. Parents with actual disposable income who do not need to deliberate for forty-five minutes before buying a pack of diapers. No chaotic unorganised competition to battle — no kirana store uncle selling counterfeit baby oil out of a gunny sack. Just clean, organised, premium retail waiting to be conquered.
So in 2019, FirstCry set up shop in the UAE — FirstCry Management DWC LLC — poured in AED 240 million (roughly ₹548 crore) in paid-up capital, and waited for the Gulf parents to come running. They did not come running.
The Part Where We Look at the Numbers and Quietly Wince
Here is where the story stops being aspirational and starts being a case study that business school professors will use for the next twenty years to make MBA students feel uncomfortable.
FirstCry’s UAE subsidiary — the one that received ₹548 crore in capital — generated AED 1.66 million in revenue in FY24. That is approximately ₹3.6 crore. The revenue also shrank by 39% from the previous year, in case you thought things were at least stable if not growing.
Let us do the maths together, because it deserves to be stared at directly. ₹548 crore deployed. ₹3.6 crore earned. That is a return ratio so grim it would make a chartered accountant cry into their spreadsheet. And yet, Q1 FY25 saw the board approve yet another AED 50 million — roughly ₹114 crore — in fresh working capital for the UAE and KSA operations. Because apparently the answer to “this is not working” is “have you tried more money?”
International GMV, which covers both UAE and Saudi Arabia combined, made up just about 11.8% of FirstCry’s consolidated revenue in the nine months to December 2023. Meanwhile, India’s business was growing at 16% year-on-year in Q1 FY25, while the international segment limped along at 6.57% growth. The company is essentially running two businesses simultaneously — one that is working, and one that is a very expensive experiment in humility.
The Part Where We Meet the Competition (And Understand Why FirstCry Is Sweating)
FirstCry walked into the Gulf expecting to find a market full of opportunity and found instead a market full of people who had already sorted out their baby shopping, thank you very much.
In the UAE, it is competing with Amazon and Noon — two companies that have more logistics infrastructure than most small countries — plus Namshi for fashion. In Saudi Arabia, the lineup includes Amazon, Noon, Mamas and Papas, and the Landmark Group’s Babyshop. These are not scraggly startups. These are corporations with warehouses the size of small towns and marketing budgets that dwarf most Bollywood film productions.
But the most interesting competitor is not Amazon. It is Mumzworld — and Mumzworld is a different kind of problem entirely. Founded in Dubai in 2011 by Mona Ataya, Mumzworld did not start as a retailer. It started as a community. It was built by a Gulf mother, for Gulf mothers, in the language Gulf mothers actually speak — literally and figuratively. It raised $50 million, built a community of 2.5 million mothers across the region, stocked over 250,000 products from 5,500 brands, and was eventually acquired by Saudi Arabia’s Tamer Group in 2021, which gave it the kind of regional legitimacy and capital backing that money alone cannot manufacture.
When Gulf traffic data from SimilarWeb is examined, Mumzworld’s site records roughly 926,300 monthly visits, sitting comfortably ahead of firstcry.ae. Gulf parents are not confused about where they prefer to shop. They have already decided. And they decided before FirstCry arrived.
The fundamental issue is this: FirstCry spent 14 years in India defeating unorganised competition — corner shops, informal retailers, the general chaos of a market that had not yet been properly consolidated. In the Gulf, there is no such chaos. Every competitor FirstCry faces is already organised, already funded, already smart, and already trusted. There is no easy gap to exploit. There is only a very hard fight for parents who have seen no particular reason to switch.
The Part About the India Playbook and Why It Does Not Travel Well
FirstCry’s India success rested on a very specific set of advantages. It understood that Indian grandmothers have enormous purchasing power in baby decisions. It knew that Indian parents are ferociously price-sensitive, which is why BabyHug diapers — FirstCry’s private label — could compete by being cheaper than Pampers. It built 936 stores and partnered with over 7,500 hospitals so that new parents encountered the FirstCry brand at the most emotionally susceptible moment of their lives — literally within hours of having a baby. It understood the Indian omnichannel consumer who wants to touch the product before buying it.
None of these advantages exist in the Gulf.
Gulf parents trust Pampers and Huggies because those brands have decades of Western heritage backing. BabyHug means nothing to a parent in Riyadh who has never seen the brand before and has no reason to take a chance on an unknown Indian label when the established alternative is right there on the same app. The hospital partnership model — so brilliant in India — has no equivalent in Saudi Arabia’s healthcare system, where FirstCry currently has zero hospital presence.
The franchise store network that gives Indian parents a physical touch-and-feel experience is entirely absent; FirstCry’s Gulf strategy is online-first, with physical stores only recently approved as a future plan, with just twelve-ish stores earmarked for Saudi Arabia over the next two to three years. Twelve stores versus 936 in India. The comparison is almost too uncomfortable to make.
Even the festival calendar is different, and this matters more than it sounds. In India, Diwali and baby-season promotions drive enormous sales spikes that FirstCry has mastered over many years. In the Gulf, Ramadan and Eid dominate the retail calendar with an intensity that changes consumer behaviour for weeks around each occasion.
FirstCry has not yet fully cracked the art of turning the entire Ramadan-Eid season into a marketing event the way entrenched local players do. CEO Supam Maheshwari, in his earnings calls, pointed to Eid falling in April 2024 as an explanation for a disappointing quarter — the argument being that sales simply moved earlier. The difficulty with this explanation is that it is now a multi-quarter, multi-year pattern of underperformance, and no festival calendar irregularity lasts that long.
The Part About What Gulf Parents Actually Want (That FirstCry Has Not Quite Figured Out)
Here is the cultural gap that no amount of warehouse infrastructure can bridge: Gulf parents shop emotionally before they shop practically.
Mumzworld understood this from day one. Its Arabic-language parenting content, local mom blogs, influencer partnerships on Instagram and Snapchat, and community events created something that FirstCry’s catalogue of 262,000 SKUs simply cannot replicate — the feeling that this brand was made for me, by someone who understands my life. Mona Ataya, Mumzworld’s founder, remains a publicly visible figure in the Gulf, regularly interviewed in regional media about parenting trends. Gulf mothers feel a genuine human connection to the brand she built.
FirstCry, by contrast, remains largely English-language in its content, India-centric in its marketing tone, and absent from the Instagram and Snapchat influencer ecosystem that Gulf parenting communities actually inhabit. It has 3.6 million app downloads across the UAE and KSA — a genuinely respectable number — but an app download is not the same as an emotional relationship with a brand. Gulf moms have downloaded FirstCry’s app. They have also downloaded seventeen other apps. The question of which one they actually trust is answered by the traffic data, and the traffic data points stubbornly toward Mumzworld.
True localisation, when done right, looks less like “we have an Arabic language toggle on our app” and more like “we ran a Ramadan parenting workshop in partnership with a Saudi paediatrician and 400 mothers attended and talked about it on WhatsApp for two weeks.” FirstCry has the logistics of localisation. It does not yet have the soul of it. The Part Where We Ask the Question Nobody at the AGM Wants to Ask- At what point does a strategic bet become a strategic trap?
Nearly ₹600 crore has been deployed into the Gulf. Revenue from the UAE subsidiary sits at ₹3.6 crore annually and is falling. The board keeps approving fresh cash injections to cover working capital gaps. International GMV growth trails India’s core business by a significant margin every single quarter. The competition is more entrenched, better funded, and more culturally embedded than FirstCry anticipated when it made its initial assumptions in 2019.
The board, the investors, and the management team are all clearly aware of this. The optimistic earnings call commentary — “we’re back on track,” “July and August showed strong growth” — is the language of people who are not ready to say out loud what the numbers are quietly suggesting. A 12% GMV bump in one quarter, following a disappointing quarter, is not a turnaround. It is a bounce. The two things look similar in a presentation slide and feel very different in the actual business.
There is one question that FirstCry’s board members owe their investors a clear answer to, and it is this: given everything we now know about the Gulf that we did not know in 2019, are we staying because we genuinely believe we are close to a breakthrough, or are we staying because admitting we misjudged a market is a very uncomfortable thing to do publicly after an IPO?
FirstCry built one of India’s genuinely great business stories — a brand that went from a single store in Pune to a household name trusted by hundreds of millions of parents across the country. That is real, and it is not diminished by a difficult international expansion. Every great company has a chapter where it overestimated how far its advantages would travel. The question is how quickly it reads that chapter, draws the right conclusions, and decides what to do next.
The Gulf wanted “India with money.” What it got was an Indian brand that arrived expecting to be recognised and found, instead, that recognition has to be earned all over again — in a new language, on new platforms, with new parents who have their own favourite brand already bookmarked on their phones.
The samosa is still waiting back in India. The new school, it turns out, has its own canteen aunty. And she already has a favourite customer.
