UK-India Free Trade Deal: Opportunities for Retail and Brands
The UK-India trade deal has the potential to reset how UK retailers think about supply chains. India is no longer just a low-cost sourcing destination and it is fast becoming a strategic manufacturing base and a growth market in its own right. In 2023, UK imports from India topped £10.4 billion, while exports reached £13.5 billion, spanning textiles, food, apparel, pharmaceuticals, and more. The deal accelerates this momentum, providing a rare chance to diversify sourcing away from single-market dependencies and to tap into a market that’s growing both in capability and consumer power.
Beyond just economics, this deal deepens a long-standing cultural and strategic relationship. The UK’s Indian diaspora, which is over 1.5 million people strong, already shapes consumer demand in food, fashion, and beauty. Yet retailers have often lacked efficient cross-border pathways to bring authentic Indian goods into the UK market at scale. This agreement begins to change that, creating commercial incentives to serve these communities better, while also opening up India’s rising upper-middle class consumers to UK brands.
Strategic partnerships like Tesco’s alliance with Tata, M&S’s joint venture with Reliance Retail, and Holland & Barrett’s expansion into India via Apollo highlight how major brands are already investing in this corridor. The trade deal makes these types of models easier to scale and more commercially viable.
But to realise these benefits, retailers need to go beyond transactional sourcing and rethink procurement, logistics, and compliance, to manage new partners and product flows. India’s complexity, spanning multiple languages, regulatory frameworks, and infrastructure levels, requires a dedicated supply chain design, not off-the-shelf fixes. It is a great opportunity for UK brands and retailers to assess where India fits in their global value chain, how to build ESG-aligned sourcing models, and how to tap into local innovation for product design.
This deal challenges long established flows from China and Southeast Asia and introduces new layers of complexity. But shifting volumes to India requires new procurement structures, updated compliance protocols, investment in traceability, and a rethink of inbound logistics and port infrastructure. For both buyers and sellers, success will hinge on supply chain investments, including building real partnerships, localising product development, embedding resilience from the start, and above all, understanding cultural nuances. Retailers who see this as just a trade discount will miss the strategic upside, while one of the biggest challenge will be execution and integrating new suppliers while maintaining quality, speed, and ethical standards. Having said that this is a great opportunity for organisations on both sides to rebuild their supply chains and incorporate true transformation and not just optimisation.
The trade deal is a door-opener. It’s a chance to serve the UK’s own Indian communities more authentically, while also positioning British brands for long-term growth in a market of 1.4 billion. Retailers who rethink their operations with strategic intent and supply chain investment, will definitely stand to gain far more than duty savings. They gain resilience, relevance, and reach. However, for others who look at this deal as a transactional cost saving exercise or just a lift and shift of supply chain, they could either miss out on a huge opportunity or even worse, could struggle to maintain their existing market share in a rapidly evolving landscape.
The full text of the deal can be accessed at: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-india-free-trade-deal-a-deal-for-growth
