H&M in India: who owns it, what it costs, and how it compares with Germany

H&M’s Indian shops are run by a company its Swedish parent lists, in its own audited report, under the heading “Wholly owned companies 2025”. That is the whole of the shareholding disclosure — a heading, not a percentage — and this page will not turn it into one.

The sharper number is on the price tag. On 6 September 2026, 4,083 garments were matched between hm.com’s Indian and German shops on H&M’s own ten-digit article number. The median Indian price came to 69.8% of the German one, and every single pair was cheaper in India.

Company answerable in India

H & M Hennes & Mauritz Retail Private Limited, CIN U74140DL2013FTC262231, incorporated 16 December 2013

Registered office

District Centre, Saket, New Delhi 110017 — the address printed as importer on the product pages

Shareholding

Listed under “Subsidiaries’ holdings — Wholly owned companies 2025” in the parent’s 2025 report

Price band, hm.com India

₹499 to ₹32,999, median MRP ₹1,999, median charged ₹1,699, read 6 September 2026

Shops

78 H&M and 2 COS across 36 cities, on the company’s own store locator, 6 September 2026

Who owns H&M in India

The Indian retail company was incorporated in Delhi on 16 December 2013, and H&M’s own release of 2 October 2015 names it as the operator of the first shop, at Select CITYWALK in Saket. What the register carries — through an aggregator’s mirror of it, not the register itself — is a private company classed as the subsidiary of a company incorporated outside India, and its Saket address is printed as importer on the product pages.

The shareholding comes from the parent’s own audited filing. H & M Hennes & Mauritz AB’s Annual and Sustainability Report 2025 sets out its holdings in two parts across printed pages 172 and 173: companies held directly by the listed parent, then companies held through those subsidiaries under a second heading, “Subsidiaries’ holdings — Wholly owned companies 2025”. Four Indian companies sit in that second list, the retail company among them, and no percentage is printed against any entry. The heading is the declaration. An older report is blunter.

“All group companies are wholly-owned.” — H & M Hennes & Mauritz AB, Annual Report 2014, Note 24

Two wordings, eleven years apart, with no change of policy recorded in either. One trap is worth naming: the group has two Indian companies with near-identical names. The parent’s directly held list carries H & M Hennes & Mauritz India Private Ltd, a Karnataka company incorporated in 2005, a decade before the first shop. It is not the shop, and nothing filed against one belongs to the other.

The revenue half, which most foreign chains leave blank

The parent’s segment note is explicit: countries with similar characteristics are combined, and the group reports three geographic segments — Asia and Oceania, Europe and Africa, North and South America. No Indian revenue appears in the group accounts. Group net sales were SEK 228,285 million in the 2025 financial year, down 3%.

The Indian company, though, files its own accounts with the Registrar of Companies, so a filed turnover exists. Every rupee figure below is a commercial service’s or a newspaper’s reading of that register rather than the filing, and two services disagree on the most recent year.

Read 6 September 2026. FY2021 fell to ₹1,395.9 crore and FY2022 came to ₹2,107.2 crore. Two readings of one year’s filed accounts; both are printed and neither is picked.

That combination is unusual on this shelf. Uniqlo’s Japanese parent publishes the shareholding of its Indian company and no Indian revenue; Trent publishes the income of the company that runs Zara here and cannot supply the shareholding. H&M has both halves on the record. The same newspaper gives Uniqlo India ₹1,175.5 crore for FY25, roughly a third of H&M India’s.

The rule H&M came in under

Single-brand retail is a regulated entry. The instrument in force when H&M incorporated here was Press Note No. 4 (2012 Series), issued by the Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion on 20 September 2012. It permitted 100% foreign investment in single-brand retail, but through the government approval route — applications to the Secretariat for Industrial Assistance, then the Foreign Investment Promotion Board. Above 51% it attached a condition: “sourcing of 30% of the value of goods purchased, will be done from India, preferably from MSMEs, village and cottage industries, artisans and craftsmen”.

The rules moved afterwards. The same 100% became automatic under Press Note No. 4 (2019 Series) of 18 September 2019, and a DPIIT clarification of February 2020 kept the same sourcing wording. So a wholly owned single-brand shop needed the government’s permission in December 2013 and did not by late 2019 — H&M’s structure and Zara’s joint venture were formed under different regimes.

Three limits go with that. The approval itself appears only in trade press — an FIPB nod in November 2013 to a proposal of about ₹720 crore for up to 50 shops — so the regime is stated here and the approval letter is not. No earlier cap explains anything, because no pre-2012 instrument was read. And the origin counts further down are not a measure of the 30% condition, which turns on the value of goods purchased rather than where a garment was sewn.

What H&M costs in India

The Indian catalogue was read on 6 September 2026 through the two lists H&M’s own navigation defines for each of women and men: Shop by product → View all, and Sale → View all. The site printed 6,498 women’s items in View all against 2,962 in Sale, and 1,560 men’s against 727 — and the two lists share nothing. Not one listing appeared in both, so the arithmetic is simple: 11,685 unique listings, 3,668 of them reduced. That is 31.4%. The same catalogue read an hour earlier gave 11,405 at 29.5%; both are printed, and two reads an hour apart differing by under two points is the reason to trust either.

Across those 11,685 the median MRP was ₹1,999 and the median price charged ₹1,699, running from ₹499 to ₹32,999. The charged total comes to 88.1% of the MRP total, and among the reduced items the median cut was 36.9%. The struck-through figure is the declared MRP: one article shows ₹699 against a line-through ₹999, and its declaration reads “Rs. 999.00 incl. of all taxes”.

What makes this its own shape is where the reductions live. Someone browsing the ordinary women’s catalogue sees 6,498 items and not one is reduced; the 2,962 reduced items sit on a separate shelf reached from a SALE entry the navigation carries for every department. The sale is a department rather than an event, and its landing page prints no date of any kind.

Put the same question to several clothing retailers in one market on one day and the answers scatter. Westside charged its printed MRP on every listing checked; Zara reduced 2.1% of 2,378 listings and carried no sale entry at all; Zudio published no price at all. H&M reduced about a third of its catalogue and shelved every reduction separately. A permanent markdown is a decision a retailer takes, and so is charging the printed price.

One further count says something no median can. Across 11,685 listings there are only 47 distinct MRPs, and every listing ends in 99 — no exceptions. Three of them cover nearly half the shop: ₹1,499 on 2,065 listings, ₹1,999 on 1,651 and ₹2,299 on 1,269. Uniqlo’s Indian catalogue the same day held 23 distinct MRPs, almost all ending in 90, and Reliance Trends showed 22 distinct discount percentages across 6,944 listings. These are price grids, and an MRP off a 47-rung ladder is a position on that ladder rather than a valuation of the garment in front of you.

India against Germany, on 4,083 matched articles

H&M prints the same ten-digit article number on the same garment in every market, so a like-for-like test needs nobody to judge whether two shirts are alike. Germany was used rather than Sweden for a plain reason: the Reserve Bank of India publishes reference rates for the dollar, pound, euro and yen, and not for the Swedish krona. Its euro rate on 6 September 2026 was ₹109.8822, and as that day was a Sunday it is the most recently published rate rather than a Sunday quotation.

Matching article numbers gave 4,083 pairs. The median Indian price came to 69.8% of the German price, on the price charged and on MRP alike, and every pair was cheaper in India — the cheapest at 18.2% of the German price and the dearest at 91.0%, so not one reached parity.

Germany, converted at ₹109.8822 to the euro

₹121.4 lakh across the 4,083

India, the same 4,083 articles

₹79.0 lakh

India as a share

65.1% in aggregate; 69.8% at the median pair

Checked on

6 September 2026

Matched on H&M’s own article number, hm.com India against hm.com Germany.

Currencies move, so the safer way to put it is as an exchange rate. Parity on the median pair would need 1 euro to buy ₹76.66, against the Reserve Bank’s ₹109.8822 — the euro would have to fall about 30% against the rupee before the median H&M garment cost the same in Delhi as in Berlin.

Two caveats travel with that. Both sides are shelf prices inclusive of whatever tax each market charges — the Indian one is expressly labelled MRP inclusive of all taxes — and neither the Indian GST rate nor the German VAT rate was verified, so neither is stripped out. And the German side is not flattered by a sale left out of it: Germany’s navigation carries no sale entry at all, and 3 of 9,936 German women’s listings and none of 3,258 men’s carried a reduction that day.

A second matched set is left without a ratio: Sweden’s catalogue yields 4,458 pairs, but the Reserve Bank publishes no rupee-krona reference rate, so only the currency statement is safe — parity on the median India-Sweden pair would need 1 krona to buy ₹6.686. Two other foreign chains were read the same way on the same day, and they do not agree with each other.

Each comparison rests on the retailer’s own product code. Both sides of each are tax-inclusive.

What the label on an H&M garment declares

Pre-packed goods sold in India carry a declaration under the Legal Metrology (Packaged Commodities) Rules, 2011. It names who is legally answerable for the goods here, not who sewed the garment, and H&M prints it on its own product pages rather than leaving it to a marketplace. Two hundred pages were read in full on 6 September 2026, across womenswear, menswear, kids’, home and beauty, and all 200 carried a block.

Each names exactly two parties: a manufacturer line, then either an importer or a marketer, never both. The Indian side is always the same company at the same Saket address, reading “Imported by” on 166 listings and “Marketed by” on 32. The manufacturer line splits the same way, by origin rather than by style.

200 pages read 6 September 2026; 198 declared a country, and 2 Bangladesh-origin listings also named a factory.

Thirty-four listings name a factory, giving 28 distinct strings and roughly 22 companies; Shahi Exports appears under three different spellings of its own name. Two names read straight across to other pages here. Arvind Smart Textiles Limited and Tata International Limited both appear as declared manufacturers of H&M garments, and Arvind is the group behind Arrow and Flying Machine here. That is what the declarations show, and this page draws nothing further from it.

The rest of the block is fuller than most. Net quantity is declared on 193 of the 200 — “1 N” on 173, and multi-piece values such as “14 N (7 Pair)” on the rest. Forty-two print the weight of the garment in grams, 190 g for an oversized printed T-shirt among them, which no other clothing brand covered here publishes. That is the weight of the article and not GSM, which measures grams per square metre of fabric; no listing carries a GSM, the tenth large apparel name in a row here to publish none.

Origin was read on each listing rather than assumed. Across the 200: China 68, Bangladesh 61, India 32, Indonesia 12, Vietnam 9, Myanmar 8, Cambodia 5, Türkiye 2 and Portugal 1, with two carrying none. On clothing alone — 175 listings — India is declared on 22, about one in eight. That places H&M with Zara and Uniqlo rather than with the Indian chains, where Reliance Trends declared India on 148 of 155.

The shops, and what the record holds

H&M’s own store locator returned 78 shops across 36 cities on 6 September 2026, plus two COS shops — the locator read on one day, not a figure disclosed in any filing. The group’s 2025 report also names India among the countries where its suppliers operate, and says the group sources “most of our cotton” there.

On advertising, the self-regulatory council’s file carries exactly one matter against the Indian company: case C.13879, in which the complaint was not upheld. It concerned an influencer post rather than a product, a price or a garment. The limits matter: that council is an industry body and not a statutory regulator, a decision runs to one advertisement as it then stood rather than to a form of words, and nobody has ruled on anything as it reads today. Searching the brand’s name also returns matters belonging to unrelated companies, and none is counted here. On the trade mark, the Indian register did not yield a clear proprietor, so this page names none — owning the shop is a different thing from owning the mark.

Common questions

How we research and verify brand audits: our methodology.

References

1. H & M Hennes & Mauritz AB, Annual and Sustainability Report 2025 — read 6 September 2026: the “Subsidiaries’ holdings — Wholly owned companies 2025” list on printed pages 172 and 173, the directly held Indian company, the three geographic segments, group net sales of SEK 228,285 million, and the India sourcing references.
2. H & M Hennes & Mauritz AB, Annual Report 2014 — Note 24, “All group companies are wholly-owned”, and the same directly held Indian company at 8,650,000 shares.
3. H&M Group news release, 2 October 2015 — the first Indian shop at Select CITYWALK and the name of the operating company.
4. H&M Group news release, 15 March 2018 — the Indian online shop and app.
5. H&M Group news release, 20 August 2019 — 42 shops and about 15,000 styles.
6. Press Note No. 4 (2012 Series), DIPP, 20 September 2012 — 100% single-brand retail on the government approval route, and the quoted 30% sourcing condition.
7. DPIIT File No. 5(6)/2019-FDI Policy, February 2020 — the clarification on single-brand retail sourcing, including SEZ units.
8. Press Note No. 4 (2019 Series), DPIIT, 18 September 2019 — the same sector at 100% on the automatic route.
9. Register mirror for H & M Hennes & Mauritz Retail Private Limited — an aggregator’s copy of the register, cited as a mirror: CIN, incorporation date and registered office.
10. Register mirror, financials FY2020 to FY2024 — the operating revenue figures for those five years, read 6 September 2026.
11. Register mirror, FY2025 revenue — the ₹3,612.44 crore reading, read 6 September 2026.
12. Business Standard, 22 January 2026 — H&M India FY25 at ₹3,595.2 crore and Uniqlo India at ₹1,175.5 crore, both attributed by the paper to a register service.
13. Business Today, 13 November 2013 — the reported approval of a proposal of about ₹720 crore.
14. Fibre2Fashion, 14 November 2013 — the same reported approval, up to 50 shops.
15. H&M India women’s catalogue, Shop by product — read 6 September 2026, with the men’s list and the two Sale lists, for the 11,685 listings, the 31.4% reduced, the price distribution and the 47 distinct MRPs.
16. H&M India product page, article 1320196002 — ₹699 against a struck-through ₹999, and the declaration reading “Rs. 999.00 incl. of all taxes”.
17. H&M India product page, article 1350254006 — an India-origin listing naming its factory, with net quantity “1 N” and a garment weight of 190 g.
18. H&M Germany women’s catalogue — the German prices and article numbers behind the 4,083 matched pairs, and the three reduced listings in 9,936.
19. Reserve Bank of India, reference rates — ₹109.8822 to the euro, read 6 September 2026 at 17:16.
20. H&M India store locator — 78 H&M shops across 36 cities and 2 COS shops, read 6 September 2026.