Snapdeal, the online marketplace has raised funds of $500 million (approx. Rs 3,259 crore) from Alibaba Group, Foxconn and its dominant stakeholder SoftBank. This funding round has taken place almost a year of negotiations on the disagreements regarding its valuations.
Foxconn is the manufacturer of Apple iPhone models. It has invested $200 million to own 4.27 percent stake in the company Jasper Infotech that operates Snapdeal. The value of Snapdeal after this recent round of funding is $4 to $4.5 billion, claim the unidentified sources. However, the details are yet to be verified.
As per these sources, Alibaba and SoftBank are believed to have made an investment of $100 to $125 million in the company. Foxconn’s investment arm FIH Mobile has invested in Snapdeal. The investment was routed via Wonderful Stars, its subsidiary based in Singapore.
The value of e-commerce companies in India is soaring, and new firms such as Paytm and ShopClues have emerged as concerns for the investors. The main reasons for the same is unclear models to achieve profitability, operational issues and heavy discounting. Eventually, the investments made in the e-commerce ventures this year have slowed down in comparison to the last year.
Earlier, Snapdeal raised capital from Software as the Japan based media, Internet and telecom investment giant invested $627 million to purchase 33 percent stake in the company. eBay Inc., the early investor of Snapdeal announced that it sold a specific part of its 9 percent stake for an amount that is undisclosed.
The existing investors of Snapdeal are Temasek, the investment firm based in Singapore, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, Myriad Asset Managemnet based in Hong Kong and PremjiInvest, Wipro Chairman Azim Premji’s family office.
Snapdeal was founded in 2010 by Kunal Bhal, alumni of Wharton and Rohit Bhansal, an IIT Delhi graduate. Snapdeal is the largest online marketplace in India in terms of the transaction of sellers on the platform.
