Amazon may rival Walmart’s bid to acquire majority stake in Flipkart: Mint Report

Amazon is said to have held exploratory talks with Flipkart.
Amazon may rival Walmart’s bid to acquire majority stake in Flipkart: Mint Report
Amazon may rival Walmart’s bid to acquire majority stake in Flipkart: Mint Report
Written by:

In what could be the biggest deal in the Indian ecommerce space, Amazon is reportedly in early exploratory talks to buy rival Flipkart. This comes at a time when Flipkart is in final stages of talks with Walmart to sell majority stake, reports Mint.

The bid placed by Amazon is reportedly a rival bid against the one with Walmart, which is currently in advanced talks to buy 55% stake in Flipkart. Mint quotes sources as saying that the deal with Walmart is more likely to go through.

If the deal with Walmart – which could value Flipkart at $21 billion -- goes through, existing investors Tiger Global Management, Accel Partners, Naspers, IDG Ventures and others are expected to sell a majority or all of their shares.

Mint reported in February that Google too, offered to invest in the ecommerce major at a valuation of $15-16 billion.

Most recently, it raised a massive $2 billion funding round, which also included a $1.4 billion commitment from SoftBank, which is currently one of the majority shareholders in Flipkart.

Ever since inception, Flipkart has been aggressive in its growth and has retained its market leadership position for years, closely followed by Amazon. The ecommerce major owns Fashion ecommerce portals Myntra and Jabong, eBay’s India operations and digital payments company PhonePe.

It was also in talks to buy Snapdeal last year, in a deal orchestrated by SoftBank. While the deal didn’t go through and Snapdeal decided to continue on its own, SoftBank went on to infuse funds in Flipkart.

Amazon too, has been fiercely competing with Flipkart to stay in the game. It has committed nearly $5 billion to take on rival Flipkart. If a deal with Amazon goes through, it would create India’s largest ecommerce firm and severely hurt other ecommerce players such as Paytm Mall, Shopclues and Snapdeal.

Interestingly, Paytm Mall just raised $450 million (Rs 2,900 crore) from Softbank Group and its existing investor Alibaba Group valuing the ecommerce company at around $1.9 billion, giving it the unicorn status.

Related Stories

No stories found.
The News Minute
www.thenewsminute.com