Anand Piramal, the Executive Director of the Piramal Group has invested an undisclosed amount in e-commerce marketplace Snapdeal. The investment has been made by him in his personal capacity. This investment comes days after Snapdeal founder Kunal Bahl disclosed the company’s journey in the last two years after it embarked on its Snapdeal 2.0 strategy.
In FY 2018-19, Snapdeal claims that its revenue went up 73%, while its loss dropped \ by 71%. In the same period, traffic on Snapdeal’s marketplace, it says, surged 2.3X to 70 million unique monthly users and the number of transacting users grew 2.2X in the last 12 months.
Anand Piramal said in a statement that Snapdeal’s sharp execution in bringing great selection to the mass market segment in tier 2-3 cities has been quite successful, leveraging the growing Internet penetration in these geographies.
“The company's mission of enabling the success of hundreds of thousands of small businesses in India through its marketplace is commendable. Since 2017, Snapdeal’s revenues have grown rapidly with profitable unit economics. With hundreds of millions of first time eCommerce buyers yet to transact, Snapdeal is well poised to grow in the future,” he added.
As per regulatory documents filed by Snapdeal, its consolidated revenues grew to Rs 925.3 crore in 2018-19 as compared to Rs 535.9 in 2017-18, while its revenue from operations grew 87% YoY.
In 2018, Kunal wrote in a blog post that Snapdeal has been focusing on the needs of the value-conscious buyers in India, who constitute the bulk of its users. Kunal believes that they are also the fastest-growing mega segment in Indian e-commerce and will be nearly 400 million strong over the next few years.
"Anand's investment comes as a significant endorsement for Snapdeal and the transformation the company has undergone over the last couple of years. His appreciation for what it takes to build a company with growing revenues with good economics in a competitive market comes from his own experiences of building and operating large companies in competitive sectors like real estate and financial services. We are thrilled to have Anand on board this exciting journey,” Kunal said.