After months of negotiation, the board of Indian ecommerce major Flipkart has approved to sell around 75% to Walmart for an amount of $15 billion, reports Bloomberg.
As per the report, SoftBank will be selling all of its stake in Flipkart at a valuation of roughly $20 billion. SoftBank invested in Flipkart last year through its investment arm SoftBank Vision Fund and held a little over 20% stake in the ecommerce major.
A FactodDaily report on Thursday stated that the deal will be a cash-and-stock buyout for around $14.6 billion. The cash component is expected to be close to 55% with the exit of some of the large investors including SoftBank.
However, investors such as Tencent, Microsoft and Tiger Global are not likely to exit completely.
As per both reports, Google’s parent Alphabet too will be participating in the deal and will pump in around $3 billion.
Despite a board approval, Bloomberg reports that the terms of the deal could change and a deal isn’t certain yet. However, if it does go through, it is expected to be done in the next 10 days.
Kalyan Krishnamurthy will reportedly stay on as chief executive of Flipkart. However, it is not clear if both the co-founders will stay on. While an Economic Times report states that Sachin Bansal may exit, a FactorDaily report states that Binny Bansal is likely to exit post the deal.
The approval of the deal with Walmart also means that Amazon’s offer to buy a majority stake in Flipkart wasn’t accepted by the board. Bloomberg reports that the board decided that a Walmart deal is more likely to receive regulatory approval.
After failing to build an online retail venture, this deal will give Walmart another chance at India’s growing ecommerce market and take on Amazon, which it has been struggling to compete with in the rest of the globe.