India’s e-commerce giant Flipkart said Monday it raised $3.6 billion in fresh funds from global investors, including sovereign funds, private equity and from its parent company, Walmart.
The new round of funding was led by Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Walmart. It also included investments from sovereign funds like Qatar Investment Authority, Malaysia’s Khazanah Nasional Berhad and DisruptAD, the venture arm of the Abu Dhabi sovereign fund, ADQ.
Other backers included China’s Tencent, Franklin Templeton and Tiger Global.
“This investment by leading global investors reflects the promise of digital commerce in India and their belief in Flipkart’s capabilities to maximise this potential for all stakeholders,” Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy said in a statement.
He said the company will focus on helping millions of small- and medium-sized Indian businesses to grow, including small family-owned grocery shops known as kiranas, and plans to continue investing in new categories and home-grown technologies.
SoftBank’s return
SoftBank has backed other Indian tech start-ups, such as digital payments firm Paytm, budget hotel rooms start-up Oyo and ride-sharing company Ola.
“SoftBank’s re-investment in Flipkart is driven by our experience with and conviction in the company’s management team to continue addressing the needs of the Indian consumer in the decades to come,” Lydia Jett, a partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, said in a statement.
India’s e-commerce potential
Most of India’s retail shopping takes place in brick-and-mortar stores, but the online potential remains enormous: India has one of the fastest-growing and largest internet population in the world.
In recent years, a combination of reforms, a push toward digitization and last year’s coronavirus pandemic — and subsequent national and regional lockdowns — shifted some of the transactions online.
In the last three months of 2020, India’s e-commerce sector grew 36% year on year in terms of volume and 30% year on year in terms of value, according to a joint report from Unicommerce and Kearney.
The personal care, beauty and wellness category grew 95% from a year earlier, while fast-moving consumer goods and health care grew 46%. Most of the incremental growth was driven by a sharp increase in e-commerce volume and value in India’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, according to the report.
Flipkart’s competitors include U.S. e-commerce giant Amazon, which has invested billions of dollars in the Indian market, as well as domestic names such as JioMart, the online grocery delivery app from Reliance Industries.
For its part, the Indian government has reportedly proposed new e-commerce draft rules in June that is expected to have an impact on Flipkart and Amazon India.
