Google plans to contribute to the latest round of funding for Flipkart, Amazon’s chief competitor in India, and take a minority share in the generalist e-commerce platform – once regulators approve the deal. Flipkart says that both Google’s investment and its cloud will help the company “expand its business and advance the modernization of its digital infrastructure.”
According to Reuters, Google’s will be investing $350 million, while the funding round’s leader, Walmart, will be investing $600 million.
Established in 2007, Flipkart has more than 500 million registered users and 1.4 million vendors. The marketplace lists about 150 million products in about 80 categories, sporting goods included. India is one of eight countries where Walmart and Amazon compete, the others being China, Japan, the UK, Brazil, Canada, Mexico and, of course, the US.
Walmart has been Flipkart’s majority shareholder since May 2018, when it purchased 77 percent for $16 billion – the most it had ever spent on an acquisition. The remaining shareholders were Flipkart’s co-founder Binny Bansal, Tencent Holdings, Tiger Global Management and Microsoft.
As the Wall Street Journal reported at the time, Walmart’s management saw it as a “long-term play in a market with a rising middle class and plenty of room for growth in mobile adoption, e-commerce and retail overall.”
Last summer, according to the Journal, Walmart increased its investment in Flipkart by buying out Tiger Global, for $1.4 billion, and acquiring the 1 percent share of private-equity firm Accel.
There have been rumors since 2018 that Google’s parent, Alphabet, was also looking to invest, perhaps to prevent Amazon itself from acquiring Flipkart.
In addition, Flipkart has long sought to make an IPO. Walmart expressed its support back in 2018 for “Flipkart’s ambition to transition into a publicly-listed, majority-owned subsidiary in the future,” and just this month, according to Reuters, its executives said they were “looking and exploring” with respect to this possibility.
