Anand Piramal, executive director of conglomerate Piramal Group has made an undisclosed investment in Snapdeal. The Gurugram-based e-commerce company on Tuesday said that the investment has been made by Piramal in his personal capacity.
“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. Since 2017, Snapdeal’s revenue have grown rapidly with profitable unit economics,” said Anand Piramal.
The $10-billion Piramal Group is a business conglomerate with diverse interests in pharma, financial services, healthcare, real estate and glass packaging.
Once part of India’s coveted unicorn (valued at over $1 billion) club, Snapdeal ran into troubled waters amidst a cash crunch, particularly in 2017. In August 2017, Snapdeal ended negotiations for a proposed sale with Flipkart, a deal initiated by Japan’s SoftBank, Snapdeal’s largest investor. Had the transaction materialised, it would have been the largest buyout in the Indian startup space.
“Anand’s [Piramal] investment comes as a significant endorsement for Snapdeal and the transformation the company has undergone over the last couple of years,” said Kunal Bahl, CEO and co-founder of Snapdeal, adding that “his [Piramal] 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.”
In FY19, Snapdeal’s revenue soared 73% and its loss dropped sharply by 71%. During the same period, traffic on Snapdeal’s marketplace surged 2.3x to 70 million unique monthly users and the number of transacting users grew 2.2x in the last 12 months, the company said recently while announcing its FY19 results.
As per regulatory documents filed by Snapdeal, its consolidated revenue grew to ₹925.3 crore in FY19 as compared to ₹535.9 crore in FY18, registering a growth of 73% year-on-year. The e-commerce company said that during the same period it managed to cut down its losses to ₹186 crore in FY19 from ₹611 crore a year ago, a decline of nearly 71%. During the period under review, Snapdeal’s revenue from operations grew 87% year-on-year, the company added.
More than 80% of Snapdeal’s users come from the small towns and cities. The company said it is a market of nearly 400 million potential buyers and is the fastest growing segment in the Indian e-commerce space. In the last two years, Snapdeal says it has added over 60,000 new seller partners, who have added over 50 million new listings. Snapdeal now has more than 500,000 registered sellers, who have more than 200 million listings on the marketplace.