Shopclues, which claims to be the India’s first and largest managed marketplace, has decided to raise around $150-200 million at a valuation of $650-700 million coupled with plans to get listed soon, reports Economic Times.
Radhika Aggarwal, Chief Marketing Officer at Shopclues has confirmed that the company is in talks to raise funds but has not revealed any other details related to this development.
As per the source, Sanjeev Aggarwal, Senior Managing Director at Helion Ventures, a firm which is an investor in the company, claimed that Shopclues is also planning to go the IPO route, though he did not specify any timeline for the same.
If this turns out to be true, Shopclues will be the second Indian e-commerce company to get listed. Earlier Ahmedabad-based e-commerce company Infibeam decided to get listed and raise around Rs. 450 crore via IPO. Last month, it also received green signal from SEBI to do so.
Shopclues was founded in 2011 by Sandeep Aggarwal, Radhika Aggarwal, Sandeep Aggarwal, and Sanjay Sethi. In January this year, the company had raised $100 million in Series D round of funding from New York-based Tiger Global Management that valued the company at $350 million.
According to the source, Tiger Global is also expected to invest in the latest fund raising round of Shopclues, which is India’s fourth-largest ecommerce company by sales, behind Flipkart, Snapdeal and Paytm.
It handled more than 2.75 million orders in October which was a crucial month for e-commerce companies due to massive festival shopping during Diwali.
The company is aiming to end fiscal year 2015-16 with $1.2 billion in annual gross merchandise value (GMV), which is the total retail price of all the goods sold on its platform.
We ship almost one-third the orders of Flipkart and half the orders of Snapdeal and our entire employee strength is about 850. GMV/revenue/number of orders created per employee is significantly higher than the competition.
said Radhika Aggarwal, CMO of Shopclues.
She further says that the company is focusing more on non-electronics products, which amounts for over 80 percent of the sale on the website. This allows them to get as much as 25 percent margin in some categories.
Revenue of the company increased to Rs. 79 crore in the fiscal year ended March 2015 from Rs 31 crore in the earlier year, reveals filings submitted with the ministry of corporate affairs.
Sanjeev Aggarwal, SMD at Helion Ventures and Director on the board of Shopclues, said,
We feel we could be the first ecommerce company to go public. Most Indian ecommerce companies are struggling to make unit economics efficient, which is the biggest barrier to a public listing. Shopclues very early on decided to not indulge in price wars and build a profitable business focused on the supply side.
