Flipkart rolling up its sleeves to devour fresh funding to keep itself competitive. It is also planning to cut its monthly expenses and tread along a lean path to shore up its reserves, reports ET. This will enable the company to maintain a firm control over its operations before it secures funds — obviously at a lower valuation.
According to sources aware of the development, Flipkart is looking to slash its monthly burn rate to nearly $20 million from a massive $45 million about six months ago. These expenses are collating its fashion portals Myntra and Jabong and keeping its UPI-based payments app PhonePe out of the mix. The company acquired the widely popular fashion platform Myntra in 2014, which then went on to pick up Jabong from Rocket Internet for $70 million last year.
The e-commerce platform is building a reserve of resources in anticipation of an upcoming fundraising round. Flipkart aims to add nearly $500 million to $800 million to its coffers, but a valuation lower than its previous round. The company had previously secured funds at a massive $15+ billion valuation, but it is now ready to go for a down round. Flipkart could settle for as low as $10 billion, report sources.
These fresh fud-raise rumours come on the heels of Flipkart, figuring out the structure of their own business. It also coincides with numerous valuation markdowns, that have plagued the e-commerce behemoth ever since it raised the previous round. And that too because it couldn’t manage to pick up fresh funds over the last one-and-a-half year. Now, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Investments and other banks are valuing the company at less than $6 billion.
But, we’ve recently also heard of pleasant rumors of Wal-Mart looking to invest fresh capital into Flipkart to compete against Amazon. The rumor mill surrounding it suggested that Wal-Mart would’ve invested a hefty $1 billion in exchange for a minor stake in Flipkart. The deal would’ve most likely resembled the recent $3 billion Jet.com transaction. The American retailing giant has termed India as an important and opportune market but hasn’t pumped any funds as of yet. Speaking on the same, a Wal-Mart spokesperson said,
We regularly meet with different companies in global retail markets, not all of those meetings lead to business transactions and we don’t share details of our discussions with individual companies.
Flipkart, over the past one year, has been faced with extreme tumultuous situations — be it protecting their pole position in the ecosystem to multiple management changes every three months. Just last year, the company appointed Binny Bansal as Flipkart’s CEO and Sachin Bansal as Chairman of the company. This high-level team was again reshuffled late last year when ex-Tiger Global executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy was appointed as Flipkart’s CEO. Binny Bansal has now assumed the role of CEO at a new entity called Flipkart Group.
Currently, Flipkart is direly looking for investments as Amazon is creating pressure on them by pumping in more capital and eating up their market share. But, it has continuously been able to maintain its position and emerge as the consumer’s favored e-commerce platform. Now, this fresh funding will enable it to further push the envelope and expedite its rate of technological and operational development. Flipkart is also lacking on other storefronts, and could use the capital to explore new avenues.
