Twin sets of big news coming in from eBay. While the company has performed better than what Wall Street expected in financial results, the company has also invested sizeable money in India’s Paytm Mall. The Economic Times, citing unnamed sources, has reported that eBay has invested around $150 million in Paytm Mall at a valuation of $3 billion. Prior to this deal, Paytm Mall was valued at just under $2 billion.
Paytm Mall is an online marketplace branch of One97 Communications — the parent company behind digital payments giant Paytm. As a part of this deal, eBay’s global inventory will be available through Paytm Mall to over 130 million users on the platform.
Over the last few months, Paytm Mall has shifted its business model from inventory-led to offline-to-online and online-to-offline models (O2O). O2O model involves providing services from local stores to customers after they place an order through the online platform. Paytm Mall claims to have over 100,000 seller partners on its platform.
“This investment is a clear testament of our turnaround, and the shopkeeper commerce model (O2O) being validated by a new set of investors,” Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of Paytm, told the Economic Times. He added, “This deal will also allow shopkeepers on our platform to source over a million unique international products from eBay’s global base.”
This is eBay’s third deal in the Indian e-commerce market. Its previous two investments being Snapdeal and Flipkart. eBay had 6.5% stakes in Flipkart. Last year, following Flipkart’s acquisition by Walmart, eBay exited Flipkart for $1.1 billion. Also, eBay faced a loss of $61 million on the Snapdeal. Though it still holds a 5% stake in the Snapdeal.
Apart from eBay, the major stakeholders in Paytm Mall are Alibaba and Ant Financial (46%), Softbank (21%), and SAIF Partners (18%). Vijay Shankar Sharma owns around 9% stake in the company. Till now, the platform has raised over $650 million from all these investments.
According to a Times of India report, Paytm has cut down its monthly losses from ₹200 crores to ₹30 crores since last year. The company is looking forward to increasing its sales from ₹13,000 crores (in FY 2019) to ₹17,000 (by FY 2020) by cutting down the burn rates.
“This new relationship will accelerate our cross-border trade efforts in a rapidly growing market, providing Paytm and Paytm Mall customers access to eBay’s selection,” said Jooman Park, eBay Senior Vice President, APAC, in a statement, noting the high potential in the Indian e-commerce market.
