With IPO share sale lock in periods ending for India’s listed tech startups, we are now seeing a trend of pre-IPO private investors offloading bulk of their shares, even if that comes at a massive discount to their original investment. After Paytm saw a massive bulk offloading by its largest pre-IPO shareholder SoftBank, its now Zomato, where Alibaba is expected to sell off nearly $200Mn worth of shares at a 5-6% discount.
According to a report from Mint, the Chinese e-commerce behemoth, through its entity Alipay Singapore Pte Ltd, aims to sell 262.9 million shares representing 3.07% stake in the company. It is offering the shares to institutional investors at a floor price of ₹60 apiece, a 5.59% discount to the last closing price, fetching ₹1,580 crore at the floor price.
For Zomato, this isn’t the first of such block deals. Earlier this year, both Uber and Tiger Global — two of its largest shareholders, also offloaded bulk of their shares as the 12 months post IPO lock in period ended. Uber offloaded it’s entire stake of 7.8%, getting nearly $400 Mn in return. This, after it assumed an unrealized loss of $707 million on its Zomato investment in the first half of this year and the quarter that ended in June 30, 2022.
Post Alibaba’s block deal execution, the Chinese e-commerce major would still own about 10% in Zomato.
