Walmart paid $1.4 billion to buy the last of Tiger Global’s shares in Flipkart. With this purchase, the retail giant increased its stake in the Indian e-commerce company even more.
The deal happened in recent days, and a person familiar with the situation said that Tiger Global, which had already cashed in most of its Flipkart shares, told investors that it made a total profit of $3.5 billion on an investment of $1.2 billion. The deal was first written about in Wall Street Journal.
A person who knows about this says that Tiger Global has only put more than $1 billion into one Indian company, and that is Flipkart. The U.S. financial giant was one of the first people to put money into Flipkart. In total, it has put more than $6 billion into Indian startups. When Tiger Global put money into Flipkart, it gave the startup community in India a big boost and put the South Asian country’s economy on the map.
The second sale of Flipkart shares put the company’s value at $35 billion. During a funding round in 2021, Flipkart was valued at $37.6 billion. Since then, after payments company PhonePe split, Flipkart has cut its own value by about $5 billion.
In 2018, Walmart paid $16 billion for 77% of Flipkart. As of last year, a market intelligence business called Tracxn found that Walmart only owned 72% of the company. Before the latest deal, Tiger Global had a 4% stake in Flipkart.
Walmart’s over $20 billion investment in Flipkart could also be seen as the American giant buying shares in a company that competes with Amazon’s local branch, which was able to start a similar business on its own for less than $7 billion.
A Walmart spokesperson said, “We still believe in Flipkart’s future and are even more optimistic about the opportunity in India than when we first invested.”
Flipkart probably won’t have to stop getting money any time soon.
Flipkart has used up most of the money it raised in 2021 and now needs to raise more money. Flipkart has looked at market interest in the past few months, but no deal was made because Flipkart was worth less. Since this is the case, it seems possible that it will go back to Walmart to get most of the money it needs for the next round.
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