[Funding alert] Snapdeal raises undisclosed amount from Anand Piramal

New Delhi-based ecommerce company Snapdeal on Tuesday announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Anand Piramal, Executive Director of the Piramal Group. 

This investment has been made by Anand in his personal capacity, the company said in a release. 

Commenting on his personal investment decision in Snapdeal, Anand Piramal said, 

“Snapdeal’s sharp execution in bringing great selection to the mass market segment in tier 2-3 cities has been quite successful, leveraging the growing Internet penetration in these geographies. The company's mission of enabling the success of hundreds of thousands of small businesses in India through its marketplace is commendable. Since 2017, Snapdeal’s revenues have grown rapidly with profitable unit economics. With hundreds of millions of first time eCommerce buyers yet to transact, Snapdeal is well poised to grow in the future."

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Snapdeal recently announced its financial results for FY 2018-19, and the ecommerce company showed a strong all-round top line and bottom line performance.

Its consolidated revenues grew to Rs 925.3 crore in 2018-19 as compared to Rs 535.9 in 2017-18, marking a sharp increase of nearly 73 percent in a 12-month period. At the same time, Snapdeal’s loss dropped sharply by 71 percent to Rs 186 crore in FY19 from Rs 611 crore reported in FY18. Also, the revenue from operations grew 87 percent YoY - from Rs 436.1 crore (FY18) to Rs 813.8 crores (FY19).

Kunal Bahl, CEO & Co-founder of Snapdeal added, 

"Anand's investment comes as a significant endorsement for Snapdeal and the transformation the company has undergone over the last couple of years. His appreciation for what it takes to build a company with growing revenues with good economics in a competitive market comes from his own experiences of building and operating large companies in competitive sectors like real estate and financial services. We are thrilled to have Anand on board this exciting journey."

In the same period, traffic on Snapdeal’s marketplace surged 2.3 times to 70 million unique monthly users and the number of transacting users grew 2.2 times in the last 12 months. More than 80 percent of its users come from the small towns and cities of India, the company said. 

In the last two years, Snapdeal has added 60,000+ new seller partners, who have added over 50 million new listings. It claims to have more than 500,000 registered sellers, who have more than 200 million listings on the marketplace.

Meanwhile, ecommerce platform ShopClues has laid off about 200 employees as its efforts to find a buyer failed. Recently, the company was in talks with larger rival Snapdeal for a potential acquisition.

However, after weeks of due diligence Snapdeal decided against the acquisition as there are concerns regarding some of the findings emerging from the due diligence conducted by advisory firm EY.

(Edited by Rekha Balakrishnan)

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