Snapdeal may soon announce an acquisition, targets 1 million sellers on platform

Snapdeal’s founder and chief executive Kunal Bahl said on Saturday the e-commerce major is close to announcing an acquisition, which will play the role of an enabler for the platform. “You will see us make some acquisitions, some may be announced soon,” Bahl said while speaking at the annual Nasscomm India Leadership Forum in Mumbai. Bahl, however, refused to give any indication on the ticket size or on the target company, limiting himself to saying that this will be an “enabler” in the larger scheme of things at the online seller. “Anything that will be an enabler for our ecosystem that will make our sellers more successful, which will make business more successful as well as the platform…it could be core tech, it could any service that our sellers use, logistics may or may not be an enabler, my lens is always on how do you make ecosystem more successful,” he said. Snapdeal has so far raised $1.5 billion (roughly Rs. 9,300 crores) from a clutch of investors that include Japan’s Softbank which owns 33 percent and Ratan Tata, among others. Fuelled by big investments, the e-commerce space is witnessing aggressive competition between Snapdeal, its bigger rival Flipkart and global giant Amazon, who have been throwing in big discounts to attract customers and have emerged as among the biggest advertisers now. Bahl also said there are no plans to list the company in the near-term due to the availability of ample liquidity in the private capital markets. “Because the private capital markets are so liquid right now and in such quantum, I would weigh the benefits carefully for going public, at least in the near-term,” he said, when asked about the IPO. Bahl said Snapdeal is targeting to increase its total number of sellers to one million from the current 100,000. “We want to create one million successful online entrepreneurs in next three years. We’re at 100,000 and 30 percent of them are women. Many of them didn’t have any income,” he said. He, however, refused to state the GMV, saying such an eventuality of having so many entrepreneurs on board can result in “billions of dollars” worth of transactions. PTI