Jabong parent gets 300 million euro funding from Rocket Internet

The parent company of online portal Jabong, Global Fashion Group (GFG), has secured funding of 300 million euro from Rocket Internet, a company statement said. “While Rocket Internet will underwrite around 100 million euro of the financing, it will invest around 85 million euro including the conversion of an existing investment at the terms of the financing,” the statement said. “We have had success over the past few months, with Jabong recently recording its best month in terms of revenue. GFG sees good progress with Jabong in India and this trust will help us strengthen our operations in the country,” said Sanjeev Mohanty, managing director and chief executive, Jabong. “The funding will greatly help Jabong, which is on a path of transformation from a start-up to a professionally run, profit oriented company,” the statement added. German e-commerce firm Rocket Internet said it was on track to make three of its start-ups profitable by the end of 2017 as it reported revenue rose 69 percent in 2015 to 2.4 billion euro ($2.70 billion) last month. While all of its start-ups are still loss-making, Rocket said it saw an improvement in their adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) margin of an average 6 percentage points in 2015. It reiterated that 2015 should represent the peak of the losses of its major start-ups and repeated a target that three of those firms should be profitable by the end of 2017. With inputs from IANS