Anand Piramal backs Snapdeal with investment of undisclosed amount

• Since the failure of the proposed merger of Snapdeal with Flipkart in 2017, the company went through huge changes as of part of vision ‘Snapdeal 2.0’.
• Snapdeal has now more than 500,000 sellers with over 200 million listings on their platform.

Piramal Group’s Anand Piramal has made an undisclosed investment in the e-commerce website Snapdeal, announced the firm on Tuesday. This news came just a week later when the company announced that it has lowered its losses significantly for the year 2018-19.

This marks a new investment in Snapdeal after 2 years since the investment by existing investor Nexus Venture Partners came in 2017.

Anand Piramal who is executive director of Piramal Group said, Snapdeal’s sharp execution in bringing a eat selection to the mass market segment in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities has been quite successful,” “Since 2017, Snapdeal’s revenues have grown rapidly with profitable unit economics.”

Since the failure of the proposed merger of Snapdeal with Flipkart in 2017, the company went through huge changes as of part of vision ‘Snapdeal 2.0’ and managed to turn it around.

The decisions behind this turn around which really helped in executing Snapdeal 2.0 includes cutting costs, shedding a big part of their workforce. The sale of payments unit FreeCharge and logistics arm Vulcan also gave them enough space to smoothly execute the vision. The motive was to cut down costs and focus on the audience which is based in tier 2 and tier-3 cities.

The result of the above-mentioned decisions was reflected in recent announcements of narrowing losses in financial year 19 by 71 percent.

CEO of Snapdeal, Kunal Bahl said, “Anand’s investment comes as a significant endorsement for Snapdeal and the transformation the company has undergone over the last couple of years,”

Snapdeal mentioned that a big number i.e. 80 percent of its users are coming from the tier 2 and tier 3 cities of India. It also says that the platform has on-boarded more than 60,000 new sellers in the last two years, who in return have added more than 50 million listings. Snapdeal has now more than 500,000 sellers with over 200 million listings on their platform.

With now Piramal backing Snapdeal, it will be interesting to watch how the competition in Indian e-commerce space grows again.