Global e-commerce player eBay has incurred losses worth $61 million (about Rs 392 crore) on its investment in Jasper Infotech, the owner of Snapdeal. This was revealed in the company’s annual report.
The company said that it sold a portion of its equity interest in Snapdeal in 2016.
In 2017, eBay received a 5.44% ownership interest in Flipkart in exchange for eBay India business and a $500 million cash investment. eBay gained $167 million on the sale of its India business. eBay and Flipkart also entered into an exclusive agreement in which they will jointly pursue cross-border trade opportunities.
Last year, Japanese investor SoftBank reported $1.4 billion in losses from its investment in ANI Technologies, which runs Ola and Jasper Infotech.
In 2014, Snapdeal has raised funding of $627 million from SoftBank Group and $133.77 million from eBay and others.
E-commerce space
For nearly 2-3 years, the battle for dominance in e-commerce was a three-way race between Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal. In recent times, Snapdeal has lost out in the number of orders and users while the others have grown the share.
In April 2017, Flipkart had raised $1.4 billion from eBay, Tencent and Microsoft. eBay’s contribution to this round was $514 million. Last year, Snapdeal was in talks of being acquired by Flipkart, but the deal fell through after Snapdeal rejected the offer. However, shortly after merger talks with Snapdeal collapsed, Flipkart raised investment from SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund. The deal was pegged at $2.5-2.6 billion. At the same time, Snapdeal cut down its workforce by 80% and decided to pursue its own path after the merger talks fell through.
Recently, Snapdeal’s parent Jasper Infotech sold its logistics arm Vulcan Express to Future Group’s supply chain solutions subsidiary for Rs 35 crore. Incorporated in 2013, Vulcan has a network of 15 warehouses and 166 hubs, and maintains a total warehousing space of over 876,700 sq. ft. across India.