SoftBank & Alibaba make Rs 1,500 crore investment in Paytm Mall

SoftBank & Alibaba make Rs 1,500 crore investment in Paytm Mall

Bengaluru: According to the filing with Registrar of Companies, Paytm Mall announced that Rs. 1,500 crore has been raised from Alibaba, Paytm’s biggest investor and Japan’s SoftBank. This investment is part of the Rs. 3,000 crore funding commitment made in April.

It is expected that this funding would come in four parts. As of now, 57 per cent stake in Paytm Mall is being held by Alibaba along with Alipay. Although, after the final round of funding the shares of Alibaba with Alipay will be around 46 per cent and SoftBank Vision Fund will be 21 per cent.

It was also revealed from the documents sourced from business intelligence platform paper.vc that Kabir Misra of SoftBank is joining the Paytm Mall board. This came against the backdrop of stepping down of Michael Evans from the board of Paytm Mall. Michael Evans is the President of Alibaba. The spokesperson of Paytm Mall confirmed the news.

Notably, Alibaba and SoftBank both committed to invest a total of $450 million i.e. Rs. 3,000 crore into Paytm mall. The share of SoftBank will be Rs. 2,600 crore while the rest Rs. 400 crore will be invested by Alibaba.

As per the information from the sources, when the funding was announced the Paytm Mall deal values around $2 billion.

Interestingly, the investment announcement came after $16 billion acquisition of Flipkart by Walmart Inc. was led by SoftBank and Tiger Global last month.

As of now, Paytm is in direct competition with Flipkart and currently to be running $3 billion in gross merchandising value and is also aiming to touch a $10 billion by the end of fiscal 2018-2019.

It was revealed in the earlier statement of the company that more than 60 per cent sales on Paytm Mall platform is generated from offline stores registered on that. As of now, around 75,000 stores area already in partnership with the online retailer whereas it is aiming to make it three times by the end of 2019.