Snapdeal.com, India’s largest online marketplace has announced that Ratan Tata, Chairman Emeritus, Tata Sons, has made a personal investment in the company. The company did not disclose the exact amount Tata has invested.
Snapdeal currently houses over 5 million products across 500+ diverse categories from over 50,000 sellers. Speaking about this, Kunal Bahl, co-Founder & CEO, Snapdeal.com said in a press statement, “This is a very proud and exciting moment for the entire Snapdeal family. An investment by a legendary and respected figure like Mr. Tata is an excellent validation of our focused strategy on building a long-term enterprise and marks the start of a very important phase for the company.”
This comes a day after Tata Value Homes, a 100 per cent subsidiary of Tata Housing, entered into a strategic partnership with Snapdeal.com to allow consumers to purchase homes online. They would together offer online booking of all Tata Value Homes projects on the Web site. Snapdeal members would be able to book a home online by paying just ₹30,000.
India's e-commerce space is attracting a lot of interest of late. India’s IT czars Azim Premji and Narayana Murthy are among the investors who have evinced interest in the country’s sunrise sector. Premji, through his personal investment Premji Invest, has made a strategic investment in Snapdeal and fashion e-tailer Myntra. Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures has picked up strategic stakes in another fashion e-tailer Yebhi.com and Amazon.in. Murthy’s ₹600-crore fund launched in 2010, has formed a joint venture with global e-commerce giant Amazon’s Asia unit to create a new entity.
Ashish Jhalani, founder of advisory and consultancy firm E-tailing India, said that “Ratan Tata’s investment in Snapdeal reinforces that there is no bubble ready to burst in e-commerce as a lot of naysayers believe.”
However, Arvind Singhal, chairman of Technopak Advisory, said, “Several High Networth Individuals make small investments in their personal capacity and one should not read much into it.”
The Indian e-commerce sector has received a lot of investor attention with Bangalore-based Flipkart raising $1 billion in funding and Amazon announcing $2 billion investments in its Indian business.