Snapdeal Rejects Flipkart’s Buyout Offer

According to numerous reports, the Flipkart-Snapdeal acquisition deal has hit another snag and Snapdeal rejected Flipkart’s $700-800 million buyout offer. This development comes after homegrown e-commerce major Flipkart, completed its commercial and legal due diligence of Snapdeal.

The offer presented late last week is significantly lower than its proposed opening bid of $1 billion post completion of eight weeks of due diligence. MoneyControl reported that according to the new offer Flipkart offered $550 million valuations to Snapdeal for an all-stock acquisition. The offer is just for the acquisition of Snapdeal’s marketplace and will not include the mobile payments subsidiary FreeCharge or the logistics arm Vulcan.

VCCircle reported that according to Snapdeal sources the proposed exclusivity period for Flipkart to conduct due diligence has ended, thereby opening up the possibility for other suitors to buyout Snapdeal. However, multiple media reports also suggest that Flipkart and Snapdeal will continue the talks of the merger but the valuation differences between the companies will delay the process.

The Flipkart Snapdeal merger talks have been in place for the past two months, with the deal hitting obstacles for a brief period of time. The delay in the acquisition deal may adversely affect Japan based softBank, SnapDeal’s major investor with an anticipated $ 1.5- $ 2 billion investment in Flipkart.

While officials from both Flipkart and Snapdeal declined to make any comment, the new deal is expected to be more satisfactory to Snapdeal’s minority investors. The private investment firm of Azim Premji, Premji Invests, one of the minority shareholders of Snapdeal, objected special payments to certain shareholders, including its two co-founders and two early backers. Ratan Tata, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and BlackRock, among others, are also minority shareholders of the online retail firm.

SoftBank agreed to cut Snapdeal’s valuation by 85% to $1 billion compared with a valuation of about $6.5 billion in February 2016. If completed, the merger would mark the biggest acquisition in the highly competitive e-commerce sector, opposing established players such as Amazon.

Majority shareholders of Snapdeal and Flipkart i.e., Softbank Group and Tiger Global Management respectively will decide the final deal amount and other aspects of the acquisition.