Chennai based TVS Logistics and India’s largest courier service GATI, along with Peepul Capital are in talks with the ecommerce firm Snapdeal to acquire their in-house logistics arm Vulcan Capital. The global professional services firm Alvarez and Marsal will advise the company on the sale and the potential acquisition could be routed by one of the Indian portfolio companies of Warburg Pincus, a global private equity major.
Many reports claim that Snapdeal is expecting Vulcan Express to fetch Rs. 90 crores to Rs 120 crores from this acquisition, which is expected to take place over the next 60 days. FreeCharge’s newly appointed CEO Jason Kothari, who will preside over the Vulcan transaction said they were not surprised by the high level of interest they were seeing for the acquisition of Vulcan. He also added that the Vulcan team was achieving one of the highest levels of efficiency and service levels in the e-commerce logistics space.
Vulcan Express was founded in 2013 after Snapdeal discontinued its contract with third-party ecommerce logistics player GoJavas. Vulcan became the end to end logistics and supply-chain solution for managing Snapdeal’s shipments. Their services now include transportation, warehouse management, line haul, last-minute distribution, quality control, inventory tracking as well as reverse logistics.
This news comes after Mumbai headquartered Axis Bank showed interest in buying FreeCharge, the digital payments platform owned by Snapdeal. Meanwhile, Snapdeal rejected the initial acquisition $700-800 million buyout offer made by Flipkart. It is also expected that homegrown ecommerce giant Flipkart might also separately bid for the logistics unit.
Jasper Infotech, Vulcan’s parent company invested $ 3.75 million in Vulcan in 2015. In August 2016, they opened six new hubs in Delhi NCR, Lucknow, Hyderabad and Kolkata and planned to expand to 80 major cities in 2017.
