Softbank, Alibaba invest ₹2,900 cr in Paytm Mall
NEWDELHI: Online shopping website Paytm Mall has received a capital commitment of about ₹2,900 crore (about $450 million) from Japan’s Softbank Group Corp. and existing investor Alibaba in a new round of funding that will come in four tranches, official documents show.
Softbank will invest ₹2,600 crore in Paytm Mall, with the rest coming from Alibaba, the documents show.
The first tranche of ₹357.5 crore has already come into Paytm Mall, according to the documents provided by business intelligence platform Paper.vc.
The deal values Paytm Mall, run by Paytm E-commerce Pvt. Ltd, at between $1.6 billion and $2 billion, two people close to the development said on condition of anonymity.
The development comes at a time when Softbank, along with Tiger Global, is spearheading the sale of its largest investment in the country—flipkart—to US retail giant Walmart. This will be Softbank’s second investment in an online retailer in India. Paytm Mall directly competes with Flipkart.
Paytm Mall, which serves 700 towns across India, confirmed the development.
“This latest investment led by Softbank and Alibaba reaffirms the strength of our business model, growth trajectory, execution capability and the potential of India’s massive O2O (online to offline) model in the retail space,” said Amit Sinha, CEO at Paytm Mall.
“We are committed to increasing the business growth for the offline merchants, who serve their customers daily. The funds will be deployed for empowering the shopkeepers with superior technology, building superior logistics, strengthening the Paytm Mall brand and bringing an enriching experience to the customers,” Sinha said.
A Softbank spokesperson said the group believed “Paytm Mall’s offline-to-online operating model, combined with the strength of the Paytm ecosystem, is uniquely positioned to enable India’s 15 million offline retail shops to participate in India’s ecommerce boom”.
Paytm Mall claims a run rate of $3 billion in GMV (gross merchandise value) and says it is aiming for a $10 billion run rate at the end of fiscal 2018-2019. NEWDELHI: Widening the scope of its probe into the ₹12,636 crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has started questioning senior executives of other Indian banks, the overseas branches of which were issued letters of undertaking (LOU) by PNB.
The agency questioned the general managers and deputy general managers of Bank of India, Allahabad Bank and Axis Bank on Sunday and Monday. CBI did not name the executives.
However, senior agency officials confirmed that these executives were not based out of overseas branches, but were part of the Indian operations of the banks.
“CBI has been questioning senior officers of other Indian banks whose overseas branches were involved in the issue of buyers’ credit on the basis of Lous issued by Punjab National Bank. During the last two days, CBI has been questioning officers of the rank of GM and DGM of these banks who were in charge of the international and treasury operations. So far, five officers of the banks have been questioned,” said a person familiar with the developments on condition of anonymity.
The person said that the questioning was being carried out in order to “understand their role, so that we can come to a conclusion,” and added that CBI had not yet been able to determine criminality “because there are shell companies that are also involved and the ongoing investigation is trying to ascertain the role of these officials.”
Emails sent to Bank of India, Allahabad Bank and Axis Bank remained unanswered till press time.