HomeShop18 acquires Shop CJ Network

Noida based television home shopping network and online marketplace, HomeShop18, the part of Network18 Media & Investments, has acquired a 74% stake in Shop CJ Network. Shop CJ Network is an equal joint venture between private equity investor Providence Equity Partners and Korean firm CJ O Shopping. The deal is said to be anywhere between $27.45 Mn to $30.5 Mn.

With this deal, Providence Equity Partners is also looking for an exit from Shop CJ Network and will sell its stake completely. Shop CJ network, earlier known as Star CJ, was launched in 2009, as a 50:50 joint venture between Star India and CJO Shopping. Later in 2014, Star India sold its stake to Providence Equity Partners for $63 Mn.

Media group Network18 had launched HomeShop18 television channel in April 2008 and its online marketplace HomeShop18.com in January 2011. It is backed by PE firm SAIF Partners with funds managed by OCP Asia. It also counts South Korea’s GS Home Shopping as a strategic investor.

Its revenues are derived from the commission it gets from the sale of products by its vendors through its platforms. It still generates the bulk of its revenues from television shopping business. Now, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) of Mukesh Ambani owns Homeshop18 through the acquisition of Network18 which happened in 2014. During that same year, HomeShop18 also scrapped its proposed $75 Mn public issue, after seven months of filing on the NYSE.

Flipkart acquires F1 Info solutions

India’s leading e-commerce marketplace Flipkart has acquired mobile repair chain F1 Info Solutions as it looks to improve its after sales service offerings to customers on its platform.

Smartphones account for over 50 per cent of the sales (by value) on Flipkart, making it the most important category for the Indian e-tailer. With F1 Info Solutions, the company will gain access to its own chain of service centres across the country. F1 Info Solutions will become a part of Jeeves, a firm that Flipkart invested in 2014. Jeeves specializes in providing after-sales service for large and small home appliances and furniture.

Following the acquisition, Flipkart will be able to monetize its customers across the lifecycle of a product, rather than just at the time of sale. According to the company, F1 Info Solutions has 158 centres and these are located in 135 cities across the country. The firm currently employs around 1,000 people who handle around 50,000 service calls every month. F1 Info is also a certified partner for several global consumer technology majors such as Apple, Samsung, HP, Lenovo, Sony and Asus.

The development comes at a time when the ecommerce giant is gearing up to sell refurbished smartphones ahead of Diwali. According to sources, Flipkart-certified refurbished smartphones will soon be sold on the online marketplace and offline outlets. To that end, the company is looking to team up with distributors for offline sale, as part of a move aimed at lowering high return rates of handsets.

Ebix acquired Paul Merchants

Ebix Inc., the parent firm of digital payments company Itz Cash Card Ltd, has acquired the money transfer business of Paul Merchants Ltd through its Indian affiliate. The deal, valued at $40.7 Million. The acquisition will be done by YouFirst Money Express Pvt. Ltd, which was acquired by Ebix in August 2017.

Paul Merchants is a listed firm offering international money transfer and foreign exchange services. The company’s inward remittance exchange comprises over 20,000 distribution outlets and 165 branches. The firm processes about 6 million transactions every year. It also controls 35% of Western Union’s inward remittance flows into India. Paul Merchants operates as an agent of Western Union and is the largest international remittance firm in India.

While Ebix ItzCash is the largest domestic remittance firm in the country, handling a business volume of $100 million a month, the acquisition of Paul Merchants will serve to consolidate Ebix’s position as the largest international remittance firm in India. Ebix is present in more than 40 countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, New Zealand, Singapore, the US and the UK. The company powers multiple platforms across the world in the field of life, annuity, health, property and casualty insurance, processing over $100 billion in insurance premiums annually.

The transaction will increase the distribution network of Ebix ItzCash as well. ItzCash already has over 75,000 physical retail outlets. After the acquisition is completed, the outlets will number 114,000. ItzCash is a digital payments firm offering payment services like prepaid cards, money transfer and e-wallet to individual customers. The company offers cash management solutions and payment processing services to companies. It also provides services like collection and disbursement management services to the government. ItzCash was acquired by Ebix in May this year for a consideration of Rs800 crore.

Paytm to acquire Travel portal Via.com

Flush with funds from Japan Softbank, digital wallet and e-commerce company Paytm is eyeing another acquisition. The payments firm has held preliminary talks to acquire online travel company via.com. Paytm, which is run by One97 Communications Ltd, is looking to invest close to $80 million to acquire the Bengaluru-based travel portal.

In March this year, the Alibaba-backed Paytm tied up with US-based online travel portal Priceline Group’s Booking.com, to expand its travel business. The company then said it will invest Rs 300 crore to further grow this business and that it is also looking to ramp up its Bengaluru-based travel marketplace team to over 250 people in the next two quarters. Paytm’s travel marketplace enables users to book hotels, flights, trains and bus tickets on a fast, secure and convenient platform. In January 2017, the Noida-headquartered company claimed to have crossed $500 million in annualized gross merchandise value.

Via.com, owned and operated by Flightraja Travels Pvt Ltd, was founded in 2007 as an offline business-to-business travel site. It currently functions as a travel deals aggregator and ticket booking site. Its inventory includes ticketing in flights, hotels, holiday packages as well as car and bus services. The firm had raised $5 million from Indo US Venture Partners (now Kalaari Capital) in 2007 and followed it up with a $10 million round from Sequoia Capital in December 2009.

Following its $200 million funding from Alibaba and SAIF Partners into to its e-commerce arm in March this year and $1.4 billion from SoftBank in May this year, Paytm has been on a multi-pronged expansion drive. It has made a number of investments and acquisitions and effected key appointments, internal movements, and new business strategies. Earlier this month, the company was in talks to acquire deal discovery app Little and online deals startup Nearbuy to strengthen its hyperlocal play.

Zomato acquires delivery startup Runnr

Food technology startup Zomato Media Pvt. Ltd has acquired delivery start-up Runnr as part of a widely expected, all stock deal that would help the former significantly shore up its food delivery business, amid intense competition from rapidly growing rivals such as Swiggy.

The deal also hands out a lifeline to Runnr which has struggled to raise funds in the recent past. It has raised about $20-25 million since it started out in 2015 from investors such as Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Runnr was a product of a merger between hyperlocal delivery start-up Roadrunnr and food-ordering start-up TinyOwl.

Goyal said Runnr was already fulfilling about 300,000 orders a month. He added that Runnr founder Mohit Kumar will remain chief executive and will continue to work on the strategic vision for the start-up with the rest of his team. He said the acquired firm will continue to be run independently by Kumar.

Prior to its buyout of Runnr, Zomato used to aggregate restaurants on its platform and works with third-party delivery partners such as Runnr and Grab to execute deliveries. In September 2015, Zomato had picked up a minority stake in Grab (Grab a Grub Services Pvt. Ltd) to bolster its food delivery business.

Paytm to acquire Nearbuy and Little

Paytm, operated by One97 Communications Pvt. Ltd, is in advanced talks to acquire two deals platforms, Nearbuy and Little. The acquisitions of Nearbuy (formerly Groupon India) and Little Internet Pvt. Ltd, both of which offer discount deals at restaurants, salons and commercial establishments, will allow Paytm to boost its presence in the hyperlocal space.

In the past two years, Paytm has been in a hyper-expansion mode. From being a digital payments platform, the Alibaba-backed firm lets user’s book movies, make reservations for hotels and travel. Separately, Paytm’s e-commerce venture Paytm Mall is scaling up rapidly to take on Flipkart and Amazon. Last month, Paytm acquired a majority stake in ticketing platform Insider.in to allow events on Insider.in to show up on Paytm.

Gurugram-headquartered Nearbuy, which broke away from its NASDAQ-listed parent Groupon Inc. in 2015, was scouting for fresh equity. Groupon Inc. had sold some of its majority stake in Nearbuy to Sequoia India—which spent $20 million for the acquisition—as part of an organizational re-shuffle. The firm was subsequently re-branded Nearbuy. In 2016, the firm raised $2.2 million in debt from Blacksoil Capital. But both Nearbuy and its rival Little struggled to expand.

In July 2015, deals discovery app Little, which was started by the founders of fashion label Zovi, raised $50 million from Paytm, SAIF Partners and Tiger Global Management. It then set a target of generating annualized gross sales of $170 million but missed it by a big margin. SAIF Partners is also a large minority investor in Paytm. Paytm, which launched its payments bank in May, raised a mammoth $1.4 billion in equity infusion from SoftBank Group Corp. in the same month. The round valued One97 Communications at $7 billion.

1mg acquires Dawailelo

Gurugram based digital healthcare platform 1mg has acquired Varanasi based Dawailelo.com. Post-acquisition, the team will be working with the 1mg ePharmacy team. The acquisition will help the 1mg team to expand the company’s footprint across most parts of India.

This acquisition comes on the heels of 1mg’s recent $15 Mn Series C funding. The new funds were fuelled in by HBM Healthcare Investments along with existing investors Sequoia India, Maverick Capital Ventures, Omidyar Network and Kae Capital. 1mg has been on an acquisition spree since last year. In April 2016, 1mg had raised $6 Mn from Sequoia Capital, Intel Capital, Omidyar Network and Deep Kalra (co-founder of travel portal MakeMyTrip).

Founded in 2013, Dawailelo is a tech-based facilitator in the healthcare space. It helps individuals buy medicines, consult with doctors and get lab tests done. Dawailelo was co-founded by duo Aditya Agrawal (CEO) and Arpit Sarin. Agrawal has an MBA in marketing from Banaras Hindu University and co-founder Arpit Sarin has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.

On the other hand 1mg, earlier called HealthkartPlus, was the drug search business of Healthkart, which was rebranded and spun off into a separate entity as 1mg in April 2015. The company operates an online marketplace for medicines apart from facilitating doctor’s appointment and diagnostic test booking. The company claims to have over 10 Mn app downloads.