EBay buys 5.5% stake in India's Paytm Mall

“We are deeply committed to India and believe there is huge growth potential and significant opportunity in this dynamic market,” Jooman Park, a senior vice president for Asia Pacific at eBay, said in a statement. “This new relationship will accelerate our cross-border trade efforts in a rapidly growing market, providing hundreds of millions of Paytm and Paytm Mall customers with access to eBay’s unparalleled selection of goods.”

The size of the investment was $165 million, valuing Paytm Mall about $3 billion, according to Livemint. It follows a $445 million investment in the company by SoftBank Group and Alibaba Group that implied a valuation of $2 billion in April last year. That transaction gave SoftBank and Alibaba 21% and 46% stakes, respectively, and was reportedly followed up last March with a $1.5 billion commitment from SoftBank Investment Advisors and Alibaba’s Ant Financial unit.

The latest transaction aims to give eBay sellers access to a rapidly growing consumer market while providing Paytm Mall buyers access to a larger global inventory that would normally be out of reach locally. In the coming weeks, millions of products sourced from eBay sellers globally are expected to surface on the Paytm ecosystem, which encompasses 450 million registered customers, 130 million active users and 12 million registered merchants.

EBay, which began operations in India in January, said the partnership would also support the local small to medium-sized business sector by allowing businesses to sell their products to the eBay’s 182 million customers globally. “Paytm Mall has always believed that the cross-border opportunity is a hugely untapped and logical growth path as technology continues to shrink the world,” said Srinivas Mothey, CMO at Paytm Mall.

Global strategic interest in India’s financial technology and e-commerce space is an emerging but distinct trend. It is expected to provide much-needed infrastructural support for a business sector that has had difficulty in nationwide scaling, while also contributing to the modernization of the overall economy. US operators have dominated this space so far, with the likes of PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, American Express, and Amazon making significant fintech investments in recent years.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Expansion
• Consumer
• Financials
• Technology
• India
• e-commerce
• TMT