Flipkart – Needull in a haystack

paytm

Price war!!!

Alibaba has earmarked $2 billion for Paytm Mall. SoftBank will put in additional money. Paytm Mall will suddenly be flush with cash like its larger rivals. Flipkart has got a $6 billion war chest, and Amazon has $2.5 billion left from Jeff Bezos’ announced commitment to the India market.

With all the money Paytm Mall has, Alibaba plans to make it a price warrior. “Product prices will be about 20-25% cheaper than what Amazon and Flipkart sell them for,” said the first executive. “With deep pockets we will win… In China, too, we offered the products at 25% cheaper than what competitors’ prices. That was the reason for our success.”

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Sunny Sen — Factor Daily

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Now, that the storm has settled a bit, a deeper analysis of the mega deal.

The big takeaway from the present deal is that deep pockets win. This is a maxim that has been demonstrated over and over again, especially in B2C technology plays. A certain disdain for capital efficiency, a focus on gaining share and a relentless focus on killing competition define today’s leading companies. Flipkart would have been in the news for very different reasons had it not been for the timely fund infusion by SoftBank in 2017. Growth had stalled, the annual burn was high and unit economics were unsustainable. And yet, as part of the strategy of Lee Fixel of Tiger Global and Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Flipkart doubled down on not ceding market share to Amazon, whatever the capital burn. This in turn caught Softbank’s eye (whose earlier investment in Snapdeal was not working to its expectations).

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Rajat Kumar — Knowledge@Wharton

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