Walmart made a big announcement on Wednesday that shook the entire ecommerce industry in India. Walmart decided to purchase majority stake in the Indian ecommerce giant Flipkart for 1 lakh+ crores of rupees. Walmart acquired 77% stake in the company and thereby making its way into the 200 billion$ + ecommerce market in India. Investment of this scale will be financed with the help of instruments such as debt and cash.
Walmart’s long tem plan for Flipkart is to list it as a publicly traded entity that would be its own subsidiary. Most of the early day investors in Flipkart decided to liquidate their share in the ecommerce company with this deal. Biggest of them includes Softbank which rakes in approximately 4 billion $ from this deal. Walmart will also infuse fresh equity of around 2 billion$ into Flipkart so as to give it a competitive edge against Amazon. Walmart will introduce its expertise in logistics and other areas which can help Flipkart in competing with Amazon.