Google is investing nearly $350 million in Flipkart, becoming the latest high-profile name to back the Walmart-owned Indian e-commerce startup.
The Android maker will also provide Flipkart with cloud offerings as part of the deal, the Bengaluru-based startup said in a brief statement on Friday. Google’s investment is part of a nearly $1 billion funding round that Flipkart is launching in 2023. Walmart led the round, having invested $600 million in it late last year. (Microsoft is also an investor in Flipkart.)
Flipkart, valued at $36 billion in new investment, leads the e-commerce market in India, where it serves hundreds of millions of consumers in smaller cities and towns. The startup, which also owns fashion e-commerce startup Myntra, has about 48 percent of the Indian e-commerce market, according to Bernstein.
Flipkart competes with Reliance Retail, Amazon, SoftBank-backed Meesho and increasingly a number of e-commerce apps. Reliance Retail — run by Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani — operates India’s largest retail chain and is increasingly trying to build an e-commerce play. Reliance Retail was valued at $100 billion in a nearly $2 billion investment by QIA, ADIA and KKR last year.
India’s e-commerce market is estimated to reach $133 billion by next year, according to Bernstein.
“Indian e-commerce is seeing the emergence of challengers in fast/social/vertical commerce. Amazon and Flipkart remain leaders driven by category strengths in mobile, consumer electronics and appliances. However, unlike the big horizontal winners in the global e-commerce market, India is likely to see category winners like Blinkit (quick commerce), Meesho (level 2+ marketplaces) and Nykaa (vertical commerce) as they scale,” Bernstein analysts wrote in a recent note.
Google, which reaches more than half a billion people in India, identifies the South Asian nation as a key overseas market. The company revealed plans to invest $10 billion in Indian businesses in 2020. (It has since invested $4.5 billion in telecom provider Jio Platforms and another $1 billion in Airtel.)
