eBay is reportedly in talks with Flipkart, a huge ecommerce player in India, with view to making an investment and strategic alliance that will help it take on Amazon and Alibaba in the region.
Apparently eBay will take a $1.5bn stake in the Indian ecommerce leader and the two may even merge operations in the move. We’ll doubtless find out more in due course.
It’s an interesting move from eBay and probably quite wise. It makes sense to partner with a successful local player and use their on the ground expertise and market knowledge to increase market share. And it’s notable that eBay’s strategic focus is shifting to Asia. Recently eBay divested its interests in Mercado Libre, a papular ecommerce brand in several South American countries.
India is fast becoming one of the key ecommerce battlegrounds for the big international players. And that’s hardly surprising because it’s the world’s second most populous country. It is also attractive because it has many english speakers and an emerging wealthy middle class. Amazon is already investing heavily in India and Alibaba announced lats month that it was teaming up with PayTM to launch a new mobile ecommerce app.
Online retail in India is estimated to be worth $15 billion in 2017 and is growing rapidly.
