Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart has agreed to sell 75 percent of the company to US retail behemoth Walmart for about $15 billion, a report said Friday, in what would be a blow to rival Amazon. Bloomberg News said Flipkart's board had agreed the sale. Flipkart declined to comment when contacted by AFP.
There has been months of speculation that Walmart was preparing to buy Flipkart to take on Amazon which is aggressively expanding in India, one of the world's key online markets. Flipkart is India's largest e-commerce group on the basis of sales but has been fighting off a huge challenge from Amazon since the US conglomerate entered the country in 2013. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has committed $5 billion to grabbing a big slice of India's e-commerce pie after failing to make inroads in China.
India's e-commerce sales hit $21 billion last year according to market research company Forrester and are expected to soar as its population of 1.3 billion people make greater use of increased internet access.
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