FIH Mobile Ltd (富智康), a subsidiary of Taiwanese contract manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), on Tuesday said it would invest US$200 million in leading Indian online marketplace Snapdeal, as part of efforts to tap a huge potential market.
FIH Mobile’s fully owned subsidiary in Singapore, Wonderful Stars, will acquire a 4.27 percent stake in Jasper Infotech Pvt Ltd, the owner and operator of Snapdeal, FIH Mobile said in a statement.
Through the investment deal, FIH Mobile expects to transform itself by providing services such as “end-to-end” information and mobile networks, while Hon Hai is expected to improve its infrastructure and consumer service, according to the statement.
The investment came after Hon Hai Group (鴻海集團) founder Terry Gou (郭台銘) signed a memorandum of understanding with Devendra Fadnavis, chief minister of the western Indian state of Maharashtra, early this month to invest US$5 billion in a new plant.
Founded in 2010, Snapdeal is one of India’s biggest e-commerce companies and has become a competitor of US online retailer Amazon.com Inc, with mobile devices accounting for the largest share of Snapdeal’s overall sales.
Snapdeal said in a statement on Tuesday that Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) and Hon Hai Group pushed further into India by leading an investment of US$500 million in Snapdeal, while existing investors Softbank Corp, Temasek Holdings Pte Ltd and BlackRock Inc also participated in the round.
US research firm CB Insights lists Snapdeal’s current valuation at US$2.5 billion, making it the largest venture-funded start-up in the country after Flipkart.
The online marketplace companies have drawn investors from around the world seeking to repeat the success of Alibaba. In the previous 18 months, more than US$5 billion has been invested in Indian e-commerce, resulting in companies hiring Bollywood stars as ambassadors and luring customers with huge discounts.
“India is among the last truly large markets that’s still untapped, so everyone wants to get a stake,” Technopak Advisors Pvt retail vice president Pragya Singh told Bloomberg News on Tuesday.
“The competition will go up, everyone will push hard to get more sellers, and there will be lots of discounts and offers to woo customers,” Singh said.
Meanwhile, eBay Inc on Tuesday said that it was selling part of its stake in Snapdeal, but said the Asian nation remains an “important market” for the US online giant.
An eBay statement offered no specifics on the divestment, describing the sale as “another step to effectively manage our global interests and invest in other strategic initiatives.”
“Over the past two years, the valuation of Snapdeal has significantly increased, and because eBay was an early investor, this sale will enable us to earn a strong return on our invested capital and strategically redeploy it into other areas of our business,” eBay chief financial officer Scott Schenkel said in the statement.
“Going forward, we will focus on accelerating eBay’s presence in India, and empowering customers through technology, as with our new #SheMeansBusiness program that encourages female entrepreneurs,” Schenkel said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day