Rather than list its stock on a foreign exchange, Snapdeal hopes to eventually go public in its home country of India. However, such an offering for the e-commerce company is probably a few years off, chief product officer Anand Chandrasekaran said at the DLD conference in Munich on Monday.
Snapdeal Hopes to Go Public in India, but Offering Could Be Years Away (Video)
Snapdeal would like to do a stock offering in India so its sellers and customers can also become shareholders.
DLD/Picture Alliance/Jan Haas
“I think it is very likely that the IPO will be in India, which is probably the only e-commerce company that is going to go public in India,” Chandrasekaran said during an onstage interview with Re/code’s Ina Fried. “But I think it’s still a ways off. I think it is a few years out.”
Chandrasekaran said the company’s founders want the site’s 250,000 sellers and roughly 80 million registered users to benefit from any public offering.
“We’d love for all of those consumers and all of those sellers to also become shareholders,” he said.
Snapdeal was valued at nearly $5 billion last year after an investment from Chinese contract manufacturer Foxconn, which is looking to expand into the payments area. Japan’s SoftBank is a major stakeholder, while Alibaba is also an investor.
Snapdeal is in a fierce battle with Amazon and fellow Indian startup Flipkart to become the premiere online shopping destination in India as more of the country gets Internet access. In the past year, it has also started to develop an ecosystem of sites by acquiring companies focused on different areas of online commerce.
Chandrasekaran, a former Yahoo executive, joined Snapdeal last year after a stint as chief product officer for Indian carrier Bharti Airtel.
During the interview, Chandrasekaran also talked about Snapdeal’s move into mobile payments and shared his views on Facebook’s controversial Free Basics program.
Here’s a video of the full session:
https://youtu.be/z-6JYB-1HuI
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
