BENGALURU: Amidst heightened border tensions between China and India, homegrown e-commerce major Flipkart landed a fresh $62.8 million investment from the Chinese internet giant Tencent holdings in a funding round, regulatory filings sourced from business intelligence platform, paper.vc showed.
The funds raise has been made through Flipkart's Singapore based parent entity, likely a part of the larger $1.2-billion round that was announced by e-tailer in July.
The funds raise comes at a time when the Chinese tech investors including Tencent, Alibaba and Bytedance are moving their headquarters to Singapore amidst a furore in US and India over data privacy and control issues, which could potentially prove to be a national security threat.
The Indian government has also issued new Foreign Direct Investment guidelines requiring prior approval of the regulators for the investments from border sharing countries into India.
App developer Tencent currently is the largest minority stakeholder in Flipkart ( 4-5% stake) valued at over $1 billion. Tencent's popular game Player Unknown's Battle Underground (PUBG) was recently banned by the Indian government which led to at least 2% share drop intra-day in Chinese company, amounting to $14 billion. Despite India accounting for a minimal revenue of Tencent for its PUBG app, nearly 35% of the overall app downloads happened here, according to data from Sensor Tower.
US retail behemoth Walmart currently holds 81% stake in Flipkart valued at over $18 billion. Walmart's recent announcement of over $1 billion funds infusion in Flipkart was slated to happen in two tranches this fiscal year.
The e-commerce firm is trying to edge out rivals Amazon, recent entrant JioMart in the tightly contested e-commerce space especially as the demand peaks up during the upcoming festival season sales.
Earlier, Flipkart announced that it will hire for 70,000 direct and lakhs of indirect roles across the country to cater to the increased demand.
Besides Tencent , the other minority investors in Flipkart which is valued at $21 billion include Tiger Global, Accel, former CEO and co-founder Binny Bansal, Microsoft and Singapore GIC.