New Numbers Reveal India’s Flipkart Worth $1 Billion, South Africa’s Naspers Has 10% Stake

New financial numbers by South Africa’s Naspers (NPN:SJ) reveal a couple of interesting things. Firstly, Naspers is now exposed as owning a 10 percent stake in India’s top e-commerce site, Flipkart. As a result of that, it’s now also clear that the Amazon-esque Flipkart is effectively valued at $1.02 billion.

The valuation is judged by Naspers’ stake at its funding of Flipkart in August last year, when Naspers and Tiger Global led a $150 million investment round in the fast-growing e-commerce site. At that time it was not known to what extent Naspers was involved.

Flipkart expanded its product line-up after that huge funding boost last August, adding men’s and women’s clothing and footwear to its catalog. But it was not all plain sailing, as Flipkart’s digital music store – first launched in February 2012 – was recently shut down. The company plans to “revisit the digital music market opportunity at a later stage,” presumably when the e-commerce and e-payments market in the country is more mature and Indian consumers are ready to pay for digital downloads.

Naspers was also involved in last week’s acquisition of online bus ticketing platform Redbus via its Indian joint-venture, Ibibo, that it operates with Tencent.

(Source: Medianama)