Asian E-Commerce Sites Net $6.9 Billion in Investment in Past 3 Years, But Exits Still Tiny [STATS]

Asian e-commerce companies have attracted $6.9 billion across 383 deals – through funding, acquisitions, and IPOs – from 2010 to the present day. That’s the prodigious number arrived at by venture capital database CB Insights in a new report on the region’s investment landscape for online stores.

But it’s not all good news for Asia’s e-commerce businesses. India and China take much of the money, and both deals and funding rounds are way down from a peak in mid-2011. Furthermore, Asian startups – even in this vital e-shopping space – see tiny exits. Indeed, CB Insights calls the exit environment “flaccid”. Most of these web buy-outs in Asia are really small – usually under $50 million. Forget the blockbuster hundreds of millions or billions of dollars being thrown around in Silicon Valley. Here’s the overview graph:

India rings in the deals

In terms of buy-out deals (which includes IPO exits as well), Indian e-commerce ventures lead the way in this region. India has seen 154 e-store deals since 2010, with 25 deals coming in 2013 already. These 154 business transactions are worth $978 million from 2010 to this point in 2013.

Just two weeks ago, India’s second largest homegrown online store, Snapdeal, acquired a smaller rival. Snapdeal is also well funded with $50 million from eBay in its pockets. The larger Flipkart site also helps make India a red hot web shopping market – and one that’s ripe for lots of consolidation this year.

China leads in terms of investments – but we’ll look into China in more depth in a separate post later today (Update: China’s here!).

Here’s how this sector in India leads in terms of deal value:

And this is the remarkable uptick in this category in India so far this year:

MakeMyTrip (NASDAQ:MMYT) was India’s biggest ever tech IPO exit so far, worth $447 million in 2010.

E-shopping in fashion

So, what kind of web store is proving the hottest for business deals? Inevitably it’s clothing sites. Just look at the huge amount of money being thrown at Rocket Internet’s fashion store Zalora, which netted $100 million last month. But thankfully the nature of these e-commerce acquisitions is changing, as shown by the growth of multitudinous web stores that fit into the ‘other’ category in this graph:

Exit, pursued by a bear

Tiger economy