Chinese tech giant Tencent has bought a $264 million (about Rs 2,060 crore) stake from Walmart-owned e-commerce firm Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal through its European subsidiary. This transaction was completed on October 26, 2021. However, this was communicated with the government authorities earlier this financial year. Flipkart is registered in Singapore and operates only in India.
According to the news of news agency PTI, after the sale of stake by Binny Bansal to Tencent Cloud Europe, his stake in Flipkart has come down to 1.84 percent. A person associated with this matter told that Tencent has been invested in the company since the inception of Flipkart. The transaction comes after SoftBank along with several other investors invested $3.6 billion in the company last year. Meanwhile, Bansal sold some of his share. At present, Tencent’s stake in Flipkart is around 0.72 per cent.
The government had come out with Press-Note 3 (2020 Series) in April 2020 in the early days of the pandemic. This was brought in to prevent opportunistic takeovers of Indian companies during the pandemic. Press-Note 3 is required by companies from countries that share borders with India. Along with this they have to get approval and security clearance.
At the same time, sources say about Tencent and Bansal’s deal that Tencent’s stake in Flipkart is less than 1 percent and Flipkart is a Singapore-registered company. For this reason the Press Note 3 is not required for this heart.
Let us tell you, in July last year, an investment of $ 3.6 billion was raised by the Flipkart Group. During that time the company was valued at about $37.6 billion, which is 50 percent more than last year.
Flipkart had also raised $1.2 billion from investors in July 2020, during which the company was valued at $24 billion. According to business intelligent platform Paper BC, in September 2020 also Chinese company Tencent had invested $ 62.8 million in Flipkart. Tencent’s name is counted among the world’s largest gaming companies. The PUBG Mobile game was developed by Tencent itself. It was acquired by US retail giant Walmart in 2018 for $16 billion.