Alibaba Searches Investment Opportunities in India

The Chinese online retailer founding executives are showing their interest in Indian start ups..

Alibaba executives, Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai plan to grab fruitful investment opportunity in India –the second largest market for e-commerce. The executives’ family offices are actively searching to get hold of such opportunity which will let e-commerce giant to emulate its success in the homeland to India as well.

As of now, no investment has been made by their personal investment offices in India based startups but according to sources close to matter, tentative proposals have been sent through unofficial networks by wealthy investors. The e-commerce titan’s co-founder Mr. Ma enjoys net worth of $22.8 billion while Executive Chairman and Vice President Mr. Tsai’s net worth is valued at $5.5 to $7 billion.

Talks between China based private capital investors and Indian startups’ representatives are often held in Hong Kong and Singapore, revealed an anonymous source. The enticement of the China based family offices towards the newly emerging Indian enterprises could offer relief to the country’s ecosystem suffering from a huge financial crunch as present investors have now got cautious about injecting more money.

In 2015, Joseph established his lucrative multi-billion family office for investing wealth generated by the Chinese e-commerce company’s $25 billion initial public offering of stock on the NYSE. He appointed hedge fund Citadel’s ex managing director Oliver Weisberg on board, to co-manage his investment vehicle with Hong Kong based hedge fund Blue Pool Capital’s founding partner Alexander West. Emails sent to Jack, West and Weisberg weren’t answered immediately.

A number of Chinese strategic investors including Alibaba, Didi Chuxing as well as Tencent, have invested already in the online shopping and payment platform Paytm,  E-healthcare information provider Practo, application based cab service provider Ola and e-commerce organization Snapdeal. The Chinese biggest search engine developer Baidu, is also exploring potential investment opportunities in the nation.

But in contrast to these internet companies, the Alibaba executives’ family offices will probably not write huge checks and the nature of their investments would be more financial, the sources stated. E-commerce marketplace for auto services and used automobiles, Droom CEO Sandeep Aggarwal has stated "These are sophisticated investors and are not likely to lead the (funding) rounds. They're not looking to play a very active role in the running of a company, as strategic investors do”.

Recently, Guragaon and Singapore based Droom raised $0.3 million from an investor group led by Digital Garage as well as Benett. Also entering the organization’s investor capital table was HK-based organization, Integrated Asset Management, which two years ago had led the acquisition of the media company Forbes Group. "A lot of these investors looking at India earned outstanding returns on their bets on the Chinese internet economy” stated Aggarwal.

Previously in 2016, a Singaporean company Brothers Fortune Apparel invested $0.5 million in Snapdeal. Brother Fortune represents many Chinese wealthy people and was advised by mid-market tech venture capital investment company Iron Pillar.