A street at the non-descript Modi Mill Complex in New Delhi’s Okhla industrial area buzzed with people and activity when this reporter went to interview Kunal Bahl, co-founder and CEO of Snapdeal, the home-grown e-commerce company earlier this week. Snapdeal is in the news for getting $627 million from SoftBank, Japanese telecom and internet corporation.
While any workplace with over 1,000 employees with an average age of 24 or thereabouts is expected to be buzzing, the visit of Masayoshi Son, founder and CEO of SoftBank, to the Snapdeal office may have added to the overall action.
Snapdeal, which wants to shape itself like the Chinese giant Alibaba, has just got an endorsement for the same from the company which is its biggest stakeholder now. Son, the unusual visitor at the Snapdeal headquarters, said Snapdeal had the potential to become an Indian Alibaba.
Snapdeal, which wants to shape itself like the Chinese giant Alibaba, has just got an endorsement for the same from the company which is its biggest stakeholder now. Son, the unusual visitor at the Snapdeal headquarters, said Snapdeal had the potential to become an Indian Alibaba.
Like any other first timer trying to locate an address in the maze of buildings and numerous bylanes in the Modi Mill complex, Son lost his way too. But in his two-hour-long interaction with the employees of Snapdeal, the Korean-Japanese business tycoon showed the way to success by narrating many of his experiences, including that with Alibaba, people in the know said.
Son had invested $20 million in Alibaba some 14 years ago when the Chinese internet firm was just a startup, and that stake is now estimated to be worth $50 billion. He may have put a similar bet on Snapdeal, that was born just four years ago.
The 57-year-old Son took questions from the Snapdeal employees, who had gathered early for a much celebrated townhall meeting, on his life, business, aspirations, vision and why he chose to invest in this e-commerce company. Nikesh Arora, the now famous Google executive who joined SoftBank a few months ago, was there with Son. Arora will now be part of the Snapdeal board.
Softbank investment in Snapdeal is a big deal for Snapdeal. After all, the SoftBank founder Son has often been called Warren Buffet or Bill Gates of Japan. Son’s networth is $16.4 billlion, making him the second richest in Japan after Tadashi Yanai, CEO of Fast Retailing that owns textile group Uniqlo. Incidentally, both Son and Yanai have met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and committed their investment in India.
There’s reason for the Snapdeal Street, as the place is referred to for a series of buildings leased by the company here, to be fired up. Going by its ambition to grow, Snapdeal needs more space beyond this street, but Bahl is in no mood to talk of million acres that some of his competition have spoken about. "We want to keep the company small,’’ Bahl said. The question is, for how long?
