Alibaba smashes 11-11 sales record of $9bn in half the time





Online Orders Amount To $14.3bn By End Of `Singles' Day'

It only took Jack Ma half the time Wednesday to sell the same amount of stuff he did a year ago with his online channels as the annual Singles' Day shopping event set a sales record. Transactions through Alibaba Group Holding during the annual Singles' Day shopping event passed 57.1 billion yuan ($9 billion) before midday , eclipsing last year's record with 12 hours still to go. By midnight Beijing time, the value of the merchandize totalled 91.2 billion yuan ($14.3 billion), according to statistics displayed at the media centre. The top-selling items included baby-related and nutritional products, Nike sneakers and Levi's jeans, the company said.
Ma raised the stakes with this year's event by moving it to Beijing, bringing in more foreign brands and Hollywood celebrities Daniel Craig and Kevin Spacey to add glamour to the shopathon. Tapping into rising disposable incomes has paid off for China's biggest e-commerce emporium as it captures more of China's surging smartphone use with restaurant deliveries and video streaming.
“Chinese consumers have a lot of money in their hands,“ said Chen Xingdong, chief China economist at BNP Paribas in Beijing. “Online retailers need to customize their products to serve these increasingly savvy urban consumers. “ Alibaba's figures come as China's retail sales accelera ted in October, overcoming the slowest economic growth in 25 years.
Retail sales climbed 11%, the quickest gain this year and beating the median economist projection, as the nation's leaders seek to re-balance the economy toward consumption and services.
“The consumers that can create and lead demand will survive,“ Ma said Wednesday night. “In the next 15 years, China's economy will be good.“
Taking Singles' Day festivities to China's political, economic and media hub comes after Alibaba's roller-coaster first year as a public company .A record offering was followed by a record fall below the initial price, allegations the company wasn't doing enough to fight counterfeits on its platforms, and the replacement of its CEO.

Flipkart has hired Google veteran Surojit Chatterjee as the head of consumer experience and growth

Flipkart Ropes in Google Veteran Chatterjee





India's largest internet company Flipkart has hired Google veteran Surojit Chatterjee as the head of consumer experience and growth, reports Aditi Shrivastava. Chatterjee will leave Mountain View, San Francisco where he was the product management director for mobile search ads and AdSense for Search at Google and relocate to Bengaluru later this month. In his new role, he will be responsible for all consumer experience across desktop and mobile. Chatterjee holds a BS in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur, and has 33 US patents to his name.

Samsung stays at No1 as market grows 20% in Q2; 4G devices and phablets drive sales

Online Sales, Low-cost Models Ring in Good Times for Smartphones





India's smartphone market bounced back in the quarter ended September -after declining for two consecutive quarters -on the back of low-cost devices and a spurt in online sales, with South Korea's Samsung Electronics maintaining its position at the top. The smartphone market grew 12% from the previous quarter and expanded 20% from a year earlier, according to Hong Kong-based Counterpoint Technology Market Research. One in three smartphones was sold online and a similar proportion of devices were LTE or 4G-enabled, with their shipments doubling sequentially and increasing 25-fold year on year.
Samsung maintained its No. 1 position in overall mobile phones with a share of 19% and in smartphones with a share of 23.2%, while Micromax Informatics and Intex -at No. 2 and No. 3 in both categories -narrowed the gap with the market leader. Micromax took 13.8% of the mobile phone and 17.7% of the smartphone market, respectively, while Intex had 11.3% and 11.7%, respectively.
“We are seeing significant proliferation of LTE and a larger display `6,500) form-factor in the sub-$100 (.price band as these features reach mass market level for the `mobilefirst' market such as India,“ said Tarun Pathak, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Research.
The Indian smartphone market is being fuelled by two device trends ­ one is 4G LTE and other is the phablet form-factor, Pathak said, and underlined that one of four phones was made in India, coming on the back of five major handset brands being assembled domestically.
Samsung said its market share by value for the September quarter was 43%, much higher than its competitors. “We've gained market share handsomely every month and across segments,“ said Manu Sharma, director -product marketing, for Samsung India, which launched two smartphones exclusively on Flipkart. The Korean company said its market share in smartphones was 43% in September, compared with 42% in August and 39% a year earlier.
The company also led in the premium smartphone segment -devices priced above . `30,000 -with a 51% share, a massive surge from 36% at the same time last year.“There's a high single-digit difference (between us and Apple) in the premium segment,“ he added.
Samsung's share in the . `10,00020,000 segment was 49% as of September, up from 43% a year ago.India, which is set to overtake the US as the second-fastest growing smartphone market after China by 2017, is where Samsung has been facing stiff competition from local players, including Micromax and Intex. The presence of Chinese players including Xiaomi, Lenovo and Huawei is making conditions even tougher for Samsung in India. The K3 Note from Lenovo was the bestselling smartphone in India in the September quarter. Lenovo took the No. 4 spot in the smartphone segment with a 9.8% share, followed by Lava with 6.6%.
A report by Ben Bajarin, principal analyst and head of primary research at Creative Strategies, predicts that Samsung may be out of the business completely within the next five years as it grapples with innovating the next big thing.

Peepul Capital is estimated to have earned `Rs 500 cr from Rs 80-cr investment in Ecom Express

Private equity investors, who have stayed away from investing in online retail companies, have instead quietly reaped a windfall by backing logistics companies providing back-end support in the ecommerce rush. In the latest deal, Peepul Capital recorded an over six-fold return on its investment in Ecom Express according to people aware of the transaction. Earlier this year Multiples Alternate Asset Management also made a partial exit from Delhivery, when the company raised fresh capital led by Tiger Global Management.
“These kinds of returns are only possible if there is multiple re-rating of both a company and a sector, which is not very common,“ said Prakash Nene, MD at Multiples, who declined to comment on specifics of the deal.
The PE firm made a partial exit after Tiger Global led a round of about `. 542 crore in the Delhi-based firm in May.
Peepul Capital is estimated to have earned ` . 500 crore on an initial investment of ` . 80 crore in Ecom Express. The firm made an exit when the logistics firm raised fresh capital in a round led by Warburg Pincus according to two people privy to the details.
The returns have been even high er for early seed and angel investors in these two companies, which handle delivery for top online retailers like Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal.
According to filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA), seed fund Oliphans Capital bought shares in Ecom Express at around . 70 per share in 2013. The fund is es` timated to have sold some of these shares to Warburg Pincus during the investment round in June this year. Regulatory filings indicate Warburg -through its unit Eaglebay Investments -paid ` . 2,276 per share of Ecom Express; this would imply that Oliphans netted a return of over 30 times.
“It's only logical that investment is also about exits,“ said Anish Jhaveri, MD at Oliphans, declining to comment on returns made by his firm. “When we invested around $1 million in the company (Ecom Express) there were just four people in front of us who had just quit Blue Dart.“
Ecom Express was founded in 2012 by TA Krishnan, Sanjeev Saxena, K Satyanarayana and Manju Dhawan who had launched the etailing business at Blue Dart. The Delhi-based company expects to deliver goods in over 10,000 pin codes covering more than 1,500 towns and cities, across the country in the next few years.
The increasing interest in these companies is driven by the rapid growth in logistic support for online retail. A recent report on the Indian internet sector by brokerage IIFL estimates that the order volume for ecommerce shipments will increase 13x by 2020, with overall volume of ecommerce orders amounting to 2,000 tonnes per day.
Investors are of the view that just as tower companies gained in the telecom boom, the online retail rush will benefit from the back-end support companies.
“There are a lot of enablers which are important from a shadow driving perspective broadly similar to what telecom towers are to telco industry and EPC companies are to infrastructure,“ said Sreeni Vudayagiri, investment director at Peepul Capital, a PE firm with $700 million under management which primarily invests in mid-sized consumption and manufacturing businesses.

Tata Teams up with Hotmail Bhatia

Global telecom carrier Sabse Technologies, started by Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia, on Tuesday announced that Tata Sons' Chairman Emeritus Ratan Tata has made a strategic investment in the company. The Silicon Valleybased company, which operates Sabsebolo -the popular communications cloud platform for small and medium businesses -did not disclose details of the investment.