In the era of growing acquisitions, retail giant Amazon and home-grown equity fund Samara Capital have entered into a deal to acquire Aditya Birla Group’s food and grocery retail chain known as ‘More’.
After Future Group’s Big Bazaar, Reliance Retail and DMart, More is the fourth-largest supermarket chain in the country. The two companies acquired the retail chain in a deal worth the enterprise valuation of Rs 4,200 crore.
Aditya Birla Retail Ltd (ABRL) owns and operates 575 More stores. Following the acquisition, Samara Capital took over 51% of Kumar Mangalam Birla’s ABRL, on the other hand, Amazon.com NV Investment Holdings LLC, Amazon’s investment arm got hold of the rest 49%.
“The board of directors of the company, at its meeting held on September 19, 2018, has approved the sale of its entire shareholding in Aditya Birla Retail Ltd,” RKN Retail Pvt. Ltd, a promoter entity of Aditya Birla Retail said.
The acquisition will be done through a two-step process. Firstly, they will buy the stake in Aditya Birla Retail from RKN Retail. The balance stake will be taken over from Kanishtha Finance and Investment Pvt. Ltd, another promoter entity of Aditya Birla Retail.
With this move of acquisition, Amazon eyes to build its food retail business in India for which it has made a separate allocation of $500 million. Moreover, it will also help the company to execute its strategy to build an offline presence in India at a time when its biggest rival Walmart is trying to establish its dominance in online retail.
Talking about the acquired company More, the firm operates 523 supermarkets and 20 hypermarkets. Some of Aditya Birla Retail own brands include More Daily, More Fresh Prarthana and Blueearth.
With this acquisition, on the other hand, Aditya Birla Group aims to its debt that stood at Rs 4,000 crore as of March 2018. Also, Samara Capital and Amazon plan to set up 100-150 stores every year including neighborhood supermarkets and hypermarkets. Also, they are planning for the current fiscal to set up 90 stores.