IndiaMart ’s share price is now above the ₹8,000-mark, compared to ₹1,800 in March 2020.- The B2B e-commerce company now sits on a market cap of ₹27,483.8 crore ($3.7 billion).
- IndiaMart competes with Tencent-backed Udaan and publicly listed company Just Dial, which was recently acquired by Reliance Industries.
It wasn’t a long time ago that IndiaMart’s shares were valued at ₹1,846 (March 27, 2020), right after India stepped into the pandemic-induced lockdown. Along with these restrictions came massive supply chain disruption that left Indian industry — from manufacturing to healthcare — in a void. IndiaMart has been gaining from it since then.
A business model that allows buyers and sellers to interact and cash in on their product needs — without physical contact — has allowed IndiaMart to garner the interest of more customers and get confidence of retail investors amidst the pandemic.
IndiaMart currently competes with Tencent-backed Udaan (valued at $3 billion) and publicly listed company Just Dial (market cap of $845 million), which was recently acquired by Reliance Industries.
IndiaMart’s share prices were above ₹8,900 as of September 8, 2021. The company’s share prices have increased 24% in the last month, from ₹7,236 on August 9. It now sits on a market capitalisation of ₹27,483.8 crore ($3.7 billion).
Jyoti Roy, equities strategist at Angel Broking, told Business Insider India that COVID-19 has shifted B2B commerce trends, from offline to online, and IndiaMart is strategically positioned to cater to such trends. Structural changes have happened in terms of supply and demand, and how these needs are met, he added.
As COVID-19 has forced micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) into the digital arena, all companies that enable such transformation have benefited from it. In general, any newage business — like Affle India or Route Mobile — that lays more stress on digital or digitisation have benefited in the last one year, Roy added.
Deven R Choksey, managing director of KR Choksey Investment Managers, noted, “everyone wants to make investments in these kinds of businesses when they are not losing money. In a business-to-customer (B2C) model ecommerce platform loses money.”
Founded in 1996, by Dinesh Agarwal and Brijesh Agrawal, IndiaMart currently enables business and discovery for MSMEs. It helps these small businesses with buyer and seller negotiations as well as quotation and invoicing of products. The company has been planning to expand further into the commerce side of the business, with payments, logistics/tracking and transactional financing.
“Apart from collections and revenue growth, IndiaMART has shown higher resilience on the margin front. While we concur that margins at current levels are unsustainable, it would see positive benefits from cost optimisation and operating leverage in the long term,” Motilal Oswal said in a report published in July 2021.
More small businesses are going digital, placing orders and finding new customers online. The company has over 70% market share in the underlying industry, the report noted. What’s better, the buyers and sellers on IndiaMart are less sensitive to pricing by the platform, according to Motilal Oswal, allowing the company to steadily increase its average revenue per user.
ALSO WATCH: IndiaMart’s founder Dinesh Agarwal explaining the recent trends in e-commerce
Motilal Oswal, in the report published before Reliance’s acquisition of Justdial, added, “IndiaMART would continue to work on gaining buyer and supplier traction to emerge as the market leader in this space.”
Meanwhile, Roy of Angel Broking said that B2B e-commerce is still at an nascent stage but there is a lot of growth potential for each company over the next three-five years. Therefore, it’s too early to comment on competition at the moment.
He also noted that the new age digital businesses have the potential to be valued much higher than the traditional information technology (IT) business that enjoys supremacy today.
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