Two companies backed by SoftBank—Brainbees Solutions Ltd, the parent company of baby products retailer FirstCry, and e-commerce-focused SaaS company Unicommerce eSolutions—made a strong debut on stock markets on Tuesday.
FirstCry, one of the largest retailers of baby and kids’ products in India, listed at Rs 651 on the National Stock Exchange, a premium of about 40% to the initial public offering price of Rs 549 per share. The shares touched a high of Rs 707.70 before closing at Rs 673.50 apiece, giving the company a market value of Rs 34,967 crore ($4.16 billion).
Unicommerce debuted at a much higher premium of 117.6%, listing at Rs 235 compared with the issue price of Rs 108. Its shares hit a high of Rs 256 before ending at Rs 211.50 on profit-taking. This values the company at Rs 2,166.48 crore ($258 million).
FirstCry sells kid products across categories that include diapers, feeding and nursing, skin and health care, toys, clothes, footwear, and fashion accessories. It had 8.8 million annual transacting customers, as of March 2023. Apart from SoftBank, US private equity firm TPG and PremjiInvest, the private investment arm of Wipro’s Azim Premji, are among the backers of FirstCry.
The company received regulatory approval for the IPO last month after refiling its preliminary documents. It raised Rs 1,666 crore by issuing new shares in the IPO while SoftBank, TPG, PremjiInvest and Indian PE firm ChrysCapital sold some of their stake, worth a total of about Rs 2,528 crore.
The parent company of Unicommerce is AceVector Ltd. It was earlier known as Snapdeal Ltd, the e-commerce company founded by Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.
Snapdeal acquired a majority stake in Unicommerce in 2015 in a cash-and-stock transaction. It tried selling Unicommerce to Infibeam in 2018, but the negotiations were called off as certain conditions were not fulfilled in the stipulated period.
SoftBank joined Unicommerce’s cap table in November 2021 with an investment of around Rs 111.6 crore. While the firm has partially sold its stake previously, it still owns about 29.23% after the pre-IPO transaction. Post the IPO, this may be reduced to half. SoftBank generated benchmark returns from the partial exit in Unicommerce, VCCircle reported earlier this month.
