Online retailer Snapdeal is unlikely to acquire ShopClues after a due diligence process revealed that the smaller rival had significant pending liabilities, media reports said.
SoftBank-backed Snapdeal had been considering buying ShopClues in an all-stock deal valued around $200-250 million.
However, the due diligence found that ShopClue owed a significant amount to vendors, according to The Times of India and The Hindu Business Line.
The reports, which cited unnamed sources, said ShopClues also recorded a steep fall in the number of orders and that many senior executives have quit the company in recent months.
The Hindu Business Line said that, the total outstanding of ShopClues would be $40-50 million, including tax liabilities.
In a separate report, The Press Trust of India reported that ShopClues was exploring options with other platforms, though these were in early stages.
Both Snapdeal and ShopClues have raised a large amount in funding from investors; both count Nexus Venture Partners as a common investor. But they are now valued far lower than their peak levels as they struggled to compete with Flipkart and Amazon.
ShopClues had an estimated value of $1.1 billion in 2017 while Snapdeal was valued as much as $6.5 billion. ShopClues last raised Rs 110 crore in funding from existing investors GIC and Unilazer Ventures in August 2018.
Meanwhile, JSW Energy Ltd is scouting for stressed power plants near coal mines to boost its thermal generation capacity, chief executive Prashant Jain told Mint.
The power generation arm of the Sajjan Jindal-led JSW group is looking to grow inorganically because there’s excess capacity in the sector that is stressed, he said.
JSW Energy is among those bidding for Ind-Barath Energy Utkal, an under-construction 700 MW coal-fired power plant in Odisha, the report said.
In June 2018, the company had submitted a bid for Monnet Power, which runs a coal-based plant of 1,050 MW in Odisha. In 2016, JSW acquired a 1,000 megawatt thermal power plant in Chhattisgarh from Jindal Steel for Rs 6,500 crore.
