Indian Start Up Story Gets a Push with Chinese Funds

Indian start ups are getting flush with Chinese funds. Recently ride sharing service OLA raised $50 million for more than 1%  stake, at a valuation of $4.3 billion from two Chinese investors – Sailing Capital, a Hong-Kong based private equity firm and China Eurasian Economic Co-operation fund, a state backed Chinese investment fund.

Flipkart Internet raised $4.6billions in funding from Singapore based Flipkart marketplace for 1.5 millions of Class A equity shares.

Indian digital payments firm PayTM was infused with $300 millions from Berkshire Hathaway, which raised the firm’s valuation to $10 billions.

Apart from the above – investments are flowing from Chinese funds across a broad range of sectors including Healthcare, Fintech, E-commerce, Transportation and Logistics.

 

Big Players who Rule the Indian Credit and Debit Card Sector

Considering it is the second largest country in the world with a huge consumer base, one would naturally assume that there will be a large number of providers for retail payments.

Surprisingly the retail payments system is ruled by only a handful of providers.

In the credit cards category, large banks HDFC, SBI, ICICI, AXIS and CITIBANK control about 28.99 million cards. That is over 75% of  total 36.24 millions cards in circulation.

In the debit cards category, 846.7 million cards are in circulation (January 2018 data). SBI dominates the category with over 279 million debit cards issued., followed by PNB (61.9m), BOI (53.1m), Bank of Baroda (51.9m) and Canara Bank (42.9m).