PRA 2nd Quarter Newsletter 2013 April-June 2013 | Page 9

The Asian e-commerce industry is attracting growing investment, although companies operating in the sector are
seeing only modest growth in their value. According to
CB Insights, Asian e-commerce companies have attracted
US$6.9 billion across 383 deals from venture capitalists
since 2010. India and China have been the largest markets
for activity.
India has seen over 150 e-commerce deals since 2010 with
25 deals coming in 2013 already. Well-funded India-based
companies include Amazon competitor Flipkart and
eBay-backed Snapdeal. Meanwhile, mega-deals to companies including 360buy.com and 55tuan.com saw Chinese
e-commerce companies rake in US$4.8 billion from investors since 2010.
The most consistently large area of investment across Asia
has been to apparel and accessories which has consistently
taken one of four deals. Large deals to the likes of Rocket
Internet-backed Zalora and China-based Moonbasa are
among the more well-funded Asia-based apparel focused
e-tailers.Tiger Global Management is the most active investor in Asia’s e-commerce sector. The top five is rounded
out by Accel Partners, Intel Capital, Sequoia Capital and
IDG. Tiger is doing deals across Asia but a vast majority of
their e-commerce investment activity is in India.

and are almost 50 per cent of exits in 2012 and 2013 todate.
Sixty per cent of Asia’s e-commerce exits with disclosed
valuations have been for less than US$50 million. The
largest exits were to companies like China-based DangDang and VIPshop and India-based MakeMyTrip which
all IPO’d. China-based LightInTheBox also went public
last month.
The poor valuations of Asia e-commerce companies to
date, coupled with the high degree of short interest in