Tencent acquires stake in Flipkart From Binny Bansal

Chinese tech giant Tencent has bought a stake worth $264 million in Walmart owned Flipkart from its co founder Binny Bansal through its European subsidiary. The transaction was completed on October 26 2021. However it was shared with government authorities at the beginning of this financial year. Flipkart is registered in Singapore and has operations in India only. Bansal now holds about 1.84 % in Flipkart after selling part of his stake to Tencent Cloud Europe BV. Walmart acquisition of Flipkart for $16 billion in 2018 not only provided blockbuster exits to its investors but also turned the founders sachin and binny bansal into billionaires. Both Sachin as well as Binny are now active in the Indian startup ecosystem, backing several of the promising startups through their personal funds and family offices. Chinese investors such as Alibaba, Tencent, xiaomi are also active in the Indian startup space, and have collectively invested billions of dollars. Tencent has invested over 2 billion dollars in Indian startups since 2016. India is considering easing scrutiny on certain foreign direct investments after rules mainly aimed at China created a bottleneck for inflows.