Will Strategic Acquisition of Free charge revive Axis Bank from Declining Profits?

Strategic Acquisitions have become the order of the day in the recent corporate world. Corporate Players who estimate their future survival in the market through current earnings, investor’s confidence and changing customer base are becoming prudent enough to strategize their investments in highly probable winning deals.

Axis Bank which is reputed as India’s third largest private lender is no exception to this. The bank has been choking to sustain its profit margins with increasing bad loan provisions which had resulted in a steep decline of its asset value. As a cascading impact, the bank had ended up reporting 16.06% decline in net earnings in the first quarter of the year despite a marginal increase in the top line revenue by 1.45% during the same quarter of last year. The lender’s asset quality has also worsened by a steep increase in Gross Non Performing Assets (NPA) to 5.03% during FY17 Q1 compared to 2.54% for the same quarter of previous year. The market has instantly reacted to this discouraging trend of financial performance by 3% fall in stock prices on the same day which reflects the loss of investor’s trust.

However, the Board has now come with a new strategy of venturing and broadening their presence into the digital space by acquiring Snapdeal’s ‘Free Charge’. The Bank was desperate to close this deal as they have offered an attractive price compared to ‘PayTm’ which was also competing to acquire this asset. This deal also gives a big sigh of relief to Free Charge’s parent, ‘Snapdeal’, which is already in talks for selling itself to its rival ‘Flipkart’ due to its declining fortune since the beginning of this year and struggling for independent survival. Free Charge was acquired by Snapdeal in early 2015 for $ 400 million. However, it has now been sold to Axis Bank at a massively discounted valuation of 85% at $ 59 million (384 Crores INR).

This clearly indicates a strategic acquisition with great anticipated outcomes. Axis Bank would get a popular digital payment brand backed up by a high-quality technology platform, which can be leveraged towards tapping into current market opportunities that are booming in the digital space. The benefits of this acquisition will begin to bear fruit in the next couple of years. Another big competitive advantage which the bank would gain on this acquisition is access to small value transactions and Utility Bill Payments which are the key customer service segments of Free Charge.

It is also quite rational to think that the Bank already has a significant presence in the Digital Space through ‘Axis Pay’ and there was no need for the acquisition. However, the digital market of India is in its boom days buoyanced by the ‘Demonetization’ Move of the Government last year. Telecom Giants like ‘Reliance Jio’ have further intensified this growth by their rapid penetration into the Digital markets by making Internet Connectivity as the common man’s amenity in India. A recent survey published in ‘The Economic Times’ on 27^th May’17 says that the Debit Card transactions have surged to 1 billion at Point of Sales of merchant locations in January 2017 compared to 817 million during the same time last year against the ATM transactions which was almost static at 700 million. This clearly substantiates the fact that the Indian Economy is rapidly shifting towards ‘Digital Cashless Mode’ and people prefer to make more cashless payments compared to cash transactions. It has also been evidenced by the annual report (2016-17) of Axis bank that the bank had reported 66% share of digital transactions in India in FY17 Q4 compared to 51% during last year. Also, the spends on Credit/Debit Cards of Axis Bank have increased to 47% in 2016-17.

Image Source – Annual Report of 2016-17 (Axis Bank)

The above facts and figures substantiate that this acquisition is a focused strategy of Axis Bank towards an inorganic expansion into the Digital Payment Space without duplicity of efforts on the customer acquisition and emerging as a ‘Key Contributor’ to the ‘Digital India’ drive amongst the BFSI Sector. The appetite of the market is so large that the bank cannot afford to spend time and resources on building a new platform from scratch, rather it is wise to leverage the market opportunities as a forerunner amidst other competitive market players. The integration of Free charge with Axis Pay would further increase the ease of the payment by the customers as Axis Bank already has a mobile wallet ‘LIME’ which has been interfaced for UPI Payments with Axis Pay.

The bank also needs to focus on retaining the acquired customers by offering them loyalty programs and cross selling products by understanding their needs. As per one of the updates that was given by Free charge late last year, the number of registered users on its platform has peaked at 30 million and 20% of them for utility bill payments. Also, the market leader ‘PayTm’ claims to have 122 million active users and hosts 90 million transactions per month on its platform. The other rival ‘Mobikwik’ has reported 35 million users and 45 million monthly transactions during the same period last year. Also, a market research throws light on the fact that India’s Digital Payment Segment has handled almost 600 million transactions in the year 2015-16 whose mean economic value rising to 400-450 INR.

Another ray of hope is that the digital payments industry in India is expected to grow by 10 times to $500 billion by the year 2020 as per the recent study by Google and Boston Consulting Group. It also predicts that more than 50% of India’s Internet users are likely to use digital payments by 2020, and the top 100 million users are likely to drive 70% of digital payments by value. If the above mentioned promising predictions turn into reality, Axis Bank can significantly tap this humungous market opportunity with its unique ‘FinTech’ flavor and competencies.  This would eventually pour in into its revenue bucket and would help the bank with some breathing air to compensate for its massive bad debt provisions eating into their bottom line, while RBI figures out a sustaining solution for increasing menace of NPAs. Though this was primarily aimed at market penetration, the bank can think of stepping into other niche products in digital space apart from payment service based on the customers’ expectations and demands. This acquisition would be the first step for building a better brand equity for the bank and an opportunity to explore and serve more customers as a ‘Digital Player’.

 

Author: Yogesh Sundararajan

PGDM, Class of 2018, Great Lakes, Gurgaon

Is a dot-com bubble shaping up in general merchandise retailing?

Internet business has definitely altered the way we shop but internet retailing will keep existing along with Brick and Mortar shops in future. Yes, “along with it”, as people will always have socializing needs as well as convenience of shopping online. I predict that brick and mortar shops will soon convert into something like life-style-shops, where people will come to have socializing time in an ambience and environment that will allow them spend quality time along with shopping goods with confidence of touch and feel. For example, there might be Mid-size or large cafes having a small-boutique store inside with a classy-touch so that women can shop while their husbands can sit down, sip a cup of exotic coffee or play games on a play station (A large-scale existing model of this is malls with shopping stores along with food and gaming stores; such models may change but will not erode away) and socialize with other people around in many ways. There can be ways to incentivize customers to socialize, network with people and refer their “experience” further; this can induce exponential demand. The whole idea is about creating user-experience because people don’t just buy products/services now…. they buy experience, whether its offline or online.

I would be delving into the internet retailing business in India to see if it’s another bubble-burst in making, more so for the top-three players that claim 70% of the market share in India viz. Amazon, Flipkart & Snapdeal and analyze who stand to win.  Among these three Amazon seems to be pacing much faster than other two. Each E-retailing company has its own strategy to increase its market share; What would help them to win would be business fundamentals rather than winning the “who-has-better-valuation-race” (based on some model, matrices and cash-flows in future….blah..blah …blah) While they are doing everything from price-slashing-discounts, Faster Delivery, exclusive tie-ups with brands, acquisitions to even backward integration in supply chain, the consumer is clearly able to get a different experience with every new move. Valuations can be subjective, over-optimistic or even completely off-the-track; what I would want to look at is whether this is again a bubble-bust scenario or is there some stability or sanity shaping in the online-retailing industry mostly driven by Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal.

As per industry report from various sources collated by Brand equity forum, Indian Retail Market is poised to grow at 12% per annum to about US$ 1 Trillion till year 2020 from US$ 600 billion in year 2015. Out of this B2C E-commerce is expected to reach US$ 102 billion by 2020 and US$ 220 billion (in terms of Gross Merchandise Value) and 530 million shoppers by 2025. Overall E-commerce market is expected to reach US$ 120 billion by 2020 supported by faster internet speeds and faster adoption of internet services along with increase in app-based customer base.

Brand equity

I strongly believe that any business proposition has to comply to established economic theories; Like how a country cannot keep printing its own currency at will, without substantial products, services & other fundamentals in the economy to back it up, any business also cannot be ascribed a value/assessed without strong fundamentals, products & services to back it up. Brand equity reflects a lot of these parameters as it also covers the perceived confidence of sellers and buyers. While recognition of a Brand as a performing brand, increasing market share and price inelasticity reflect a lot about brand equity, Online retailing industry is not yet  in a price controlling position (Can’t raise their margins, they don’t have any for that matter).

a) Customer’s Side

In B2C online retailing, Amazon has steadily increased its market share and has captured more than 1/3^rd of the market-share, whereas Flipkart and Snapdeal combined have nearly 40% market share. If we talk about most used apps the numbers are still high for Flipkart at 34% along with 11% for Myntra and 6% of Jabong that it already owns. Amazon is installed on 21% of the mobile devices, whereas snapdeal on 16%. Noticeably Amazon seems to have picked up at the app-installation figures since November 2015, the time when Flipkart decided upon the strategy to provide mobile-friendly site for direct browsing rather than from app.

b) Seller’s Side

An important point that I would make is that assessment of any online retailer from sellers’s point is as important as it is from customer’s perspective. As per the results from a study (Neilsen’s E-commerce Sellers study Q1 2016-Jan-March) highlighted by Business Standard, starting point to assess the brand equity  is the brand-recall for most sellers (Amazon-25%, Flipkart-21%, Snapdeal-20%), second is the overall awareness (Amazon-86%, Flipkart-82%, Snapdeal-20%.). Providing a favorable platform to sellers increases the brand equity of an online retailer manifolds.

Fundamentals

Tracxn Technologies Pvt. Ltd. Has its own list of Deadpool companies (online business) in India and has its own matrices (like shrinking team size, , suspended operations and decline in user traffic) to list them. This approach seems logical when we look at recent failures in e-commerce business like askmebazaar that suspended its operations due to lack of funds/Cash and  as reported, left 4000 employees jobless in August 2016 ,was looking out for a potential sell-out.  There have been many dead and walking dead companies in the Deadpool list of Tracxn. Looking at recent sell out of Jabong at much lesser a price than valuation (giving rise to a terminology called Jabonged) and downfall of askme bazaar there are new rounds of discussion on e-commerce bubble.

So simply building an online business & burning cash to achieve figures that help you to make it saleable (be it Plan A or Plan B) is a “well-planned-scam” under the daylight, atleast for the stakeholders (Investors, debtors, vendors, employees…..well not customer… they just have to download another app and shop like a boss). Though finance is fungible and the money can be rolled but there has to be enough cash to be rolled. A business that was not started with intent to run & sustain on its own constructs rather than just the mercy and so called loyalty of its customers is a scam as somebody is going to lose sooner or later. Abidali Neemuchwala, new CEO of Wipro (although from a different industry) interestingly said, in an interview for Mint, “I am not afraid about falling Revenue or profitability, I am excited about profitable growth, we will not buy revenue by sacrificing margins”. Most of the internet businesses focus on growth, expansion, revenues and await success that never happens. Simply put the business has to generate its own cash from margins. On contrary all online retailing companies (taken in this write-up) have negative profits.

In case of internet retailing there are lines of products mostly common across all companies (only Snapdeal, Flipkart & Amazon in this write-up) whereas services, value proposition & operations would definitely vary as per their own common or mutually exclusive strategies because each one of them is trying to differentiate & win maximum market share whether it is volumes, Revenues, Product segments etc. So to have a pulse of the industry and see which company is going which direction, we should look for their past & present operations as well as current strategies that have futuristic approach or scope for profits as well.

FLIPKART

• Flipkart has acquired Myntra and Jabong that have already been leaders in apparel retailing and it is going for strong private brand tie-ups (like how Myntra’s 25% revenue comes through Roadster, Mast & Harbour and Dressberry). HRX by Hrithik Roshan is a lifestyle & sports clothing brand (and some accessories) which is soon going to tie up with Flipkart (Flipkart is targeting the majority stake)
• As per a report by A.T. Kearney and Google; fashion is expected to be dominantly, the largest product category in online retailing by 2020. Fashion segment offers much fatter margins viz a viz books and electronics and in fashion, private brand tie-ups reap larger margins than third party.
• Flipkart is much ahead than everybody else when it comes to fashion segment (with 12 private brands of Myntra). As per a commentary by EY, having private brand tie-ups helps a company learn about merchandising and branding giving them better negotiation power with external brands. Flipkart is aggressively trying to improve in this segment as it offers fat margins and may help them become profitable.

AMAZON

• Amazon is consistently improving on Revenue and market share and surpassed Flipkart in gross sales in July
• Amazon is catching up well in Smartphone segment with Flipkart while it is already a leader in book sales.
• Amazon is coming up with its fulfillment centers in Chennai, Coimbatore, Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai with a total of 5.5 Million square feet storage space (adding to 2.5 million sq-ft. already existing over 21 centers in various states in Gujarat, Haryana, Rajasthan, Delhi, Punjab, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Tamilnadu, Telangana, West Bengal) for sellers which shall bring down their fixed costs. This strategy as per my opinion is going to have double impact for Amazon as it will get products at real lower rates (bringing down storage/logistics cost for sellers, also building closer association with them-80% of sellers on amazon use its fulfillment service) and consumers will keep getting lower rates on Amazon with faster delivery (two important factors in user experience). This strategy will have a strong backward integration advantage and strong geographical hold across India in supply chain.
• Amazon Prime is a paid service that gives customer a faster delivery (1 or 2 days). This has seen success in US and other markets. But Indian consumers want more than just the faster delivery. However even a small part of the 50 million user base can be enough to give benefits.
• Fulfillment center and Amazon Prime combined can help Amazon do away with discounts. Any company that can build a strategy around this idea will eventually see the sustainable success (profitable growth). Amazon seems to have taken a formidable position.
• AmazonBasics (by cloudtail India pvt. Ltd.) brand selling headphones, charging cables, bags and various other accessories contributes more than 40% of its business and is set to expand it substantially this year (2016)
• Have aggressive plans in private label offering in electronics accessories, groceries and fashion segments. If this happens they can take Flipkart head-on.

SNAPDEAL

• While GMV (Gross Merchandise Value-Value of goods sold on an online-marketplace company) has remained a dominant metric to monitor the growth, Snapdeal-CEO, Kunal Bahl said Snapdeal is focusing on net revenue rather than GMV. It has cut down discounts and cost of advertisements; helps fight cash-crunch situation.
• Snapdeal has diversified portfolio wherein it has FreeCharge (mobile recharge), Shopo, Vulcan, Gojavas, Rupee power (online financial services platform), exclusively (luxury ecommerce site) etc. in its basket.
• Shopo is a market place for sellers of handicraft products (with zero-commission in revenue, just a fee). It has seen good amount of success with one lakh sellers onboard in just nine months. Shopo can be a promising online shop for small businesses with logistics (connects to logistics companies) and payments tools (freecharge) embedded.
• Vulcanexpress and Gojavas were conceptualized by snapdeal to compete with its rivals flipkart and Amazon as having in-house logistics is more economical for marketplace companies (it makes logistics reliable & scalable) but snapdeal was late to do this and has faced problems with these two ventures.
• Freecharge has much younger customer-base 18 to 25 years (age-bracket), with 10 million app-install-base. Snapdeal has a app-install-base of 20 million and its customers belong to 25 to 35 years age-bracket.
• While Snapdeal seems to have taken a diversified approach, success is yet to be seen in these ventures as well and focus will be shared on all such ventures, whereas its rivals are focusing to improvise on lesser diversified models.

Conclusion

The financials available for the online-retailing companies (on public forums and platforms) do not give a veritable insight. However, I have tried to track the fundamentals and strategies being followed by the major players in the industry.  While Amazon and Flipkart seem to have taken the formidable position of top-two players over last one year, Snapdeal despite its move to focus on profitable growth, is losing market share and its strategy doesn’t seem too focused. Snapdeal is trying to grab everything it can, Flipkart is much focused on its most profitable segment, Amazon has a sound approach of wooing both customers and sellers on its market place and is working towards weaning off the discounts. My personal opinion is that Amazon and Flipkart can be the last survivors with profitable growth. Snapdeal and other players may lose the game. It’s a boom-bust situation for everybody else than Amazon and Flipkart.

Disclaimer: This study is based on use of data from private company database, newspaper articles and internet-trends. The data collated through different sources like “similarweb” etc. have been duly credited to and are indicative in nature. The author doesn’t claim any ownership or the veracity of figures mentioned. The ideas that have been borrowed have been duly credited and other self-proposed ideas are inconsequential and meant only for the academic-engagements of the institute.

Author : Gaurav Chauhan

Senior Research Fellow, Great Lakes

Sapience 2013 – Annual Management Conclave

Great Lakes Institute of Management, Gurgaon held its Annual Management Conclave ‘Sapience – 2013’ at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi on 23^rd September,2013. The Conclave was graced by Dr. Arvind Mayaram, Secretary Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Government of India, as the Keynote Speaker. The Conclave also saw 21 eminent industry leaders participating in panel discussions on key areas for growth and opportunities in this challenging economy.

India Smart Grid Forum (ISGF), Bridgei2i and Evalueserve were the knowledge partners for the Conclave and Mint the Media partner. The guests were welcomed by Mr. Mohan Lakhamraju, Vice Chairman – Great Lakes Institute of Management and Dr. Himadri Das, Director – Great Lakes Institute of Management, Gurgaon. 

Dr. Arvind Mayaram delivered the keynote address on the theme ‘Growth Drivers in a Stressed Economy’. With his vast experience as an administrator and as key economic policy maker,  Dr. Mayaram, focused on the key macroeconomic indicators related to the recent volatility seen in the markets, depreciation of the rupee, Current Account Deficit (CAD), Fiscal Deficit and Inflation. He said that on each of these indicators the situation is completely under control and that the Government has done its arithmetic and taken measures to rein these in. Dr. Mayaram expressed a strong belief that the growth would return to its potential level of 8 per cent on account of greater investments in the country and said the investments were likely to pick up because of the large projects that have been cleared by the Cabinet Committee on Investment. Most importantly, Dr. Mayaram was a harbinger of hope that things would get better in the future.

The keynote address was followed by four panel discussions by industry leaders on the four possible growth drivers for the Indian economy – Smart Grids, Natural Gas, Internet & Mobile and Analytics.  Each panel had 5-6 senior industry participants with one of them moderating the panel and each panel discussion was preceded by a presentation by a Great Lakes Gurgaon student to create a background of the discussion with a review of the state of the art.

The themes for the four panel discussions were on the plausible growth drivers in the current stressed environment. The first panel was on Smart Grids and its role in improving the travails in the stressed power distribution sector. This was followed by a panel discussion on Natural Gas, which is expected to help grow the energy sector through an increased presence in the national energy basket mix. The other two panel discussions were in relatively very new sectors as compared to power distribution and natural gas. One of them was on Internet and Mobile and the other was on Analytics. The Internet and Mobile panel discussed innovative business models that have been in play and more innovations to follow, which will disrupt the way products and services are delivered and consumed. The Analytics panel focused on a huge opportunity for India as a global hub for analyzing huge quantities of data to gain actionable business insights that can drive competitive advantage,

Topic 1: Smart Grids – Transforming power to optimize assets and resources

This panel focused on smart grids that can balance loads and shift demand to create smoother demand curves that are aligned with power supply. “Will power availability be a key driver of growth across sectors?” was the question which was answered by the panelists. The panel also discussed the need, practicality and challenges of implementing such schemes and opined that smart grids with a focus on demand response can shift peak demand to different times of the day to get a smoother load curve that is more aligned with power generation. The panel said that this would go a long way in alleviating the power shortages faced during peak demand and reduce the pressure on increasing generation capacity.

The panel comprised of Bridgit Hartland Johnson, Managing Director – Energie Dynamique, Anish De, CEO Asia – Mercados EMI, Chintan Soni, Co-founder and Director – Ecolibrium Energy, Girish Muley, General Manager (Solutions, Energy & Utilities) – IBM India Pvt. Ltd., Gopal Saxena, CEO – BSES Rajdhani Power and Vikram Gandotra, General Manager (Marketing) –  Siemens.

Topic 2: Natural Gas – Playing a bigger role in the energy mix for generation and consumption

The panel discussed the effect of the proposed domestic natural gas price increase on driving investments in exploration and production that would in turn increase the availability of domestic natural gas and change the energy mix in the country to a cleaner fuel basket. The panel also discussed the success and desirability of piped natural gas as a substitute for LPG cylinders.

The panel comprised of Utpal Bhaskar, Energy Editor – Mint, Deepak Mahurkar, Director and Leader (Oil & Gas) – PWC, Karunakaran Hari, Head (Commercial) – Cairn Energy India, Prabhat Singh, Director (Marketing) – GAIL and Vijay Duggal, DGM (Commercial) – BPCL.

Topic 3: Internet and Mobile – The channel of choice for young Indian consumers

The panel witnessed the discussion on young India’s growing appetite for consumption and its overwhelming preference for the internet and mobile as the platform of choice for everything from information to commerce to socializing. The panel discussed the evolution of the Internet and mobile space and the current large categories of search, classifieds, travel, e-commerce, and a whole plethora of social network centric business models and was of the opinion that the future of this sector was likely to witness disruptive business models driven by rich media, mobility, localization, and digital payment systems.

The panel comprised of Ankur Warikoo, Head – Groupon APAC, Anurag Saran, Vice President (Product) –  Yatra, Apurva Chiranewala, Head (Strategic Alliances) – Snapdeal, Vivek Jain, Executive Vice President (Naukri Product & Analytics) – Info Edge India Ltd and Sriram Jagannathan, CEO, AIrtel mCommerce Services (joined through Skype).

Topic 4: Analytics – India as the future global hub

The panel discussed the deluge of data facing businesses today, huge volumes of data coming in at a high velocity from a variety of sources – the dawn of big data. The panel was of the opinion that this presents a huge opportunity for analytics to deliver actionable insights from this data that could drive competitive advantage for companies. The paucity of trained professionals to exploit this opportunity was discussed as a key challenge.

The panel comprised of Sanjoy Roychowdhury, Vice President – Evalueserve, Anurag Verma, CEO – fnMathLogic, Ashish Sharma, Co-founder and Director – Bridge i2i, Raghu Yalamanchili, Associate Director – Mu Sigma and Sivaramakrishnan Narayanan, Partner (Business Analytics, GBS) – IBM.