PayPal is about to buy Stakes in Freecharge

An Online Payment gaint PayPal is in Talks with Indian Online Payment Wallet Freecharge.com to buy 25% of its Share.

25% Stake would be somewhere around $200million.

As per one of the report  PayPal’s initial offer was for a 51% stake in FreeCharge. But Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp, the largest shareholder in Snapdeal, is not keen to divest a majority stake and may sell 20-25% in FreeCharge.

Freecharge was founded in 2010 by Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon, which is a Online Payment based Solution for Recarge and other Online Transactions.

The move could heat up competition in the online payments industry in India that has received a boost in recent weeks with the government invalidating old high-denomination currency notes and driving the move towards a cashless economy.

Paypal has already done an Aggressive move by filing a Case against Alibaba-backed digital wallet company Paytm for copyright infringement, saying it “slavishly adopted” the two-tone blue colour scheme of PayPal in its entirety in its logo.

While PayPal has hired Goldman Sachs as an advisor, Jasper Infotech is being counselled by Deutsche Bank. Snapdeal’s head of mergers and acquisitions Abhishek Kumar and Jasper Infotech Founder Kunal Bahl are leading the deal.

This move may help Freecharge and Snapdeak to reach out Indian and International market very easily.This news came just after Snapdeal move to Cash on Door.

 Paytm was founded in 2010 as a prepaid mobile recharge website by One97 Communications, a company founded to provide mobile value-added services (such as cricket scores through text messages). It launched a digital wallet in 2014. Since then, Alibaba Group of China and its affiliate Ant Financial Services Group have invested more than $680 million in the company, becoming its largest shareholders. The company’s founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma was also awarded a payments bank licence by the Reserve Bank of India, and the Paytm payments bank will likely launch in early 2017.

In October, The Economic Times reported that SoftBank was in talks to invest up to $150-200 million in Freecharge along with other investors.

The report said that the transaction would value the company at around $900 million to $1 billion.

“While there were a few more financial investors ready to invest in Freecharge, what makes PayPal’s offer interesting is that it comes with global experience and know-how,” said the first person.

Referred:knowstartup