Mumbai: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has acquired a minority stake in Indian property start-up PropTiger.com for $30 million (Dh110 million), marking the media group’s largest investment in the country and the latest in a series of deals in India’s fast-growing eCommerce sector.
The deal marks the first of a series of investments, according to Raju Narisetti, News Corp’s senior vice-president for strategy.
“We see a big digital opportunity in India, where digital use is booming and demographics are favourable, and this is the first stage of that,” he said. “I would look at it as the beginning of several things we would do in the future.”
News Corp picked up a-25 per cent-holding-in Elara Technologies, the parent of the website, which provides information on India’s growing but fragmented and formidably complex market for newbuild residential property.
Online property listings is the latest Indian eCommerce sector to attract attention from global investors, as excitement over new funding rounds for larger retail technology groups such as Flipkart and Snapdeal cascades down to smaller start-ups in more niche markets.
The deal also underlines News Corp’s continued push for digital expansion, following the $950 million purchase in September of Move, the owner of US-based property website Realtor.com. The company has a long-time majority holding in Australia’s realestate.com.au, and a stake in iProperty, which operates in south east Asia.
In 2013, Murdoch split News Corp into a newspaper and publishing group, and the newly-created 21st Century Fox, a faster-growing broadcast and entertainment business.
21st Century Fox has extensive and rapidly-expanding interests in India, ranging from its Star television channels and a Bollywood movie studio to stakes in newly-launched leagues for sports including football and kabaddi, a traditional Indian variant of wrestling.
The residual NewsCorp has a smaller operation, however, including its Dow Jones news wire and the Indian branch of publisher Harper Collins.
India’s digital consumer market is growing rapidly, with an online population approaching 300 million and a surge in smartphone sales, leading many analysts to predict that Indian eCommerce businesses will now follow the rapid growth shown by Chinese companies such as Alibaba and Baidu.
A number of new companies are vying to shake-up India’s market for home buying, which is traditionally dominated by local brokers, with patchy and unreliable housing information online.
SoftBank of Japan reportedly earlier this month led a $100 million investment round into Housing.com, another start-up.
Numerous other sectors are also benefiting from the influx of capital. Last week Zomato, an India-based online restaurant guide which also operates in the UK, announced a $60 million funding round involving Indian technology group Info Edge and Silicon Valley venture fund Sequoia Capital, valuing Zomato at $660 million.
News Corp said customers had invested at least $1 billion buying more than 10,000 properties through PropTiger since the site’s launch in 2011.
— Financial Times
