New Delhi: The board of online marketplace Snapdeal has given the go-ahead to the company to continue negotiations to sell itself to Flipkart, which had increased its buyout offer to $850 million last week, three people familiar with the matter said.
The development implies that Snapdeal’s largest investor SoftBank Group Corp. has won the boardroom battle against two other investors and Snapdeal founders, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, both of whom wanted to sell the company to Infibeam Inc. or stay independent.
Snapdeal and Flipkart will start negotiations on Monday to finalise a sales and purchase agreement (SPA), the people cited above said. An SPA is a contract that will bind the two companies to conclude the deal.
Snapdeal will then call for a shareholders’ meeting to get the deal approved by all of them, the people said. It has more than 25 institutional shareholders as well as dozens of individual part-owners.
SoftBank has already reached out to smaller shareholders in Snapdeal to seek their approval on the current terms of the deal, one of the three people said.
Read More- Mint