Things are looking good for one of South Africa’s biggest ecommerce players — Takealot. According to a TechCrunch report, the site has just secured a staggering US$100-million from Tiger Global Management.
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The site was founded in the 2002 as Take2, but was later relaunched as Takealot in 2010 by Tiger Global Management and CEO Kim Reid. Takealot offers an extensive range of locally supplied and imported books, DVDs, music, games, electronics and toys with delivery to your doorstep.
This investment is a major coup in the South African tech scene. But if you think the ecommerce site is about to go on a buying spree with its new found millions, you would be wrong.
“We have no acquisition plans,” CEO Kim Reid told Ventureburn. “We are focussed on South Africa,” he said. He then went on to say that the company wants to continue to grow organically and the new round of investment will help with the company’s continued growth.
The CEO said that the company had no plans for an immediate expansion outside South Africa but did concede that it does have plans for “aggressive growth”.
“We are thinking about Sub-Saharan Africa, but I can’t really say much about that right now. And it won’t be happening for a while. We want to grow the business in South Africa before expanding outside the country.”
In 2012 Takealot acquired a majority stake in delivery company Mr Delivery to launch its same-day delivery service in major cites. Reid commented that both companies “work extremely” closely to ensure that customers get a great service.
One aspect that Reid said that this new round of funding would be utilised for is technology. He said that Takealot would be “pushing technology” into the business by way of root optimisation and tracking to ensure that the company has more control over the deliveries.
Tiger Global and Takealot have enjoyed a long relationship since late 2010, early 2011, when it was stealthy scooped up what seem to be a major ecommerce buying spree by Tiger.
Tiger holds a stake in the South Africa’s largest online auctions site, Bid or Buy, as well as other key online properties such as Private Property, the largest online property portal, travel bookings site SafariNow and online payment and fulfilment site PayFast.
On the international front, the multi-billion dollar US-based hedge fund has also invested substantial sums of money in the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn.
