MUMBAI: Indian ecommerce giant  Flipkart  -owned by  US retail major Walmart - has a new minority shareholder. India’s monopolies  and fair trade watchdog, the Competition Commission of India, on 26 November, gave the green signal to Alphabet's subsidiary Shoreline International Holdings LLC to acquire a stake in it. Shoreline International Holdings is a wholly-owned offshoot  of Alphabet,  Google’s parent company. It is a holding firm and does not own or operate any Google products or services.

"The proposed transaction comprises an investment through subscription of shares of Flipkart Pvt Ltd (Target) by Shoreline International Holdings LLC (acquirer) and an arrangement between an affiliate of the acquirer and the target's subsidiary for the provision of certain services," the regulator said in a release.

Flipkart mainly  offers wholesale cash and carry operations and runs marketplace-based e-commerce platforms to facilitate trade between customers and sellers in India. 

In 2023, Flipkart had started a funding round of close to a billion  Us dollars which included $350 million from Google and around $600 million from Walmart. The agreement with Google also included, according to reports, access to its cloud services which would allow it expand its digtal infrastructure further. With that its valuation had risen to $36 billion and it said it would use the money to expand into quick commerce and other fintech ventures.

85 per cent owned by Walmart, Flipkart will probably move towards an IPO in the not-too-distant future, as it is something which the Binny Bansal and Sachin Bansal-founded firm has been thinking about for sometime.