NEW DELHI, June 4
US-based asset management company Baron Capital has marked up the fair value of its stake in food delivery platform Swiggy by about 25% to $109.2 million as of March 31, from $87.2 million in the preceding quarter, as per its latest quarterly report. This puts Swiggy’s valuation at $15.1 billion, 25% higher than Baron’s previous valuation of $12.1 billion.
In the March quarter, Swiggy was among the top ten holdings in Baron Capital’s emerging markets fund, which also has Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC, Samsung Electronics, Tencent Holdings, Alibaba Group, along with India’s Reliance Industries and Bharti Airtel, among others. In the March quarter report, the investment firm noted that Swiggy, India’s leading food delivery platform, enjoys a market share of roughly 45%. The company’s shares were up during the quarter, driven by increasing penetration of food delivery in India and improving profitability, it said.
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“We retain conviction as we believe India’s food delivery industry is still in its infancy and will continue to scale over the next several years, driven by a growing middle class, rising disposable income, higher smartphone penetration, and a structural shift in consumer preference to a tech-savvy younger population,” the firm said.
Following Baron’s valuation markup in December, Swiggy’s other investor US-based asset management company Invesco also marked up the company’s value by 19% to $12.7 billion, in a third straight markup by the investment firm.
Both Invesco and Baron Capital were a part of Swiggy’s fund raising round of $700 million in January 2022, and hold stakes of around 2% each.
Baron Capital had bought into that round as a fresh investor with $76.7 million. Swiggy’s latest valuation of $15.1 billion still lags behind that of listed rival Zomato’s at nearly $18.6 billion.
As for the troubled edtech firm Byju’s, Baron Capital slashed the fair value of its investment by 99.2% to $120,779 as of March 31, from $15.4 million in the preceding quarter. The asset manager had invested in the company in 2021 through two of its funds – Baron Global Advantage Fund and Baron Emerging Markets Fund.
In its latest quarterly filing, the investment firm has recognised a final write down of its investment in Byju’s. “Weak performance was driven by a marked slowdown in business momentum as Covid-related tailwinds that benefited online/digital education have begun to dissipate,” Baron Capital had written in the December report.
Byju’s was recently seeking a valuation of $200 million, a sharp fall from the peak valuation of $22 billion. In the June quarter of last year, Baron had slashed Byju’s valuation by to $11.7 billion, from $21.2 billion in the preceding quarter.
