Indian eyewear retailer Lenskart is a joint venture between Japan’s Ondays Inc. is buying a majority stake in the company, making it Asia’s largest online retailer of eyewear. The Indian startup, backed by SoftBank Group, said it has agreed to buy OnDaze shares owned by El Caterton Asia and Mitsui & Co Principal Investments.
According to a Bloomberg report, the Japanese chain is valued at around $400 million in this deal. Ondays will operate as a separate brand under the leadership of co-founders Shuji Tanaka and Take Umiyama, but will target the premium segment, while Lenskart focuses on medium and large market segments, he said. lenscarto OnDase will own a majority stake but the deal is designed as a merger.
The acquisition will expand Lenskart’s presence to 13 markets in Asia, including Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Japan.
Tokyo-headquartered Ondays was founded in 1989 and opened its first overseas store in 2013. It currently operates 460 stores in a dozen countries in addition to Japan.
“About 4.5 billion people worldwide need to wear prescription glasses, but only half of them do,” said Piyush Bansal, 38, co-founder and CEO of Lenskart at Bloomberg. “We’re looking at $100 billion to $50 billion.” Billions of opportunities and a real chance to build Amazon for eyewear.”
Bansal estimates that Lenskart should reach profitability when sales reach $400 million in the year ending March 2023. He said the two companies planned for combined sales of $650 million in that period. Lenskart, which was established in 2010, is the leading e-commerce portal for eyewear in India which grew 65% last year and is projected to surpass it this year.
Bansal graduated in engineering from McGill University in Montreal and worked at Microsoft Corp’s headquarters before returning to India. He co-founded Lenskart Solutions Pvt Ltd in 2010 in the dusty, industrial city of Faridabad outside New Delhi, along with three others he met on LinkedIn.
Bansal said a public listing for the newly enhanced Lenskart is at least 36 months away. The company is now building the world’s largest eyewear manufacturing plant in the North-West of Delhi. Bansal said the $150 million factory will ship 50 million pairs of eyewear annually.
(with inputs from Bloomberg)