At the company’s town hall meeting, founder and CEO Vidit Atre said the Meta platform and SoftBank-backed Meesho are working on becoming Ebitda-positive by mid-2023 before going public.
Meesho is likely to list in India, given that US markets are crowded, and it will be in an advantageous position with its unique business model as investors have more options around listed e-commerce businesses.
A recording of the meeting obtained by VC Circle showed aggressive plans to turn EBITDA positive. “We must put all of our efforts into a public listing. If we achieve EBITDA profitability, we can achieve successful listings.”
Ebitda is short for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.
Atre was also looking at dual listing on the lines of Infosys and HDFC, which are listed in both India and the US.
He added that Meesho will focus on gaining a large market share in India and should add a billion users, and not look at overseas expansion, noting that India’s retail market is likely to reach $1 billion. , They said.
Refuting reports of lack of funding, Atre said the company still has more than half what it was last year. The move to go public is about scale, not a lack of funding, he said, citing SEA Group’s Shopee’s success in raising public market capital for expansion.
Atre said the market is no longer profitable as compared to profits and the next phase of Meesho’s journey will be profit-oriented.
Meesho’s seller partners are mostly from tier-II cities, while it targets customers in smaller cities. About half of its sales come from apparel, apart from selling jewellery, kitchen appliances, footwear and groceries. The startup has 700,000 sellers on the platform and 125 million monthly active users.
Founded in 2015 by Atre and Sanjeev Barnwal, both IIT Delhi alumni, Meesho started out as a social commerce firm and is in the process of moving towards e-commerce. It competes with the likes of DealShare and CityMall. In April, it laid off about 200 employees and revamped its grocery workspace to reduce redundancy as part of a cost-cutting exercise.
In 2021, Meesho raised over $870 million in two tranches from Fidelity, SoftBank and B Capital, and was valued at $4.9 billion in September 2021.
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