Unicommerce’s recent acquisition of Shipway could give it a big opportunity of over Rs 4,000 crore, according to MD and CEO Kapil Makhija. “We haven’t done a detailed external study, but our internal assessment suggests that the market is roughly Rs 3,800-4,300 crore annually, which is a large opportunity, he said.
The acquisition aligns with the company’s vision to become a one-stop shop for e-commerce enablement, allowing it to expand its product suite to include solutions for courier aggregation, shipping automation and returns reduction.
“We now have solutions across the e-commerce value chain and we get access to nearly 3,000 customers of Shipway to whom we can cross-sell our existing products,” Makhija told FE.
The company continues to pursue discussions with companies in the segment for acquisitions. The idea is to opt for white spaces that may take longer to build in-house and are available at a good valuation.
Unicommerce onboarded over 85 clients in Q1FY25 and over 100 enterprise clients in Q2 and continues to aggressively expand that trajectory. “We continue to onboard both established as well as upcoming brands, because we have solutions to straddle across the entire scale,” he said. The second growth lever will come from product expansion and the third from international expansion.
The objective is to go deeper within Southeast Asia and West Asia. The two geographies are quite similar to India in terms of their buying behaviour and their pain points. “The good part is that our core product is already ready. We just have to make incremental investments in terms of just getting the local integrations in place,” Makhija said.
At the same time, the company will take care not to spread itself too thin and will only focus on these geographies for some time. The long-term vision includes becoming a one-stop shop for e-commerce enablement while delivering consistent growth, expanding profitability and delivering long-term value to its shareholders. “We also want to continue to demonstrate that you can actually build a large business out of the Indian landscape and hopefully inspire the next set of entrepreneurs to focus more and more on India,” he said.
The CEO believes that the company has operating leverage with a large portion of its revenues going to its bottom line. This ensures consistent revenue without a proportionate increase in costs. The product, he said, is a sticky one. “Once a customer or a brand adopts this product, it’s a marriage of a lifetime. We don’t have to spend over and over again in acquiring a new brand,” he said.
The e-commerce SaaS company reported an operating revenue of Rs 29 crore for the quarter ended September, up from Rs 26 crore a year ago. Net profit increased by 21% to Rs 4.4 crore and total income stood at Rs 30 crore.
The company has an annual run rate of 930 million+ transactions, which is around 20-25% of India’s total e-commerce dropship volumes. “Shareholders have appreciated the fact that we have steadily built a business that can be viewed as an index to e-commerce,” Makhija said.
The SaaS startup, listed on the stock exchanges on August 6 to raise Rs 276 crore from the public market, is the second most-subscribed IPO of 2024.
Unicommerce was founded in 2012 by Ankit Pruthi, Karun Singla and Vibhu Garg and was backed by Nexus Venture Partners and Snapdeal founders. Today, the firm has more than 3550+ clients, including Zivame, Mamaearth, Lenskart, Fabindia, SUGAR Cosmetics, and boAt. It offers end-to-end e-commerce solutions such as warehousing, order management and shipment tracking.