India’s Ecommerce Ponzi Scheme Has Started to Unravel

flipkartA spate of newsreports in the recent past clearly show that Indian ecommerce companies are in trouble.

A newsreport on Moneycontrol.com points out: “With an aim to cut costs, struggling e-commerce firm Snapdeal is likely to downsize its team by around 1,300 employee.” This is around one-third of the company’s total workforce of 4,000 employees.

On the other hand, Flipkart has shutdown its courier service and hyperlocal delivery project, less than a year after launching it. There are other examples as well. The question is why are companies doing this? They are trying to cut down their costs and at the same time conserve on all the money they have raised from investors.

Over and above this, investors have made a spate of mark-downs to their investments in these firms. A January 27, 2017, newsreport on Reuters points out that Fidelity Investments has marked down its investment in Flipkart by around 36 per cent. In December 2016, Morgan Stanley, had marked down its investment in Flipkart by 38 per cent.

The Japanese investor Softbank recently marked down the combined value of its shareholding in Ola and Snapdeal by $475 million. What does all this mean? It essentially means that these investors do not accept these ecommerce firms to be as successful as they expected them to be in the past. And given this, they have been writing down the value of their investments.

In a column, I had written early last year I had called Indian ecommerce firms a Ponzi scheme. Of course, this had led to a lot of abuse on the social media and I was told that I do not understand the business model of these firms. I wrote what I did because I understood the business model of these firms. Allow me to explain.

A look at the profit and loss numbers of these firms will tell you that the losses of these firms go up at the same time as their revenue.  Take the case of the market major Flipkart. As a report in the Business Standard points out, for the financial year ending March 31, 2016, the losses of the firm stood at Rs 2,306 crore. The company’s losses for the year ending March 31, 2015, had stood at Rs 1,096 crore. Where did the revenue of the firm stand at? It jumped from Rs 772.5 crore to Rs 1,952 crore, during the same period.

Or take the case of Snapdeal run by Jasper Infotech Private Ltd. A report in the Mint points out that for the financial year ending March 31, 2016, the losses of the firm stood at Rs 3,316 crore. For the financial year ending March 31, 2015, the losses had stood at Rs 1,328 crore. During the same period, the revenue of the firm increased from Rs 933 crore to Rs 1,457 crore.

What sort of a business model is this—where the losses of a company go up at the same time as its revenue? In fact, in case of Snapdeal, the losses have gone up at a much faster rate than its revenue.

What explains this basic disconnect? As Gary Smith writes in Standard Deviations—Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics: “A dotcom company proved it was a player not by making money, but by spending money, preferably other people’s money… One rationale was to be the first-mover by getting big fast… The idea was that once people believe that your web site is the place to go to buy something, sell something, or learn something, you have a monopoly that can crush competition and reap profits.”

What was true about American dotcoms is also true about Indian ecommerce companies. This isn’t surprising given that many investors in Indian ecommerce firms are American.

I discovered Flipkart one day in 2009. Back then it was simply an online bookstore. It had a reasonably good collection of books. It even had books which bookstores did not. And the deliveries were on time.

What else did one want? Discounts. It had good discounts on offer as well. Hence, out went the bookstore and in came Flipkart. The loyalty was to discounts and nothing more. Sometime later, when other websites like Homeshop18 and even Amazon, started offering higher discounts, I moved to ordering from these websites.

Nevertheless, one did wonder, how would these websites ever get around to making money, given the huge discounts that they offered. The way businesses run traditionally it never makes any sense to sell a product below the cost all the time, because that way the business is never going to make any money.

But these websites did not fit into the traditional way of doing things. At least, that is way they thought. The best way to explain this is through the example of a telephone. As James Evans and Richard L. Schmalensee write in Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms: “A telephone was useless if nobody else had one. Even Bell and Watson started with two. A telephone was more valuable if a user could reach more people.”

The point being that more the number of people who had a telephone, more the number of people who would want to have a telephone. The economists call this the phenomenon of the direct network effect. This essentially means that more the number of people who are connected to any particular network, the more valuable it is to people who are already a part of it.

Take the case of app-based cab services. When they launched, they offered rock bottom rates. This was done to attract customers. Once customers came on board, it was easy to attract more and more drivers on to the network as well. And over a period of time, the price of these app based services has gone up.

Of course, it is not easy as I make it sound. But that is the basic logic. Then there are apps which deliver food from restaurants. They also offered discounts initially in order to build a critical mass of customers to be able to attract good restaurants on the platform.

As economist John Kay writes in Everlasting Last Bulbs—How Economics Illuminates the World: “The company that is first to create the largest network denies access to competitors and establishes an unassailable monopoly…Connectedness is vital, and it is best to be connected to the largest network.”

So, the ecommerce game is centred around building a monopoly and cashing in on it. As Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan write in The Inner Lives of Markets in the context of network externality: “The bigger a company gets, the more valuable it is to each successive customer, there’s a huge premium on expanding your customer base.”

And this explains the discount led model. In case of Flipkart, the discount led model was first offered on books to build a critical mass of customers, and then the company gradually got into selling many other products. The hope was that once the consumer was comfortable buying books from the website, he would become comfortable buying other products as well, over a period of time. The logic worked on the supply side as well, as more and more vendors got comfortable selling online, more vendors came in.

Of course, the discount led model leads to losses. Hence, any company following this model, needs money from investors to keep running. And this is where the structure of Indian ecommerce companies becomes similar to that of a Ponzi scheme.

A Ponzi scheme is essentially a financial fraud in which investment is solicited by offering very high returns. The investment of the first lot of investors is redeemed by using the money brought in by the second lot. The investment of the second lot of investors is redeemed by using the money brought in by the third lot and so on.

The scheme continues up until the money being brought in by the new investors is greater than the money being redeemed to the old investors. The moment the money that needs to be redeemed becomes greater than the fresh money coming in, the scheme collapses.  How does this apply in case of Indian e-commerce companies?

Indian ecommerce companies have managed to survive because of investors bringing in fresh money into the scheme at regular intervals. It is worth mentioning here that every time investors bring in more money, they bring it in at a higher valuation. This essentially means that the price at which shares of the company are sold to the investors are higher than they were the last time around. This increases the market capitalization of the company.

This increase in market capitalization comes about because the company has managed to increase its revenue. As long as the money being brought in by the investors keeps subsidising the losses being accumulated by the e-commerce firms, these firms will keep running. The moment this changes, the firms will start to shut-down. The structure of the Indian e-commerce companies is that of a classic Ponzi scheme.

Nevertheless, as we have seen earlier in this column, this increase in revenue typically comes at the losses increasing as well. This is a fact that investors of these firms have started to realise as well. And that is why they have marked down the value of their investments.

An investor who is marking down his investment is unlikely to invest more money into the firm. If he actually goes about investing more money in the firm, then he is likely to do it at a much lower valuation. Given this, the Indian Ecommerce Ponzi scheme is now unravelling. The trouble is that everyone wants to be build a monopoly. But everyone cannot be a monopoly.

As Smith writes in the context of the American dotcom bubble: “The problem is that, even if it is possible to monopolize something, there were thousands of dotcom companies and there isn’t room for thousands of monopolies. Of the thousands of companies trying to get big fast, very few can ever be monopolies.”

This basic logic applies to the Indian ecommerce as well. And given this, if fresh investor  money stops coming into these firms, as it has in many cases, these companies will soon start going bust.

To conclude, it’s time we got ready for the ecommerce bloodbath.

The column was originally published on Equitymaster on February 15, 2017

Flipkart, Air India and the Crony Socialism of Narendra Modi

flipkartNews-reports published in several newspapers last week revealed that the ecommerce company, Flipkart, had postponed the joining date of fresh MBAs it had recruited from the various IIMs, to December, later this year. The MBAs were supposed to join the company in June 2016. In order, to compensate them for the late joining Flipkart will pay the MBAs an extra joining bonus of Rs 1.5 lakh each.

These are clear signs of trouble at the company. In fact, one of the first things the information technology companies had done after the dotocom and telecom crash of 2000-2001, was to postpone the joining date of the fresh engineers it had recruited. The joining dates kept getting postponed and in several cases went beyond one year.

A friend of mine got so fed up waiting to join that he ended up joining the Indian Navy.

The news-reports on Flipkart further suggested that the company is facing funding issues and has had to cut costs to keep itself going. The question is why are Flipkart and many other Indian ecommerce companies, having funding issues?

In late January, earlier this year, I had written a column (not on Equitymaster), in which I had called Indian ecommerce a Ponzi scheme. After the post was published, I got solidly trolled on the social media. People said, I did not understand technology. Honestly, I don’t understand technology, even though I am a BSc in Maths and Computer Science, and have an MBA in Information Systems. But that part of my education I have more or less forgotten.

I don’t understand technology, but I do understand a very basic point—in order to survive, businesses need to make money. And almost all of the Indian ecommerce companies don’t make any money. If you look at their financial results (currently available only as on March 31, 2015), their losses have grown at a faster rate than their revenue. What sort of a business model is that?

Take the case of Zomato, a company which basically delivers food at your doorstep. The latest numbers of this company are available because 47% of it is owned by Info Edge, a stock market listed firm.

For the financial year ending March 31, 2016, the losses of Zomato shot up by 262% to Rs 492.3 crore. It had reported a loss of Rs 136 crore for the year ending March 31, 2015. The revenue of the company went by around 91.3% to Rs 184.97 crore. The revenue for the year ending March 31, 2015, was at Rs 96.7 crore.

So, the losses of Zomato went up by 262%, when its revenue went up 91.3%. What sort of business model is this, where the losses of the company go up at a much faster rate than its revenue? Of course, I don’t understand information technology.

The Indian ecommerce companies have adopted a discount model in order to lure customers. This means selling products at a loss in order to build a customer base. And this has made their operating structure very similar to that of a Ponzi scheme.

A Ponzi scheme is essentially a financial fraud in which investment is solicited by offering very high returns. The investment of the first lot of investors is redeemed by using the money brought in by the second lot. The investment of the second lot of investors is redeemed by using the money brought in by the third lot and so on.

The scheme continues up until the money being brought in by the new investors is greater than the money being redeemed to the old investors. The moment the money that needs to be redeemed becomes greater than the fresh money coming in, the scheme collapses.

How does this apply in case of Indian ecommerce companies? Up until now the ecommerce companies have managed to survive because of private equity, venture capitalists and hedge fund investors, bringing in fresh money into the company at regular intervals. This fresh money being brought in essentially funds the huge losses that these companies make, in order to drive up their revenues.

This money seems to have dried up or is coming in more slowly than it was in the past. And this has put many Indian ecommerce companies in trouble. Some of them have had to cut down their operations. And some others like Flipkart have had to postpone joining dates of MBAs they have recruited, in order to control costs.
And this brings us back to the oldest business lesson—businesses need to make money, in order to survive. Businesses which don’t make money for an extended period of time, don’t survive. They shutdown. That is how it is.

Of course, there is a corollary to this rule. There are businesses which can keep running, even if they don’t make money. They can keep making losses. This is only possible if they happen to be owned by the government of India.

Take the case of the government operated airline Air India (Okay, I know I am sounding like a broken record here, if you know what that means, in the MP3 era). The airline has made losses of Rs 34,689.7 crore between 2010-2011 and 2015-2016, and is still running.

Or take the case of Hindustan Photo Films, the fourth largest loss making public sector enterprise. The company has accumulated losses of Rs 7,794.51 crore between 2010-2011 and 2014-2015. As the table shows, the losses of the company have been going up over the years.

Hindustan Photo Films Manufacturing Company
YearLosses(in Rs crore)
2010-20111156.65
2011-20121352.32
2012-20131560.59
2013-20141560.59
2014-20152164.36
Total losses7794.51
Source: Public Sector Enterprises Surveys

This is sheer waste of money. The money can be better spent on many other things like primary education, health, roads, railways, ports, and so on. There isn’t exactly a shortage of things that the government of India needs to spend on. And it isn’t exactly going around loaded with money. In this scenario, it needs to be careful with where and on what it spends its money on. Hence, the last thing it should be doing is subsidising losses of public sector enterprises which have been perpetually losing money.

The prime minister Narendra Modi in a recent interview to the Wall Street Journal said: “You can’t suddenly get rid of the public sector, nor should you.” Well, that doesn’t mean that the government continues to run loss making companies like Air India and Hindustan Photo Films. Further, Modi has been governing for more than two years now, and if he still continues to run companies like Air India and Hindustan Photo Films, it clearly tells us that he has no intention of shutting them down.

The Congress led United Progressive Alliance practiced crony capitalism (the mess at public sector banks is a clear evidence of that) as well as crony socialism (by continuing to fund loss making public sector enterprises). While Modi, to his credit, has gotten rid of crony capitalism, he continues with crony socialism.

While, we may be able to have a Congress mukt Bharat in politics, it seems difficult to have that scenario when it comes to economics. Indeed, that is a big tragedy.

The column originally appeared in the Vivek Kaul Diary on May 30, 2016

Why Indian E-commerce Is A Ponzi Scheme

flipkartIt is that time of the year when the business media is publishing the financial results of Indian ecommerce companies for the financial year 2014-2015(i.e. the period between April 1, 2014 and March 31, 2015). The numbers are being taken from the filings that the ecommerce companies have made with the Registrar of Companies(RoC).

And the results make for a very interesting reading. As can be seen from the accompanying table compiled from various media reports, the losses of the major ecommerce companies have gone up multiple times during the course of the year.

It needs to be stated here upfront that it is difficult to estimate the exact numbers of the ecommerce companies given that they have complex holding structures as regulations in India currently do not allow foreign direct investment in online retail, but allow it in case of an online marketplace.

chart

The combined losses of the five companies in the table stood at Rs 5524 crore in 2014-2015. In 2013-2014, the losses had stood at Rs 1338.1 crore. This is a jump of a whopping 313%. How does their combined revenue number look? In this case a direct comparison cannot be made given that the revenue numbers of Snapdeal for 2014-2015 are not available.

As a recent news-report in the Mint newspaper points out: “Snapdeal reported a loss of Rs.1,328.01 crore for the same year, compared with Rs.264.6 crore in the previous year, RoC documents show. It didn’t disclose revenue numbers.”

Hence, we will have to adjust for Snapdeal numbers before we compare revenue earned by the companies with their accumulated losses. The revenue for 2014-2015 for four companies other than Snapdeal stood at Rs 11,827 crore. The revenue for 2013-2014 for these four companies had stood at Rs 3,445.8 crore. This is a jump of 243% over the course of one year.

In the normal scheme of things a jump of 243% in revenue in one year would have been deemed to be fantastic, but the losses of these companies have gone up at a much faster rate. In 2013-2014, the losses of the four companies other than Snapdeal stood at Rs 1073.5 crore. In 2014-2015, the losses had jumped by a whopping 291% to Rs 4,196 crore.

Hence, a 243% jump in revenues has been accompanied by a 291% jump in losses. This analysis is skewed to some extent given the huge size of Flipkart in the sample. If we had known Snapdeal revenue numbers for 2014-2015, the results would have been more robust.

Nevertheless, even the small companies in the sample, show the same trend as the broad trend is. Take the case of Paytm. In 2013-2014, the company made a profit of Rs 5 crore on a revenue of Rs 210 crore. In 2014-2015, the revenue jumped to Rs 336 crore and the losses jumped to Rs 372 crore. Shopclues also showed a similar trend. The revenue of the company went up by 155% between 2013-2014 and 2014-2015, whereas the losses went up by 163%.

What sort of a business model is this—where the losses of a company go up at a faster rate than its revenue? The answer lies in the fact that the Indian ecommerce companies have adopted a discount model in order to lure customers. This means selling products at a loss in order to build a customer base.

This strategy of acquiring customers has been directly copy-pasted from what many American ecommerce companies did during the dotcom boom towards the turn of the century.  As Gary Smith writes in Standard Deviations—Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics: “A dotcom company proved it was a player not by making money, but by spending money, preferably other people’s money…One rationale was to be the first-mover by getting big fast…The idea was that once people believe that your web site is the place to go to buy something, sell something, or learn something, you have a monopoly that can crush competition and reap profits.”

The major Indian ecommerce companies seem to be following a similar strategy of trying to build a monopoly by offering products on substantial discounts. The trouble with this strategy is that it needs a lot of money. Up until now, the Indian ecommerce companies have managed to survive because international hedge funds and private equity investors have made a beeline for investing in them.

With returns from financial securities all over the world drying up over the last few years, Indian ecommerce companies have offered an iota of hope. The trouble is that every reasonably big Indian ecommerce company with access to funding seems to be following the same strategy of offering discounts and wanting to build a monopoly. And once they are there, they hope to cash in.

Having said that, the current structure of the Indian ecommerce companies is akin to a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme is essentially a financial fraud in which investment is solicited by offering very high returns. The investment of the first lot of investors is redeemed by using the money brought in by the second lot.

The investment of the second lot of investors is redeemed by using the money brought in by the third lot and so on.

The scheme continues up until the money being brought in by the new investors is greater than the money being redeemed to the old investors. The moment the money that needs to be redeemed becomes greater than the fresh money coming in, the scheme collapses.

How does this apply in case of Indian ecommerce companies? Up until now the companies have managed to survive because of investors bringing in fresh money into the scheme at regular intervals. It is worth mentioning here that every time investors bring in more money, they bring it in at a higher valuation.

This essentially means that the price at which shares of the company are sold to the investors are higher than they were the last time around. This increases the market capitalization of the company.

This increase in market capitalization comes about because the company has managed to increase its revenue. But as we have seen earlier in this column, this increase in revenue typically comes at the losses increasing at a much faster rate. I wonder why all these fancy investors do not take something as basic as this into account?

Having said that, as long as this money keeps coming in and is greater than the losses being accumulated by the ecommerce firms, these firms will keep running.

The moment this changes, the firms will start to shut-down. The structure of the Indian ecommerce companies is that of a classic Ponzi scheme. In fact, a news-report in The Economic Times suggests that FabFurnish, a furniture retailer, is likely to shutdown given that its German investor does not want to burn any more money to finance its losses.

The trouble is that everyone wants to be build a monopoly. But everyone cannot be a monopoly. As Smith writes in the context of the American dotcom bubble: “The problem is that, even if it is possible to monopolize something, there were thousands of dotcom companies and there isn’t room for thousands of monopolies. Of the thousands of companies trying to get big fast, very few can ever be monopolies.” While the word thousands does not really apply in the Indian case, the overall logic still remains the same i.e. everyone cannot be a monopoly.

This means that many of today’s fledging ecommerce companies will shutdown in the years to come as investors pull the plug. In fact, the companies with the deepest pockets are likely to survive. Meanwhile, dear reader, enjoy the discounts until they last.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He can be reached at [email protected])

The column originally appeared on SwarajyaMag on January 28, 2016

Of prisoner’s dilemma and the discounting wars of Indian e-commerce

Big-Billion-Day-Sale
This week the ecommerce companies operating in India are at war.

Snapdeal had its electronic Monday sale on October 12, 2015.

Fllipkart has The Big Billion Days Sale between October 13 and October 17, 2015. This sale is limited to its smartphone app.

Amazon has the Great Indian Festival Sale during the same period. Amazon’s sale isn’t limited to its app, like Flipkart’s. Nevertheless, the company is offering higher discounts on the app.

Over the next few days you will see reports in the business press with senior executives of these companies saying that they have managed to sell this much and sell that much.

The trouble is everyone will talk about revenue numbers. No one will tell you that they are losing money on each product they sell and the more they sell the more money they will lose.

In fact, the business press is already talking about the positive impact of these sales. As Rahul Taneja of Snapdeal told the Mint newspaper: “We are well on track to reach $100 million sales on our Electronics Monday Sale.”

Nevertheless, things are not as simplistic as they are being out to be. The Indian ecommerce scene should be viewed from the lens of the prisoner’s dilemma.

The dilemma was first put forward by Polish mathematician Melvin Dresher while he was working at the Rand Corporation in the United States in 1950. It was given its name by Canadian Mathematician Albert Tucker.

And this is how the dilemma goes. There are two people who are suspected of a major crime. They are apprehended during the course of carrying out a minor offense and put in jail.

As John Allen Paulos writes in A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market: “They’re then interrogated separately, and each is given the choice of confessing to the major crime and thereby implicating his partner or remaining silent. If they both remain silent they’ll get one year in prison. If one confesses and the other doesn’t, the one who confesses will be rewarded by being set free, while the other one will get a five-year term. If they both confess, they can expect to spend three years in prison.”

The best solution here is for both individuals to remain quiet and get a prison sentence of one year. But the individuals are being interrogated separately and hence, one doesn’t know how the other will react. So what happens?

As Paulos writes: “Given…human psychology, the most likely outcome is for both to confess; the best outcome for the pair as a pair is for both to remain silent; the best outcome for each prisoner as an individual is to confess and have one’s partner remain silent.”

So even though the best outcome is for both to remain silent and spend one year in prison, the most possible outcome is that both of them will confess in the hope that they will get away free. In the process they land up in jail for three years.

Now how is this linked to what we started with i.e. the discount wars of Indian ecommerce? As Paulos writes: “The charm of the dilemma has nothing to do with any interest that one might have in prisoner’s rights…Rather, it provides the logical skeleton for many situations we face in everyday life. Whether we’re negotiators in business, spouses in a marriage, or nations in dispute…If both (all) parties pursue their own interests exclusively and do not cooperate, the outcome is worse for both (all) of them; yet in any given situation, any given party is better off not cooperating.”

Economist Dani Rodrik explains the situation of prisoner’s dilemma in the context of advertising carried out by competing companies in his new book Economics Rules—Why Economics Works, When It Fails and How to Tell the Difference.

As he writes: “Assume that two competing firms must decide whether to have a big advertising budget. Advertising would allow one firm to steal some of the other’s customers. But when they both advertise, the effects of customer demand cancel out. The firms end up having spent money needlessly.”

What is happening here? As Rodrik writes: “When the firms make their choices independently and they care only about their own profits, each one has an incentive to advertise, regardless of what the other firm does: When the other firm does not advertise, you can steal customers from it if you do advertise; when the other firm does advertise, you have to advertise to prevent loss of customers. So the two firms end up in bad equilibrium in which both have to waste resources.”

Now replace the word advertise in the above paragraph with the sales that are currently on and the situation is very similar. Let’s say Flipkart (or Amazon or Snapdeal, it doesn’t really matter) announces a big sale over five days to acquire new customers as well as sell more to existing ones. It makes tremendous sense for Flipkart to do that as long as it is the only company doing it.

If Amazon and Snapdeal (and other similar ecommerce websites and aps) decide to ignore the Flipkart sale, they will lose out on their customers. So they need to announce their sales as well to prevent Flipkart from stealing their customers and retain their customers.

The moment they do this, Flipkart loses out on the advantage it would have had if it was the only sale in town. The vice versa is also true.

Now Amazon and Snapdeal also have a sale on just to ensure that they don’t lose out on their customers. A classic prisoner’s dilemma.

Also, each company now has to offer greater discounts on their products, to make it look like a sale. This means accumulating more losses than they currently are. The Indian ecommerce players don’t mind doing this given that they are currently looking to drive up their revenue.

The higher the revenue number they are able to generate, the higher the valuation they get. And this helps them raise more money from investors. This, in turn, helps them keep running the show given that their current operations are loss-making.

Akhilesh Tilotia of Kotak Institutional Equities in a report titled .com 2.0 – Value versus Valuation makes a very interesting point. As he writes: “It will be instructive to note that the proportion of people who have purchasing power in India is limited to the top 10% or so of the population.” So the number of people that Indian ecommerce companies can tap is limited and is nowhere near as is typically made out to be.

And this has important repercussions. As Tilotia writes: “It is important to consider whether India’s e-commerce GMVs[Gross Merchandise Values] and volumes are going to come from (1) a larger number of users doing more transactions or (2) a smaller base of consumers (say the top-end 100 million or so users) driving all the volume. If it is going to be the latter, customer engagement and retention will be more important than customer acquisition.”

If customer retention is more important than customer acquisition then any one company launching a sale will lead to others having to join in, in order to retain their customers, even though they may not want to do the same. The prisoner’s dilemma is at work.

As John Allen Paulos writes in Beyond Numeracy: “The parties involved will be generally better off as a pair if each resists the temptation to double-cross the other and instead cooperates…If both parties pursue their own interests exclusively, the outcome is worse for both of them than if they cooperate.”

But that’s not going to happen because that is what competition is all about. And it does work at some places.

The column originally appeared on The Daily Reckoning on October 14, 2015

Does Janet Yellen know Bahl and Bansal of Indian ecommerce?

yellen_janet_040512_8x10
On August 31, 2015, The Economic Times, the largest read business newspaper in the country carried an interview with Kunal Bahl, the chief executive officer of Snapdeal. In this interview Bahl claimed that: “The one thing I am very , very clear about right now is that I think we’re going to be No. 1 (in terms of sales) by March 2016….I think we’re going to beat Flipkart by then.”

Two days later on September 2, 2015 (i.e. yesterday), Mukesh Bansal, the head of commerce at Flipkart, responded in the same paper by saying: “Flipkart will sell goods worth $10 billion (Rs 65,000 crore) during fiscal 2016, and “nobody will be even half of that”…There is not a shred of doubt based on all the market numbers we have today.”

When was the last time you saw a CEO or a CXO of a brick and mortar company talk like this? Where does this confidence of Bahl and Bansal come from?
There is a basic advantage that ecommerce companies have, which the brick and mortar crowd does not. Consumers can buy many things through a single transaction. I can buy a geyser, a book case and several books, all at the same time and pay for it all at once sitting at home (or in office for that matter). I don’t have to visit different shops to buy these things.

As economist Alvin E. Roth writes in Who Gets What and Why—The Hidden World of Matchmaking and Market Design: “It looks to me like a single transaction, even though I may have bought each item from a different seller that subscribes to Amazon’s marketplace services.” Now replace the word Amazon with Flipkart or Snapdeal and the logic remains the same.

Plus, there is something called “thickness” at work here as well. As Roth writes: “The thickness of the Amazon marketplace—the ready availability of so many buyers and sellers—is self-reinforcing. More sellers will be attracted by all those potential buyers, and more buyers will come to this market place because of ever-expanding variety of sellers.”

And as I said earlier, what works in case of Amazon in the United States, also works in case of Flipkart and Snapdeal. But there is also something else that needs to be pointed out here.

Typically, the tendency is to look at India as one big market given the huge population of more than 120 crore people. But the more important question is –how many people are digitally proficient to be able to carry out ecommerce transactions on computers as well as smart phones.

And this is where things get interesting. Analyst Akhilesh Tilotia of Kotak Institutional Equities in a recent research report titled How many internet literates in India?  points out some very interesting data based on the 71st round of the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO).

As Tilotia writes: “We note that 48.9% of the youth in urban India in the age range of 14-29 can operate a computer; this proportion falls to 18.3% in rural India. We also note that digital literacy among women trails men’s by 10 percentage-points. Even more interesting, only a quarter of those in urban Indian in the age range of 30-45 years can operate a computer, this percentage is 4% in rural India.”

It needs to be pointed out that in the NSSO survey on which this data is based, “any of the devices such as desktops, laptops, notebooks, netbooks, palmtops, smartphones, etc. were considered as computers.”

In fact, digital proficiency is significantly lower than digital literacy. As Tilotia writes: “Only around one in seven Indians can do any meaningful activity with their computers/smartphones. Urban India is better off with between a fourth and a third of its populace having dexterity to work on their digital devices; less than one in 12 rural Indians have such skills. It is quite possible to be communicative on social media without having email-writing skills or Googling skills.”

This is not the kind of data which the Indian e-commerce companies would want to take a look at.

The NSSO survey on which these numbers are based was carried out between January and June 2014. While things would have definitely improved on the digital proficiency front since then, the improvement couldn’t have been very significant.

So, given this low level of digital proficiency among Indians there has to be a limit to the size of the ecommerce market in India. But individuals who run these companies clearly don’t think that way. As Bansal of Flipkart told The Economic Times: “Flipkart is aiming to sell goods worth $100 billion in 5-7 years.”

The way things are currently going, the kind of valuations the ecommerce companies seem are getting, leads one to conclude that the investors who invest in these companies believe that Indian ecommerce companies will continue to grow at a rapid rate in the time to come.

There are regular news-reports on the front pages of business newspapers of millions of dollars of investment going into Indian ecommerce companies. But none of these news-reports ever seems to talk about the profitability of these companies.

As I have written in the past, almost all the Indian ecommerce companies are losing money big time. Most of these companies have been able to attract buyers by offering discounts on products that they sell. The only thing that has kept them going in spite of making massive losses, is the endless rounds funding that keep coming in, from venture capital and private equity firms, as well as hedge funds. And with every round of funding, the valuation of these firms also goes up.

All this money coming into Indian ecommerce is essentially because of extremely low interest rates that prevail through much of the Western world. In the aftermath of the financial crisis that started in September 2008, the Western central banks started to print money and drove interest rates to very low levels, in the hope of initiating an economic recovery. Leading the way was Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States, the American central bank. He was succeeded by Janet Yellen in 2014.

The private equity and the venture capital firms have borrowed and invested this money into Indian ecommerce companies. And it is this “easy money” from the West that has kept the loss making Indian e-commerce companies selling things on discounts, going.

The question is till when will this money keep coming in? Until very recently most economists were of the opinion that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates from September 2015 on. Now with the massive fall in stock markets all over the world that seems unlikely.

Nevertheless, the Indian ecommerce companies are totally dependent on this “easy money” borrowed at very low interest rates. And it is this money that has kept them going. And it is this money that will keep them going. In fact, I am even tempted to ask, does Janet Yellen know Bahl and Bansal of Indian ecommerce?

The column appeared originally in The Daily Reckoning on Sep 3, 2015