Amazon Buys Into India's More Supermarket Chain

   By Corinne Abrams 
 

MUMBAI--Amazon.com Inc has invested in an arm of a private equity firm that bought Indian supermarket chain More, a person familiar with the matter said.

Witzig Advisory Services bought a 99.99% stake in Aditya Birla Retail from RKN Private Retail, Kanishtha Finance and Investment and Aditya Birla Retail, according to a Wednesday release on the BSE, a Mumbai exchange.

Witzig is owned by private-equity firm Samara Alternative Investment Fund.

Amazon has invested in Witzig via Samara, a person familiar with the matter said, without giving more details. The BSE statement didn't say how much Witzig had paid for Aditya Birla Retail.

Aditya Birla Retail includes more than 500 supermarkets and hypermarkets under the More brand. An investment by Amazon in More would bolster its defense against Walmart, which bought a controlling stake in Indian ecommerce company Flipkart earlier this year.

RKN Private Retail and Kanishtha Finance are the investment firms of Indian conglomerate Aditya Birla Group's chairman Kumar Magalam Birla.

The deal is subject to regulatory approvals, the statement said.

--Debiprasad Nayak contributed to this article.

Write to Corinne Abrams at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 20, 2018 04:11 ET (08:11 GMT)

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