Prosus Ventures and its subsidiary payment giant PayU have called off the $4.7 billion BillDesk merger they announced last year, saying “certain conditions precedent” had not been met by the deadline in a surprising development a month after the proposed acquisition received approval from the local antitrust watchdog.
“Certain conditions precedent were not fulfilled on the long shutdown date of September 30, 2022, and the agreement has automatically terminated in accordance with the terms and accordingly, the proposed transaction will not be executed,” Prosus said in a statement Monday without identifying what those circumstances were. goods.
The cash acquisition, announced at the height of the bull cycle last year, would be the second-largest M&A deal in the consumer internet space in the South Asian market. In recent quarters, as the market changed, many promised deals have fallen apart. Prosus, which has invested more than $5.5 billion in India, has also lost a significant amount of value in the past year.
It is unclear whether Prosus and BillDesk had agreed a termination fee. BillDesk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
BillDesk — which counts Visa, Temasek, General Atlantic and a number of Indian banks among its lenders — has raised $245 million so far. It was valued at $1.59 billion after the January 2019 funding round, according to research firm Tracxn. Before closing the deal with Prosus, BillDesk internally planned to make an initial public offering.
PayU and 20-year-old BillDesk process a significant number of payment transactions in India. If they had been combined, they would have taken a clear lead over the Indian market.
“Together, PayU India and BillDesk will be able to meet the evolving payment needs of digital consumers, merchants and government enterprises in India and provide state-of-the-art technology to even more excluded segments of society, while adhering to to the regulatory environment in India and provide robust consumer protections,” said Prosus announcing the acquisition.
(More to follow…)
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