Akash Jha
Adani Enterprises, the flagship company of billionaire Gautam Adani’s conglomerate, has acquired a share in Start Enterprises Pvt Ltd, the company that runs the online railway ticket buying platform Trainman, for close to 30 percent of the company’s total equity.
Adani Enterprises made the announcement one month ago that it has inked a contract to acquire one hundred percent of SEPL.
Adani Enterprises announced on Saturday, in a filing with the stock exchange, that one of the company’s wholly-owned subsidiaries, Adani Digital Labs Pvt Ltd, has purchased a 29.81% share in SEPL for the price of Rs 3.56 crore.
In the fiscal year 2022-23, which ran from April 2022 to March 2023, SEPL had a revenue of 4.51 crore rupees.
On Saturday, Adani Enterprises identified SEPL as a company that is involved in “e-commerce and website development.” The previous month, the company had classified SEPL as “an online train booking and information platform.” The statement that was made a month ago sparked a minor controversy when Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh tried to imply that Adani’s acquisition of Trainman could eventually lead to the company’s acquisition of IRCTC, which is the ticketing and other services part of the Indian Railways.
IRCTC had published a statement to dispute the accusation, which can be found here. IRCTC had mentioned in its previous explanation of the e-ticketing business area that around 14.5 lakh reserved tickets are booked on a daily basis in Indian Railways. Nearly 81% of these tickets are electronic and were booked directly through the IRCTC website. As a result, IRCTC and its agents, such as Trainman, do not face any competitive pressures.
It had been stated that Trainman, which is a B2C partner of IRCTC, is responsible for 0.13 percent of the total reserved ticketing. Additionally, it had been stated that because these companies are integrated with IRCTC, they assist customers in having a more streamlined experience when purchasing tickets.
Trainman is an Indian travel booking application that was established in 2011 by Vineet Chirania and Karan Kumar. The app enables passengers to check the PNR (Passenger Name Record) status, predicts the possibility of getting a confirmed seat in the event of a wait-list, and provides real-time updates on seat availability, running status, time table, coach position, fare calculator, and other relevant information.
The Adani group has made another investment in the travel booking and information industry with their purchase of Trainman. In October of 2021, Adani Enterprises made a purchase of a minority investment in Cleartrip Pvt Ltd, which is an online travel aggregator owned by Flipkart.
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