Zomato Shares Gain Over 4% On Block Deal; Ant Group's Alipay Likely Seller

The share price of online food delivery chain Zomato gained 4.04% at Rs 118.40 per share at 10:11 am IST on Wednesday. Today, the stock saw a spurt in trading volume by more than 116.30 times.

Today's drastic jump in the share price of Zomato was seen after a major block deal happened where 29.75 crore equity shares, equating to a 3.4% stake swapped hands. There has been no official confirmation about the Buyers and sellers in the transaction as of now.

Reuters reported on Tuesday that Chinese payments group Alipay is planning to sell its 3.4% stake in Indian food delivery giant Zomato for almost $400 million via block deals on Indian stock exchanges. This information was based on a Reuters review of the deal's term sheet, and three sources.

According to the report citing sources, Ant Group owned Alipay, will sell its entire 3.44% stake in the deal, and Bank of America and Morgan Stanley have been appointed as the advisers on the deal.
As per the term sheet, the block deals are set to be executed at Rs 111.28 a piece, down 2.2% compared to Zomato's closing price on Tuesday.

Last month, Japan's SoftBank offloaded a 1.1% stake in India's biggest food delivery platform. In recent years, there has been an upsurge in demand for online ordering of food, prompting companies like Zomato to aggressively expand.

Alipay's exit from Zomato comes as other Chinese companies have been selling their stakes in Indian companies. Earlier, in August, China's Antfin sold a 10.3% stake in Indian fintech giant Paytm.

Zomato share price performance:

Shares of Zomato have gained 96.43% in this year so far. In the last one year the stock has gained 86.23%.In terms of returns, the last 3 months and 6 months performance of the stock is up 25.04% and 76.43% respectively. The company commands a market capitalization of Rs 1,03,180.80 crore.