BillDesk’s endless wait for $4.7 billion acquisition by PayU

These days, the first thing BillDesk employees do every morning is open the Competition Commission of India’s website. They have been visiting the antitrust regulator’s site for months to check if their company’s acquisition by PayU has been given the green light.

Their anxiety is understandable given that it will be a year, by the end of this month, since the deal was announced. Back then, it was expected that given the size of the two companies it could take anywhere between nine to 18 months to close the integration.

In September 2021, PayU agreed to buy BillDesk for a staggering $4.7 billion in an all-cash deal, in what would be the largest acquisition in the Indian startup ecosystem after Flipkart was taken over by Walmart.

But CCI approval, which was supposed to be a mere formality for the mega deal, has dragged on. Around April, the competition watchdog asked PayU to file a fresh application. On April 20, the revised application, with more details about the acquisition, was filed. 

Four months on, there appears to be little movement. People in the know say the deal is under intense scrutiny from an antitrust perspective mainly because of the string of acquisitions that PayU and its parent entity, Naspers, have made in India and also because of the combined size of the two companies.