Owndays will be majority-owned by Lenskart, however, the arrangement is intended to be a merger rather than a purchase.
With the acquisition of Owndays Inc. by Indian eyeglasses shop Lenskart, the two companies will become one of Asia’s largest online eyewear merchants. L Catterton Asia and Mitsui & Co. Principal Investments have agreed to sell their stakes in Owndays to the Indian firm, which is funded by SoftBank Group.
As reported by Bloomberg, the acquisition is valued at $400 million. Shuji Tanaka and Take Umiyama will run Owndays as a distinct brand with an emphasis on the luxury sector, while Lenskart will concentrate on the medium and mainstream market, they said. Owndays will be majority-owned by Lenskart, although the two companies want to combine.
In addition to Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, Lenskart will now have a presence in 13 other Asian countries as well.
Tokyo-headquartered As of 2013, Owndays has established its first international outlets. Apart from Japan, it has 460 locations in a dozen other countries.
Half of the world’s 4.5 billion people require prescription glasses, but only half of them wear them “Lenskart’s 38-year-old co-founder and CEO, Peyush Bansal, told Bloomberg that company’s news agency. A possibility to develop an Amazon for eyeglasses exists in the range of $50 billion to $100 billion, according to our projections.”
Bansal expects Lenskart to become profitable in the year ending March 2024 if sales exceed $400 million. In that time, the two firms expect to make $650 million in total sales, he added. India’s top eyeglasses e-commerce business, Lenskart, which was started in 2010, surged 65 percent last year and is expected to exceed that this year.
Prior to moving back to India, Bansal earned an engineering degree from Montreal’s McGill University and worked for Microsoft Corp.’s corporate headquarters there.
In 2010, he and three others he met on LinkedIn co-founded Lenskart Solutions Pvt in the dusty industrial town of Faridabad outside of New Delhi.
Bansal estimates that Lenskart’s first public offering will take at least 36 months.
The firm is now establishing what it claims to be the world’s biggest eyeglass production factory located northwest of Delhi. Bansal estimates that the $150 million facilities will produce 50 million pairs of eyeglasses yearly.
