Adani buys 30% in Trainman’s owner Start Enterprises for Rs 3.5 cr

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Adani Enterprises, the parent company of billionaire Gautam Adani Group, has bought nearly 30 percent of the shares of Start Enterprises Pvt Ltd, which owns the online train ticket booking platform Trainman.

Adani Enterprises announced last month that it had signed an agreement to acquire 100 percent of SEPL.

In a stock exchange filing on Saturday, Adani Enterprises said Adani Digital Labs Pvt Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of the company, had bought 29.81 per cent stake in SEPL for Rs 3.56 crore.

SEPL had a turnover of Rs.4.51 crore in the 2022-23 financial year (April 2022 to March 2023).

While last month Adani Enterprises described SEPL as an “online train booking and information platform”, on Saturday it described the company as one in “e-commerce and website development”.

The announcement last month led to a small controversy with Congress General Secretary Jairam Ramesh seeking to suggest that Adani’s takeover of Trainman could eventually lead to a takeover of IRCTC – the ticketing and other services arm of Indian Railways.

The IRCTC issued a statement denying the claim. Explaining the e-ticket business segment, the IRCTC said that about 14.5 lakh tickets are booked on a daily basis in Indian Railways. Of these approximately 81 per cent are electronic tickets and are booked through IRCTC itself. Thus, there is no competition between IRCTC and its agents, including Trainman.

Treneman, being a B2C partner of IRCTC contributing 0.13 percent of the total tickets booked, added that these companies are integrated with IRCTC, in general, they help customers with a smooth ticketing process.

Founded in 2011 by Vineet Chirania and Karan Kumar, Trainman is an Indian travel booking application that enables passengers to check their PNR (Passenger Name Record) status, predicts the possibility of getting a confirmed seat in case of waiting list, and also provides real-time updates about Seat availability, running status, schedule, coach mode, fare calculator, etc.

Trainman is the second investment of the Adani Group in the travel and information reservations sector. In October 2021, Adani Enterprises bought a minority stake in Flipkart’s Cleartrip Pvt Ltd, an online travel aggregator.

(Only the title and image for this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard team; the rest of the content is generated automatically from a shared feed.)