The parent of India’s largest coffee chain, Cafe Coffee Day, is filing for an IPO in the country in the coming fortnight. The pre-IPO valuation of the Starbucks rival is said to be $1 billion.
The pioneering Cafe Coffee Day is credited with triggering off a cafe culture in the country, blitzing not just India’s metropolises but also its smaller cities with cafes. It currently has 1,530 stores and 600 kiosks across India as well as 30,000 vending machines in 11,000 corporate offices.
The cafes have become a hangout for India’s young and restless, and a meeting hub for its entrepreneurs, corporate workers and housewives.
Sources told Forbes that Coffee Day Enterprises is to offer 20% of its stake to the public for about $200 million. The regulatory formalities are expected to take a couple of months and the IPO will likely be in the September-October timeframe. Three India-based Forbes billionaires, investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, retail baron Radhakishan Damani and technology tycoon Nandan Nilekani, are said to have made pre-IPO investments in the chain whose public offering is expected to garner much investor interest.
Cafe Coffee Day is promoted by Forbes billionaire V.G. Siddhartha, 55, who launched the chain in 1996. The first outlet was also India’s first public access cybercafé in downtown Brigade Road in his home base and tech hub, Bangalore.
Siddhartha was born in a family of planters in the coffee-growing Chikmagalur district near Bangalore.
The chain now competes not only with later entrants, global chains Starbucks and Costa Coffee, but also the newest, McDonald’s McCafe which is planning a furious expansion in India.
A Cafe Coffee Day outlet in downtown Bangalore (Image: CCD blog)
