Aditya Birla Fashion acquires 51% stake in designer clothing brand Masaba

New Delhi: Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd (ABFRL) on Friday said it will acquire a 51 per cent majority shareholding in popular and contemporary brand 'Masaba' promoted by the leading designer Masaba Gupta for a cash consideration of Rs 90 crore.

The Aditya Birla Group has entered into a 'binding term sheet’ agreement to acquire a 51 per cent stake in 'House of Masaba Lifestyle Pvt Ltd', a move which will strengthen its play into fashion for young and digitally native consumers.

This will also help ABFRL to foray into branded beauty and personal care segment, which offers tremendous opportunities to build distinctive, scalable home-grown brands.
ABFRL has plans to scale Brand Masaba through direct-to-consumer (D2C) channels in the segment, which is rapidly growing driven by an increase in women shoppers, a rise in disposable incomes and acceleration in digital influence.

"Brand Masaba will be scaled predominantly through the digital direct-to-consumer (D2C) channel, leveraging its strong connect with younger and digitally influenced consumers," according to a joint statement.

The brand will straddle across the entire lifestyle offerings ranging from apparel, accessories, beauty and other lifestyle products.

"The brand is targeting to achieve annual revenues of around Rs 500 crore in the next five years," it said.

House of Masaba Lifestyle (HML) was incorporated in the year 2014.

Its revenue in the COVID-19 impacted FY22, excluding its beauty business, and was estimated to be at Rs 30 crore, said ABFRL while updating the bourses about the deal.

The Aditya Birla Group firm expects the deal to be completed in 60-90 days. However, this will be subject to the signing of definitive agreements, completion of closing conditions and statutory approvals.

ABFRL Managing Director Ashish Dikshit said, "This partnership is also an important step in building a presence in the fast-growing beauty and personal care segment. This fits in well with our overall strategy to partner with India's top-most designers to build a portfolio of distinctive and aspirational home-grown brands across fashion and lifestyle categories."

House of Masaba founder Masaba Gupta said, "The House of Masaba has already established a strong foothold among the youth with a robust digital-first strategy and the tie-up with ABRFL will strengthen this position, making the brand future-ready."

Gupta added that with this partnership, she looks forward to creating immersive and collaborative experiences for the company's target audiences who highly engage in virtual mediums today and are driving the industry's evolution to the Metaverse.

ABFRL is extending its play after acquiring companies and fashion labels.

In February last year, it had partnered with fashion designer Tarun Tahiliani and a month before that, ABFRL had announced the acquisition of a 51 per cent stake in designer brand Sabyasachi. Also Read: Budget to offer more fiscal support to economy amid uncertainty from third wave: Report

In June, Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd's e-commerce ethnic brand Jaypore made a foray into the menswear category. Also Read: Stocks to buy: HDFC Securities bullish on THIS stock

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