“There was no desperation,” says Deep Kalra, the CEO of MakeMyTrip. “From either side.”
He is referring, of course, to MakeMyTrip’s decision to acquire the Ibibo group from its parents, South-Africa’s Naspers and China’s Tencent.
“In some deals, one side is desperate. So the deal might get done quickly, but the other side will squeeze it out. Ours took a long time because neither side was desperate. Naspers has deep pockets. So it took a long time because of the push and give,” he says.
It was sometime last year that Kalra and Rajesh Magow, MakeMyTrip’s CEO (Kalra is Chairman and Group CEO), first broached the topic of a potential merger with Naspers’ CEO Bob van Dijk.
