JSW One aims to become profitable this year, eyes IPO by FY28

The company aims to achieve steady-state profit margin of 1%, he said. This would make it one of the first business conglomerate-led B2B e-commerce platforms to become profitable. Other such ventures include Aditya Birla Group’s Birla Pivot, Larsen & Toubro’s L&T SuFin and Tata Group’s Nexarc.

JSW One targets ₹ ₹50,000 crore in gross merchandise value (GMV) in the next three years. GMV is the total monetary value of all the products sold on a platform. The company clocked a GMV of about ₹12,500 crore in FY25 on its platform with a revenue of about ₹4000 crore, Sachdeva said.

 

“This year we should be profitable," Sachdeva said during an interview at the company’s office in the Santacruz neighbourhood of Mumbai. “(IPO) somewhere in two years to two and a half years."

Parth Jindal, chairman of JSW One Platforms, had said in April last year when Manipal Group’s Ranjan Pai joined the company’s board as an independent director that JSW One would look to go public in 18-24 months.

The company that started operations in 2021 aims to position itself as a full-stack solution provider for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the manufacturing and construction space. About 82% of the e-commerce business comes from manufacturing and 18% from construction.

JSW One’s business offerings include distribution of third-party products, processed steel cut to the buyer's specifications as well as JSW One branded products procured through contract manufacturing.

It also disburses about ₹500 crore a month in working capital loans which are underwritten by its banking partners. The company has set up its in-house non-banking finance company (NBFC) to underwrite a portion of the loans it disburses.

What sets the company apart is the ownership of its distribution chain, Sachdeva said. The company has a proprietary asset-light logistics platform that specializes in distributing steel coils.

JSW One achieved $1 billion valuation when it raised ₹340 crore last month in an equity round led by Principal Asset Management.

Raising capital or giving investors an exit won't be a motivation for the 900-people-strong company to go public, Sachdeva said.

“I think it's a different game to be able to be answerable to the market," he said. “We dreamt of it as a team and we've executed it to this scale, we'd like to showcase it to as many investors as possible."

Going public would also give the company legitimacy and liquidity to raise capital if and when any expansion or acquisition opportunity comes, he said.

The company is looking to go public as a B2B distributor of steel products before leveraging its supply chain to diversify into other products. By the time of IPO, the company aims to triple or quadruple its steel distribution scale. Post-listing, it plans to expand its services to newer products by leveraging its supply chain. Some of the other products it wants to diversify into are cement and bitumen.

The company will be a competitor to the likes of Infra.Market and Birla Pivot. However, Sachdeva claims that JSW One's model of owning the distribution as well as having branded products means that it has no direct competitor in the market.

Sachdeva said Infra.Market caters largely to construction and branding catalogue, while JSW One focuses on the MSME manufacturing ecosystem.

“We supply steel to auto-ancillary units, boiler makers and equipment manufacturers and not just builders," he said.