Morgan Stanley trims its Flipkart valuation once again

Morgan Stanley has once again cut valuation of its stock holding in India's most valuable e-commerce firm Flipkart.

Morgan Stanley Institutional Fund Trust – a mutual fund arm of Morgan Stanley, in a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing said that it has revised value of its each share in Flipkart Online Services at $50.51 per share as of December 2016, down 3.10% from $52.13 per share of September 2016.

With this revision, Flipkart's valuation is now pegged at $5.37 billion. 

This would be the sixth time in two years where Flipkart's valuation has been trimmed by Morgan Stanley.

A major revision was made in the month of November 2016, where Morgan Stanley lowered the value of its shareholding in Flipkart by 38% to $52.13 per share against $ 84.29 per share in the previous quarter.

Morgan Stanley's mutual fund arm invested in Flipkart during its Series D round and presently holds 566,827 shares in the online retailer.

Flipkart has been trying to raise fresh money from new investors but existing ones are busy slashing valuation of their holding in the company. 

On January 20, 2017, T Rowe cut its stockholding valuation in Flipkart's by 4%.

Few days later on January 25, 2017,  Fidelity Investment slashed value of its shareholding in Flipkart by 36.1%, reducing Flipkart's total valuation to $5.56 billion.

Recently, Flipkart named Kalyan Krishnamurthy  as the new chief executive office and moved cofounder Binny Bansal to a new position as group CEO. 

Flipkart also plans to hit the market to raise a new, large round of funds in the range of $500 million to $1 billion before the end of the year 2017.