Zalando investors want to take the crown from Zara, H&M and Ikea

Resounding names and big promises

Oliver, Marc and Alexander Samwer are on the
prowl for money – lots of money. In that search they are not afraid to drop
names to potential investors of big companies that already have a participation
in Rocket Internet or one of the derived companies: according to their claims they include Indian steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, Ukrainian billionaire Victor
Pinchuk and Colombian beer tycoon Alejandro Santo Domingo.

The Samwers are not only throwing around big names, but
are also juggling with high returns on invested funds: at least ten percent
within three to five years. To realise this, the brothers have launched
spin-offs of Zalando on different continents and they have copied other
successful e-commerce companies.

Dizzying predictions

Their predictions are not conservative: sales of
Brazilian Zalando-sister Dafiti should be twenty times higher by 2016 and reach two billion euro. Sales of Russian brother Lamoda, about 45 million euro
last year, should by then be a staggering 1.5 billion dollar. The Amazon copy
that was recently launched in Latin-America under the name Linio, has to
generate more than 250 million euro of sales by 2016.

The profits of Zalando though are not on par
with the ambitions of the company. Despite rising sales Zalando made a loss of
ninety million in 2012. The online furniture shop Home24 alone had to swallow a
loss of forty million euro, according to German Manager magazine, that had the
opportunity to see confidential documents.