Turkish eCommerce Platform Hepsiburada Seeks Nasdaq IPO

D-MARKET Elektronik Hizmetler ve Ticaret Anonim Şirketi (in English, D-MARKET Electronic Services & Trading), the company behind major Turkish eCommerce player Hepsiburada.com, has filed to go public on the U.S. Nasdaq exchange.

The registration was filed Friday (May 28) with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The company is seeking to sell American Depository Shares (ADSs) on the Nasdaq corresponding to Class B shares of D-MARKET Elektronik Hizmetler ve Ticaret Anonim Şirketi stock.

“Hepsidurada” means “You can find anything you want here,” founder and company Chairwoman Hanzade Doğan wrote in the SEC filing. The company said it is the second-largest eTailer in Turkey.

“I founded Hepsiburada with the vision to build the gateway for digitalization of commerce in Turkey, from shopping to payments to last-mile delivery,” Doğan wrote. “Throughout our 20-year history, we have scaled Hepsiburada with the conviction that digitalization would improve commerce by connecting every household and every merchant in Turkey. And by offering the broadest range of goods to our customers while setting the standard for affordability, accessibility and convenience.”

She added in the filing: “We offer next-day delivery to every corner of Turkey and make all goods and services accessible by every customer. With our long tail selection and extended catalog of over 44 million SKUs, our customers can find everything they need at their fingertips.”

She wrote, echoing language used to describe Amazon: “Hepsiburada, at its core, is a technology company. We constantly innovate and introduce new services, from payment tools to agile, scalable, last-mile delivery infrastructure.”

The company noted in the SEC filing that the pandemic drove growth but also conceded: “We experienced negative Free Cash Flow in the three months ended March 31, 2021, due to purchases of inventories higher than usual, to be able to secure supply during the COVID-19 lockdown period in the second quarter of 2021.”

According to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 tracker, Turkey has lost 47,405 people to COVID-19 amid 5.2 million cases. The tracker further stated that 15 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated.