Farfetch sees an IPO on the cards in the next two to three years

Online luxury retailer Farfetch is getting ready to explore a potential floatation after having been valued at around 1.5 billion dollars in a fund-raising this year.

In an interview with Reuters, the CEO and founder of Fartfetch, Jose Neves, said that investors had it in mind (an IPO) as an objective but had not decided yet whether it would take place in London, New York or Hong Kong.

"We could start considering it in two to three years but not now as we are still in an intense investment phase," Neves told Reuters at Vogue Fashion Festival in Paris earlier this week. "It will be the next major financial milestone for the company," further added Neves.

Farfetch’s marketplace combines more than 500 boutiques, including L'Eclaireur in Paris, Maxfield in Los Angeles and Fivestory in New York. It launched in 2008 with a few boutiques such as Maria Luisa, which is known for nurturing younger designers, recalls Bloomberg.

In May, Farfetch raised 110 million dollars from existing and new investors, including France's Eurazeo, Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek and China's IDG Capital.

For the time being, the e-tailer is still lossmaking but "firmly on track to become profitable" in the medium term, according to Neves.

The value of the company’s transactions is set to reach more than 800 million dollars this year, up from over 500 million dollars in 2015, reports Bloomberg.

Revenue growth in the past few years has been around 60 percent, Neves said. "We have seen growth accelerating in the third quarter and in the fourth and do not expect this acceleration to stop."

Sources quoted by Bloomberg who have preferred to remain anonymous given the private nature of the matter, advanced that Farfetch will appoint advisers in the coming months. No final decisions have been made, and the company may also hold off on listing until 2018, they said.

In this vein, the same sources stressed that the IPO timeline is intended to coincide with Farfetch’s plan to become profitable by late 2017.