Australian-owned book retailer, Booktopia has received $20 million in capital raising to enhance the capacity and efficiency of its Sydney distribution centre.
The equity was raised from private investors including Champ Ventures co-founder and CEO, Su-Ming Wong and JBS Investments founder and CEO, John Sampson. The funds will be used to scale its inbound and outbound capacity from 30,000 individual books per day to 60,000 per day, to grow in-stock range and hold more units of popular titles, as well as working capital.
Booktopia CEO, Tony Nash said the retailer has come so far and the team is proud to have built the Australian owned business to scale from within internal resources.
“The funding will allow us to accelerate our growth in a controlled and measured way by investing in our ability to deliver to Australian book consumers through expanded distribution infrastructure and stock. This has been a proven high growth and predictable model for us for 16 years and we are not about to change,” he said.
Nash confirmed that the recent acquisition of the University Co-operative Bookshops was separate from the current capital raising.
“We were already well advanced with our private investors before The Co-op went into administration and as Tertiary Academic Sales were already a significant portion of our revenue, it was deemed that if the numbers worked then we would purchase it from within our own financial capacity.”