Walmart Inc. has purchased $3.5 billion worth of shares in Flipkart Pvt. Ltd., India’s largest e-commerce marketplace operator.

Walmart disclosed the investment in a Friday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It bought the Flipkart shares during the six months ended July 31. On July 30, the Wall Street Journal reported that Walmart had purchased Flipkart shares from investment firm Tiger Global at a $35 billion valuation.

Bangalore-based Flipkart launched in 2007 with an initial focus on selling books. Over the subsequent years, the company expanded into other parts of the e-commerce market through a series of acquisitions. It bought Letsbuy, an online electronics store, in 2014 and spent $280 million to purchase fashion retailer Myntra two years later.

In 2018, Walmart paid $16 billion to acquire 77% of Flipkart’s shares. The investment the retail giant disclosed on Friday increased its stake to about 80%.

Walmart said in the filing for the investment that it bought shares from “certain Flipkart noncontrolling interest holders” as part of the deal. According to TechCrunch, those shareholders included Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, Accel and Tiger Global. It was earlier reported that Tiger Global had invested $1.2 billion in Flipkart and realized $3.5 billion worth of gains.

Walmart detailed that a part of its $3.5 billion investment was used to “settle the liability to former noncontrolling interest holders of PhonePe.” PhonePe is a company that operates a popular mobile payments service of the same name. The service is widely used by consumers in India to make online purchases.

PhonePe became part of Flipkart in 2016 through a $20 million acquisition. When Walmart bought a 77% stake in Flipkart two years later, it also became PhonePe’s majority investor. Walmart split off the mobile payments provider into a separate company last year but continues to retain a controlling stake.

Walmart disclosed in June that Flipkart had achieved double-digit revenue growth during the three months ended April 30. In the same time frame, the annualized value of the payments processed by PhonePe topped $1 trillion for the first time. The latter company maintained a 46% share of India’s mobile payments market as of last December and has more than 400 million users.

With Flipkart’s help, Walmart hopes to double the value of the merchandise it sells in international markets within five years. The company is seeking to achieve gross merchandise volume of $200 billion in international markets by 2028.

Walmart rival Amazon.com Inc. is also making significant investments in India as part of its long-term growth plans. In May, it announced plans to spend $12.7 billion on local Amazon Web Services Inc. data centers. A month later, the online retail and cloud computing giant pledged to invest another $6.5 billion in India through 2030.

Image: Flipkart