The Proverb of Old is Gold seems true in the case of India’s largest e-commerce company Flipkart. Under new CEO Binny Bansal, Flipkart re-appointed Mr. Kalyan Krishnamurthy as head of categories.
Before explaining anything about Flipkart re-joining strategy kindly read our previous report to get more clarification.
Kalyan Krishnamurthy an executive at Flipkart’s largest investor Tiger Global Management was first appointed as a interim chief financial officer (CFO) & Category Head of Flipkart in February 2014. He left the company and joined Tiger Global again in November 2014.
In 2015, Flipkart replaced its entire senior management and hired professionals from Google, Amazon etc.
In 2016, due to shortage of funding and poor performance Flipkart’s three senior executives lost their jobs.
Binny Bansal appointed as a new CEO of Flipkart in 2016. Commerce platform head Mukesh Bansal, chief business officer Ankit Nagori and product head Punit Soni have left the company.
Facing stiff competition from Amazon under his regime CEO Binny Bansal trying to bring old Flipkart hands back to India’s largest e-commerce company.
In an email to Flipkart employees, Bansal wrote, “…we are at an inflection point and need some fundamental improvement to our business approach. Going forward, we will follow a clear set of priorities—first and always delivery product quality and service quality to our customers as a non-negotiable starting point—we cannot scale without this. Only after we deliver this should we pursue growth—this is what made Flipkart different when we started and we have to go back to these fundamentals.”
Flipkart bought mobile payments start-up PhonePe to get former Flipkart executives, Sameer Nigam (former senior vice-president, engineering) and Rahul Chari (former vice-president, supply chain) back to the company.
As per report Binny Bansal also tried to bring back Vaibhav Gupta, a former senior finance executive in the team but he started his own venture with two other former Flipkart executives.
Now, Bansal’s approach to former Flipkart employees is part of his efforts to revitalize Flipkart’s brand and customer service and re-energize the organisation after a year in which it lost the initiative.
Due to Amazon aggressive marketing approach and in danger of being overtaken, Binny Bansal doesn’t have too much time. Amazon significantly improves its product selection, delivery times and consistency, and other parts of its business.
Earlier this month, Amazon announced that it will invest another $3 billion in its India operations, after exhausting its earlier investment of $2 billion. On the other hand, Flipkart’s valuation has been marked down by four of its mutual fund investors.