Faced with a series of valuation markdowns, management exodus and scarcity of funds, Flipkart has announced yet another round of top-tier management changes. It has decided to hand over control of even more departments to these personnel in an effort to streamline its business and revive sales growth.
As the pressure of competition deepens, the company is going through this restructuring to double down and deliver results in this increasingly tough environment. And, probably to successfully conduct its upcoming flagship Big Billion Day sales event.
Kalyan Krishnamurthy, a representative of its largest investor Tiger Global Management, who’s returned for a second round at the company has been offered a bigger role by the Bansal’s. He will now head Flipkart’s marketplace, retail and advertising businesses, says a note sent by the company to its employees. Previously, he had worked at the firm as interim CFO and category management head.
Flipkart in this restructuring has topped its already complex management and dissected the management on the basis of functioning. For instance, the heads of all the demand side functions of the company, marketing, private label, marketplace and customer experience product, will now directly report to Krishnamurthy.
In a similar fashion, Saikiran Krishnamurthy, the head of Flipkart’s logistics unit Ekart will additionally oversee the supply side of the company’s marketplace and retail business.
Flipkart has also handed over bigger positions and titles to two other senior executives. The company’s HR Director Priya Cherian has quit to join the Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, who is planning an Indian intervention in the following year.Thus, chief people officer, Nitin Seth, has now been promoted to chief administrative officer. He will not only head the human resources, but also oversee strategy and analytics.
The head of Flipkart’s advertising unit, Ravi Garikipati, will now lead engineering. According to the internally distributed note, two of the current engineering leaders, Hari Vasudev(replaced CTO Peeyush Ranjan in India office) and Ashish Agarwal will now report to Garikipati.
Commenting on the restructuring, CEO Binny Bansal said,
Towards the goal of creating Flipkart group as an e-commerce conglomerate, organizational changes have been announced with the following three objectives: increasing focus on Flipkart Group; consolidation to simplify organization; creation of top-team with clear accountabilities
All executives who’ve been handed bigger roles at the company will report directly to Binny Bansal. Additionally, Sameer Nigam, the head of Flipkart’s payment arm PhonePe and Ananth Narayanan, chief exec of the company’s fashion marketplaces Myntra and Jabong will continue report to Bansal. Before this simplification, Bansla had more than 12 executives reporting to him.
Proir to this, the company has gone through three major changes in the past year. The company, firstly, announced the appointment of Binny Bansal as Chief Executive, who replaced Sachin Bansal(now Executive Chairman). In a bid to rival Amazon and cut losses, it also announced that it is has split the company business into three units: a commerce platform, supply chain and ads.
And, finally, the company has been introducing new and fresh schemes to please both customers and sellers alike. It has recently launched the ‘Flipkart Assured‘ initiative to fight the sale of ‘fake/counterfeit’ products on its platform. The company has also achieved the humongous milestone of disbursing over 800+ loans amounting to Rs. 125 crore to its third-party sellers.
