Another re-shuffle at Flipkart’s top-deck to streamline business

Amidst a tough sail in the rough waters marked by scarce funds, valuation markdown and management exodus, India’s largest e-commerce portal, Flipkart has announced another re-shuffling at its top-deck.

With ever increasing competition from arch-rival Amazon, the company has decided to hand over control of even more departments to this personnel in an effort to streamline its business and revive sales growth especially in the face of 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 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 has also categorized the management this time 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. Similarly, Saikiran Krishnamurthy, the head of Flipkart’s logistics unit Ekart will additionally oversee the supply side of the company’s marketplace and retail business.

Two other senior executives also get a bigger role by Bansals, according to the internally distributed note. With company's HR Director Priya Cherian having quit to join the Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, who is planning an Indian intervention in the following year, 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.

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.”

The head of Flipkart’s advertising unit, Ravi Garikipati, will now lead engineering and two of the current engineering leaders, Hari Vasudev and Ashish Agarwal will now report to Garikipati. 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 executive of the company’s fashion marketplaces Myntra and Jabong will continue reporting to Bansal.