Flipkart top deck shuffled yet again

The management shakeout at Flipkart has not stopped with last week’s elevation of Kalyan Krishnamurthy into roles that had hitherto been under the direct remit of Flipkart co-founder and Group CEO Binny Bansal.

In a move that signalled Bansal’s reduced role in Flipkart’s core operations, Krishnamurthy, a senior executive with Tiger Global, Flipkart’s largest shareholder, was brought in to revamp operations at the e-tailer which has been battling stiff competition from Amazon and has seen its valuation getting marked down sharply over the past few months.

After Binny Bansal was brought in as the CEO, he was given the task of improving the customer experience as well as getting strong visibility into improving the bottomline.

However, Bansal chose to focus more on quality products across categories, which resulted in the mobile business taking a hit as most Flipkart-only mobile handset manufacturers shifted to Amazon. They are back now after some time but Flipkart took a major hit because of the shift. Flipkart was expected to increase the cash burn to retain mobile handset manufacturers but it did not happen as the focus was on profitability. The constant change in business strategy was also one of the reasons for GMV going down considerably for Flipkart.

Last week, Flipkart rejigged its top deck with Kalyan Krishnamurthy being given additional roles such as head of marketing, advertising, marketplace and customer experience businesses in addition to category design management. Samardeep Subandh, who joined Flipkart as its chief marketing officer from Marico last October, will now report to Krishnamurthy.

Hari Vasudev, former VP at Yahoo, who was appointed as Senior Vice-President for Engineering, IT and Supply Chain Analytics, Surojit Chatterjee, Senior Vice-President and Head of Product Management and Consumer Shopping Experience and Ashish Agarwal, Senior Vice-President, Engineering, will also report to Krishnamurthy.

The Flipkart top deck is expected to see more shake ups with Chief Technology Officer Peeyush Ranjan likely to be one of the casualties, sources said, while another honcho, Anand KV, Senior Vice-President, Customer Experience, has already exited the company.

Sources within the company told BusinessLine that there is likely to be a bigger shake up once the ‘Big Billion’ sale in October gets over. They said that the appraisals of key employees were concluded on Monday and this could see several voluntary exits over time in a top-heavy organisational structure.

It is likely that after the first set of layoffs, where it let go of about 400 non-performing employees, a second round is on the cards.

A Flipkart spokesperson told BusinessLine that Ranjan is still with the organisation though he has been moved to the US and works in the company’s R & D unit there. Sources said from now onthose hired in the US, will function from there. This is being done to reduce costs of relocation.

The e-commerce giant is also reducing costs at all levels. For example, team outings have been brought to a minimum, there are very few offsite meetings, key employees no longer get free cab rides and both international and domestic travel has been drastically reduced.

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