Flipkart Hires Five Senior Executives For Vice President Posts

Homegrown ecommerce platform Flipkart has hired five senior executives at the level of vice president, aimed at strengthening company’s top management. The total number of VPs, including new hires, stands at 28.

The development comes with Walmart’s entry into Flipkart as it signs a $16 Bn deal for 77% stakes in Flipkart. Lately, Flipkart has been trimming its senior management which was evident with Kalyan Krishnamurthy taking over as CEO of the company.

Flipkart has hired VPs across corporate functions — fashion, corporate strategy, engineering, risk management, shared technology, and services group. New hirings for the post of vice-president (VP) include Dev Iyer, Srinivasulu Grandhi, Phanimohan Kalagara, Naren Ravula and Vineet Sethi.

Dev Iyer, vice-president (fashion) will be looking after fashion, home, and furniture business segments of Flipkart. He will be reporting directly to Rishi Vasudev (VP, Fashion, Home & Furniture). Whereas other newly hired VPs will be reporting to Kalyan Krishnamurthy (CEO). He was earlier working with Reckitt Benckiser and ITC.

Srinivasulu Grandhi was earlier with Amazon and Microsoft. Phanimohan Kalagara(VP, Engineering) is joining Flipkart after 12 years stint with PayPal.

Naren Ravula has worked at companies like Salesforce and NetApp. Ravula has been appointed as vice-president for corporate strategy, Flipkart.

On the other hand, Vineet Sethi who has been appointed as vice-president for risk management, Flipkart, will be reporting to Pramod Jain (Head of risk management, compliance, and assurance). Sethi has worked with companies like PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, among others.

Flipkart’s organisational structure has always been kept less top-heavy by Kalyan Krishnamurthy. The company had 14 SVPs in 2015.

Other Ventures By Flipkart

Flipkart is planning to foray into customer loyalty programme ‘Flipkart Plus’, a no-fee membership programme, setting August 15 as the launch date. The programme aims at enabling all Flipkart customers to earn ‘Plus Coins’ with each order. It has also tied-up with MakeMyTrip, Gaana, Uber, and Hotstar for festive passes in its loyalty programme.

Recently, Flipkart tied up with Hotstar to launch a video advertisement platform named Shopper Audience Network. The launch was a part of a broader strategy to generate more revenue from the booming video advertising business.

Flipkart is also looking to place its bet on the Indian fintech market which is said to be worth $2.4 Bn by 2020. In a recent development, the company has applied for a non-banking financial company (NBFC) license to focus on consumer lending.

[The development was reported by ET]