Flipkart Loses 4 SVPs As It Paces Up Its Profitability Run

At a time when Walmart-led ecommerce giant Flipkart is trying to walk the profitability trail by trying to cull its monthly expenses, four senior vice presidents (SVPs) have left the company. 

Travel booking website Cleartrip’s head Ayyappan R, marketplace and categories leader Amitesh Jha, fintech and payments head Dheeraj A, and growth and retention head Bharath Ram are the four top-level employees who have recently exited the company, as per an ET report.

The group chief executive of Flipkart, Kalyan Krishnamurthy, informed the company’s employees in an internal email.

“Our approach to enabling wealth creation and career planning… has given several individuals the opportunity to pursue the next phase of their careers… Amitesh, Ayyappan, Bharath and Dheeraj are part of this talented set of visionary leaders who have chosen to embark on journeys beyond Flipkart,” Krishnamurthy said. 

Inc42 has access to this email.

While Jha joined Flipkart in 2010, Ayyappan has been with the etailer since 2013. The two are among the executives with the longest tenures at the Bengaluru-based firm. 

“The changes are also happening at the top level as the firm is working to increase agility and efficiency,” the report said, citing sources close to the matter.

This comes days after Krishnamurthy said that the company is nearing profitability on the back of a significant reduction in monthly cash burn. He added that the ecommerce major has been working to reduce its costs for the past two years.

Since last year, the company has witnessed the exits of several senior executives. These include — Flipkart’s senior vice president and head of verticals Adarsh Menon, SVP of supply chain Ravish Sinha, Flipkart Labs’ head Ajay Ponna Venkatesh.

More recently, Binny Bansal resigned from the board of Flipkart, completely ending his association with the company as its cofounder.

Meanwhile, the company is expected to lay off a few employees in the coming months. As per a Moneycontrol report, the company is slashing around 1,000 jobs as part of its annual performance review process. 

Accordingly, the team size is expected to be cut by 5%. Earlier, a report said that the layoff would impact around 5-7% of the total workforce.

The company currently has around 22,000 employees on its payroll.

Flipkart India, the B2B arm of the company, saw its standalone net loss widen over 42% YoY to INR 4,845.7 Cr in FY23. In FY22, Flipkart Internet, the ecommerce giant’s marketplace arm, reported a 1.5X YoY surge in its net loss to INR 4,361 Cr.