E Commerce giant, Flipkart has announced a major reshuffle in its top management. The company has created a bigger role for Kalyan Krishnamurthy, managing director at Flipkart’s largest investor Tiger Global in an effort to streamline its business to revive sluggish sales growth.
According to the report published in Live Mint, Krishnamurthy, who started his second stint at Flipkart in June, will now head Flipkart’s marketplace, retail and advertising businesses, The company communicated the development to its employees late on Thursday.
Saikiran Krishnamurthy, who was hired as chief operating officer (COO) of commerce unit from McKinsey last year, will reportedly oversee the supply side of Flipkart’s marketplace and retail business. Krishnamurthy was also named as head of logistics unit Ekart early this year.
Chief people officer Nithin Seth will now oversee strategy, analytics and planning besides human resources as chief administrative officer whereas Ravi Garikipati, the senior vice-president leading the advertisement business will lead the engineering team, the report said.
Hari Vasudev who was leading the engineering team after chief technology officer Peeyush Ranjan moved back to Silicon Valley along with Ashish Agrawal who joined in June as engineering senior vice president, now report to Garikipati, the report said. Both Vasudev and Agarwal were previously reporting to CEO Binny Bansal. Flipkart declined to comment to the publication.
Also Read: Flipkart To Lay Off Unproductive Staff: Report
This is Flipkart’s third major restructuring in the past one year. In February 2015, Flipkart split into three units: a commerce platform, supply chain and ads. In January, the company named Binny as its new CEO, replacing Sachin Bansal who became executive chairman.
This reshuffle comes days after Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal made a startling disclosure that he was replaced as chief executive “because of performance”. This disclosure was made in a monthly employee meeting where Bansal was defended the company’s decision to let go of 700 to 1000 employees, saying it was done on merit.
Over the past year, the company faced significant top management exits including Myntra founder Mukesh Bansal who was heading the company’s commerce platform; Ankit Nagori who was chief business officer; former chief product officer Punit Soni; and more recently Rajinder Sharma, who was the legal head.
In January, Binny Bansal was handed charge of running all business areas including commerce, Myntra and the in-house logistics unit Ekart, with Sachin Bansal focusing on strategic direction, mentoring the senior leadership and looking for new investment opportunities.
“Some of our targets have been missed and everyone, including the top management, has paid the price.” Bansal reportedly said in the meeting.
The company is now aiming to turnaround the company by focusing on improving the customer service levels, which had dropped over the last year, thereby partly aiding Amazon India’s rapid growth in the country.
Last week, it introduced Flipkart Assured (F-Assured), which is essentially an revamped version of its earlier program Flipkart Advantage to offer improved delivery service to customers.