Ecommerce major Flipkart has acquired mobile phone and electronic products repair and services startup F1 Info Solutions as it seeks to enhance aftersales offerings.
Flipkart has merged F1 Info Solutions with its subsidiary Jeeves, a third- party service provider for home appliances and furniture.
As part of the deal, Shammi Moza, F1 Info Solutions co-founder and CEO, will be joining Flipkart as senior director and will continue to hold responsibility for the business. He will report to Abhijit Upadhye, vice president at Flipkart and head of Jeeves.
Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO, Flipkart said the acquisition is a big capability add-on for the company that would help the firm give its customers a comprehensive service ecosystem that takes care of the repair and service needs. “Flipkart is the top destination for mobile phones in India and having created the market for online smartphones from scratch, we’re now taking our offerings several notches higher,†he said in a statement.
Mobile phone is a hotly contested category among ecommerce players and Flipkart claims to have 70% market share in the online smartphone sales market. With the acquisition of F1 Info Solutions, Flipkart’s end-to-end capabilities in mobile phones would become a “critical service differentiator†compared to other ecommerce firms, the ecommerce firm said.
Founded in 2012, Mumbai-headquartered F1 Info Solutions has a repair service network of 158 centres in 135 cities. The firm has close to 1,000 employees, including technicians, and handles more than 50,000 service calls every month across the country.
F1 Info Solutions, which was chosen as No.1 in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 India in 2015, recorded revenues of Rs 76 crore and profit of Rs 8 crore in financial year 2015-16, according to VCCEdge, the data research platform of News Corp VCCircle.
Earlier this year, Flipkart had acquired e-Bay’s India business as part of a funding deal with the US-based online seller. The company has acquired a series of firms—including Myntra, Jabong, Phonepe and Jeeves—over the years to build various verticals and capabilities. After the recently concluded record fundraising of nearly $4 billion, Flipkart shows signs of regaining its aggression on the acquisition front.
