India’s largest e-commerce venture Flipkart.com seems to be getting aggressive with acquisition plans and taking all the necessary initiatives. We have learnt that the company is hiring people to build its M&A team, which will help the biggest Indian e-tailer scale up further via partnership/acquisition route.
According to a Jobvite posting sourced by us, the e-commerce company is looking at putting together a mid-senior level team drawn from premier institutes whose full-time job is to do deal sourcing and acquisitions as part of the corporate strategy.
The team is expected to identify potential acquisition opportunities through market study and contribute to the evaluation and development of business opportunities through the assessment of acquisition opportunities to determine priorities for growth, divestiture and expansion of business into new markets. It will also advise the company management on the financial, organisational, and facilities & capital resource implications of new business opportunities, resulting from bid and proposal activities.
Only recently, the company hired Hiren Doshi as vice-president, corporate strategy and M&A. Prior to this appointment, Doshi worked with Bangalore-based Manthan Systems as senior VP and product head and looked after P&L responsibility for supplier portal & analytics, financial analytics and mall analytics products. An alumnus of Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Doshi had earlier worked with Infosys Technologies and Logica. This hire also indicates Flipkart's intention of strengthening the new team so that it can explore the opportunities of partnering with other companies or acquiring them.
Replying to an e-mail query sent by us, Flipkart CFO Karandeep Singh said, "As mentioned before, we have a target of reaching $1 billion in revenue by 2015. Keeping that in mind, we are open to partnerships and acquisitions that fit in with our business goal of profitable growth – thus helping us achieve our targets."
The company is also looking at Rs 500-600 crore in revenues in the current fiscal. In the last fiscal, it clocked revenue of Rs 50 crore.
In February this year, Flipkart acquired Letsbuy.com as a move to boost its electronics product catalogue but a month ago, it pulled the plug on Letsbuy. Last October, the company acquired Mallers Inc (Mime360), a firm registered in the US and Mumbai, in a cash-and-stock deal.
Flipkart also acquired the rights of Chakpak’s digital library, a Bollywood news site that offers news, photos and videos. Prior to that, it acquired the social book discovery tool WeRead from Lulu, a US-based on-demand publishing firm.
(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)