Home grown e-commerce giant Flipkart has reshuffled its top management with Myntra’s co-founder and CEO Mukesh Bansal, who had joined Flipkart’s board and is also head of its fashion vertical, will now also lead marketing.
Bansal (not related to Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal) will also be responsible for categories like computers and consumer electronics, and will market the company’s private label brands (like in-house tablet brand DigiFlip), according to a report by The Economic Times.
In May, Flipkart acquired Myntra Designs Pvt Ltd, the company which runs the online fashion and apparel shop Myntra.com. However, both the entities remain independent and Flipkart is planning to invest $100 million in the fashion business alone, a high margin vertical and one of its weak points before it snapped Myntra.
Ravi Vora, who was earlier handling marketing for Flipkart, will now be responsible for building new in-house brands for the company. As part of the reshuffle, Ankit Nagori, Flipkart’s marketplace head, will also oversee general merchandise and book-retailing.
The moves are part of a larger organisational rehaul, and the company’s employees were informed about the same in an email sent by Flipkart’s founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal (not related).
The email also announced that Kalyan Krishnamurthy, who had been appointed as the interim chief financial officer (CFO) of Flipkart, is returning to Tiger Global Management, one of the largest investors in Flipkart. Krishnamurthy, director (finance – portfolio companies) at Tiger Global Management, had joined the company as interim CFO in May 2013. His appointment had come in the wake of Karandeep Singh, former CFO of Flipkart, leaving the company in February last year.
The firm had recently roped in Sanjay Baweja from Tata Communications to head the finance team.
Flipkart had raised $1 billion (around Rs 6,000 crore) in a fresh funding round of funding co-led by two of its existing investors Tiger Global and Naspers in July this year. One of the two sovereign wealth funds of Singapore, GIC, along with other existing investors Accel Partners, DST Global, ICONIQ Capital, Morgan Stanley Investment Management and Sofina, also participated in the financing round.
The development took the total fundraise by Flipkart to date to around $1.75 billion, making it not just India’s but one of the single-biggest private funding rounds for a tech venture globally.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)