Paytm has transferred over 800 employees from its parent company, One97 Communications Ltd, to the recently-launched entity, Paytm Ecommerce Pvt. Ltd, which runs online shopping platform Paytm Mall.
According to a company statement, the employees were actively involved in the e-commerce business of One97 Communications.
Paytm Mall, majority-owned by China’s Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd, said it has plans to hire another 2,000 employees, including a team of technical experts, to scale up its operations.
Paytm Mall is also scaling up its partner network by adding 3,000 agents across the country. It looks to tap the offline customer base with an offline-to-online strategy. The company is focussing on shopkeepers in tier 2 and tier 3 cities.
The company, which had recently named One97 Communications vice president Amit Sinha as its chief operating officer, has put together a team to lead the company’s various functions – Saurabh Vashishtha will oversee marketing, Amit Bagaria will take care of customer experience, Bhushan Patil will lead the logistics team and Sunil Goyal will look after product and technology. Goyal is the founder of Near.in, which was acquired by Paytm in 2015.
Last year, Noida-based One97 had separated its e-commerce and payments businesses under Paytm E-Commerce and Paytm Payments Bank Ltd, respectively. In June, Paytm E-Commerce received a funding of $200 million from Alibaba and venture capital firm SAIF Partners. The investment increased Alibaba’s and its affiliate Ant Financial’s stake in Paytm E-Commerce from 40% to 62%.
In May, One97 had raised $1.4 billion from Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp in the largest ever funding round from a single investor in India.
In an interview to VCCircle late last year, Sharma had said that Paytm would be one of the two final winners in the Indian e-commerce contest. “We have taken a long-haul journey in e-commerce. Since we find that it is becoming an independently sustainable business, we are making it a standalone unit. If we were to take a five-year forward view, we will be one of the final two marketplaces,†he had said.
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