Indian consumers are spending big online with Flipkart, the Indian marketplace that says it brought in $1 billion in online sales last year. Flipkart, meanwhile, is spending big on technology talent to continue growing its business and keep sellers and shoppers coming back.
The e-commerce giant, No. 15 in the Internet Retailer Asia 500, last week announced it has hired Hari Vasudev as senior vice president of engineering, IT and analytics for the supply chain vertical. Also hired were Anand KV (KV is his last name) as senior vice president of customer experience and Manish Maheshwari as vice president and head of seller ecosystem.
The new hires follow Flipkart’s hiring of former Google staffer Punit Soni, who joined Flipkart as chief product officer in March.
As senior vice president of engineering, IT and analytics for the supply chain vertical, Vasudev will be in charge of building new supply chain products and services using technologies including robotics, mobile, data sciences and Internet of Things—or objects communicating with each other via the Internet.
Prior to Flipkart, Vasudev worked with Yahoo Inc. as vice president and center head. In that role, he worked on consumer products and various platform products in the consumer and advertising fields. Vasudev spent more than eight years at Yahoo in various leadership positions on search and platforms teams.
“Hari, with his rich experience, has built and scaled organizations across multiple domains in the software industry,” says Binny Bansal, co-founder and chief operating office for Flipkart. “His expertise will help us in transforming supply chain in India by using technology to create a highly differentiated customer experience at a very large scale.”
Vasudev has a master’s degree in computer science from Iowa State University and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley.
As senior vice president of customer experience Anand KV will be responsible for driving customer experience for Flipkart’s marketplace.
“As Flipkart scales and ventures into newer territories within the e-commerce space, the need to maintain our focus on a superior customer experience has become paramount,” says Mukesh Bansal, head of commerce for Flipkart. “We are confident that Anand, with his depth of experience in the customer engagement space, is a great fit to lead Flipkart in this initiative.”
Prior to Flipkart, KV spent more than 18 years in the satellite broadcasting and satellite television industry across the Middle East, Hong Kong and India. He has worked with India-based direct broadcast satellite television provider Tata Sky and most recently with Hathway Cable & Datacom Ltd., as president, digital platforms.
Maheshwari will be responsible for attracting new sellers to the Flipkart marketplace and growing and improving the seller ecosystem team.
Maheshwari co-founded txtWeb, growing the company into a marketplace for text-based apps with over 16 million mobile users in India alone. Prior to founding txtWeb, Maheshwari was the head of new markets for the Global Business Division at Intuit Inc., a provider of accounting software for small- and medium-size businesses and retailers.
“Manish’s experience leads to him having a great understanding of SMEs in India,” says Ankit Nagori, senior vice president of marketplaces for Flipkart, using the acronym for small and midsize enterprises. “He has a proven track record of building cross-functional teams with a constant focus on customer experience.”
Maheshwari also worked at consulting firm McKinsey, where he advised Fortune 500 companies on entering new markets and growth strategy in technology and e-commerce.
Flipkart, launched in 2007, sells more than 20 million products across 70 product categories. It was one of the earliest major players to market and one of the first to offer cash on delivery, overnight delivery (in 50 cities) and same-day delivery (in 13 cities). Its annual subscription service, Flipkart First, offers customers perks including free overnight delivery, discounted same-day delivery and early access to promotions and sales for 500 rupees ($8.04) a year.
Flipkart says it has 30 million registered users and attracts more than 10 million daily visitors. It delivers eight million packages per month and has 33,000 employees.
While still very poor—India remains among the bottom third of nations measured on a per capita basis—data indicates the country’s fortunes are rising. In 2010, nearly 30% of India’s population lived below the poverty line. Just two years later, that rate had dropped to 21.9%, according to the World Bank. The National Council for Applied Economic Research, an Indian economic policy institute, estimates there were 160 million Indian consumers in the Indian middle class last year and it expects that number to grow 66% to 267 million by next year.
E-commerce sales in India are expected to grow at a 33% compound annual rate through 2020, spurred in large part by a rapidly growing middle class with solid annual income and access to web-enabled mobile devices, according to Gartner Inc. projections.
In the near-term, Gartner estimates online retail sales in India could grow 71% from an estimated $3.5 billion in 2014 to $6.0 billion this year. In terms of sales, India is painfully behind e-commerce powerhouse nations like China, which had nearly $450 billion in 2014 online sales according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, and the United States, which accumulated $305 billion in 2014 web sales, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. However, India’s projected e-commerce growth rate would be far higher than the United States’ 15.4% growth rate last year and even China’s 49.7% growth rate.
Indian companies like Flipkart and its main rival Snapdeal, which launched in 2010, are benefiting from brand recognition that comes with their deep pockets and somewhat early entry into Indian e-commerce. Also helpful is Indian law that restricts foreign companies from selling direct to consumers via the Internet.
“India may one day have substantially more web shoppers, but today that base is very small and some companies like Flipkart have been catering to those customers for eight or nine years,” says Vishal Tripathi, a Gartner principal research analyst for India.