To revitalise Flipkart’s brand, CEO Binny Bansal brings back old executives

Since his appointment as the Chief Executive Officer in January, Binny Bansal has got at least three former senior executives back to Flipkart.

According to Mint, Kalyan Krishnamurthy has joined back in his earlier role as Head of Categories. Kalyan, who was an executive at Flipkart’s investor Tiger Global Management, had left the company in November 2014. Kalyan had served as the interim chief financial officer at Flipkart before being appointed as the categories head. The news was first reported by Business Standard.

In April this year, Flipkart acquired, mobile payments startup PhonePe. One of the main reasons behind the acquisition was to get ex-Flipkart executives Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari back to the company.

Sameer was Senior Vice President of Engineering when he left Flipkart in July 2015, while Rahul held the role of Vice President of Supply Chain before quitting in November last year.

Binny is also trying to bring back former finance executive Vaibhav Gupta, the Mint report claimed. However, Vaibhav chose to start his own venture and will not be joining the e-commerce giant anytime soon.

There have been many changes in Flipkart's senior management since 2015. Earlier this month, the company witnessed a complete rejig in their technology leadership with Engineering Head Peeyush Ranjan having elevated to the role of Group Chief Technology Officer.

The firm also hired former Amazon and Micromax Informatics executive Ashish Agarwal as senior Vice President of Engineering. Ashish is expected to head the engineering division of Flipkart’s consumer shopping experience.

Hari Vasudev was also promoted to the head of technology function of two of Flipkart’s most important businesses –marketplace and Ekart. Former Google executive Surojit Chatterjee was appointed to the position of Chief Product Officer.

In last one year, Flipkart has seen multiple high level exits, garnering some negative publicity for the company. In mid-April, Punit Soni abandoned the position of the Chief Product Officer, with speculation making the rounds since January (this year). Earlier this year, Mukesh Bansal, Chairman of Myntra and Head of Commerce at Flipkart, left the company along with Chief Business Officer Ankit Nagori. A few days later, even Manish Maheshwari who was heading the seller business, left to become the CEO of the Network 18 group.

Troubled times

In May 2016, Flipkart was in news for deferring the offers it made during campus recruitments by six months. Earlier, Morgan Stanley marked down the valuation of its holding in the company, further by 15.5 percent, bringing down Flipkart’s value from $15.2 billion (as of last July) to $9.39 billion.

On the other hand, the company’s new return policy (to be implemented by June 20) has not gone down well with its sellers. A small group of merchants are threatening to either exit or be inactive on the online marketplace. Its arch rival Amazon India has been closing in on Flipkart’s market leadership.

Shortly before company founder Jeff Bezos announced a fresh investment of $3 billion into its India operations, Amazon had seen its market share (in terms of shipments) rise to over 21 percent from 14 percent this year. This makes it the only major player to increase its share from a year ago. Flipkart's share reportedly stands at 37 percent slipping from 43 percent (as of March 2015).