COO Nitin Seth calls it a day at Flipkart

Flipkart COO Nitin Seth has quit citing personal reasons, according to company sources in the know. He put in his papers earlier this week, just a few days after CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy took over the human resources (HR) department at Flipkart—which was handled by Nitin till recently. Nitin was also in charge of Flipkart’s logistics arm Ekart.

Nitin Joined Flipkart a year ago, as Chief People’s Officer and was later promoted to Chief Administrative Officer, before he became the Chief Operating Officer.

Earlier this year, a bunch of senior executives—including Ekart head Saikiran Krishamurthy, product head Surojit Chatterjee (who had replaced Punit Soni), and marketing head Samardeep Subandh—had left Flipkart, following Kalyan taking charge as CEO.

Last year also saw major management changes at Flipkart – with Mukesh Bansal (Myntra co-founder and head of marketplace at Flipkart), Ankit Nagori (Chief Business Officer at Flipkart for six years), and Mekin Maheshwari (who was Chief People’s Officer before Nitin) leaving the organisation to start up on their own.

Changing roles

Nitin is leaving Flipkart when the e-commerce market leader is in the process of growing the market. In an earlier interaction, Nitin had told YourStory, “It is when Flipkart grows that the industry grows.”

Flipkart COO is a position which was once held by co-founder Binny Bansal (when co-founder Sachin Bansal was the CEO). He is now the CEO of the Flipkart Group. Nitin is also an alumnus of the co-founders’ alma mater, IIT Delhi.

Before joining Flipkart, Nitin was with Fidelity International where he served as Country Head for almost six years. He has also worked with McKinsey and NASSCOM in different roles over various periods.

Way ahead for Flipkart

Nitin’s exit obviously means more power (and responsibility) for Kalyan. Departments of Category design, private labels, and marketing teams report to Kalyan, as do CFO Sriram Venkataraman and Engineering head Ravi Garikapati. (Flipkart is now looking for a head of HR)

Curiously, these high-level changes are coming when Flipkart is close to acquiring its rival online marketplace, Snapdeal, and thus on-boarding Japanese investment firm SoftBank. Flipkart had recently acquired Ebay India as well, which means the company has quite a handful of people to integrate into its workforce. Incidentally, Snapdeal’s HR Head Saurabh Nigam has also quit the company.