Flipkart rejigs top management to ‘simplify’ ops

Flipkart has rejigged its top deck yet again, carving a bigger role for head of ‘category design management’ Kalyan Krishnamurthy among other changes, to create a “top-team with clear accountabilities”. The rejig at Flipkart, the third major one this year, comes at a time when the Bengaluru-based firm is locked in a battle with global rival Amazon for market leadership. In an internal note, Flipkart said the goal of the reorganisation is to “increase focus on Flipkart Group, consolidate to simplify organisation and creation of top-team with clear accountabilities”. The new structure will help the company better manage its functions and operations of the marketplace as well those of Myntra (and Jabong), Ekart (logistics) and PhonePe (wallet). “In the last few months, Flipkart has made considerable progress in creating the foundation of an e-commerce conglomerate... Flipkart is now in a position to combine its strengths,” the note said. Co-founder Binny Bansal will focus more on his role as Flipkart Group CEO and consequently, Commerce will be managed by former Tiger Global (Flipkart’s largest shareholder) executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy and Saikiran Krishnamurthy. They will report to Bansal. Kalyan will lead the ad, Market Place (sellers), marketing and customer shopping experience businesses in addition to category design management. Saikiran will look after supply chain as well as part of his existing role as Head of Ekart. Another change in the structure is expansion of Nitin Seth’s role from Chief People officer to Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), consolidating strategy, strategy deployment, quality, HR, corporate development, analytics, planning and communications.