Flipkart Group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy told in an interview that the company will scale up verticals such as grocery and hyperlocal deliveries alongside its value-focused platform Shopsy after investing in these verticals over the last year.
This comes at a time when Indian ecommerce has seen the entry of younger players, a flood of investor capital, and incumbents like Flipkart and Amazon being challenged for the first time in many years.
Instead of diversifying further this year, Krishnamurthy said the Bengaluru-based company, which is majority owned by the US-based retail behemoth Walmart Inc., will double down on these bets while also pushing healthcare and travel, where it made strategic investments last year.
The last two years have been primarily about launching new products, but in 2022 “we will scale all of these businesses”, he said. “Shopsy, grocery, travel and healthcare, these are big and we made massive investments… We want to really get these to the next level of growth and pull in customer adoption over the next 12-18 months.
Flipkart raised $3.6 billion in July last year at a valuation of $37.6 billion in its first external financing round since being acquired by Walmart in 2018. Aside from its own fundraising, the etailer has had a busy year with numerous investments and acquisitions. The company is estimated to have spent $400-500 million on M&As in the last 12-18 months, as it purchased travel booking site Cleartrip, online pharmacy SastaSundar, and most recently invested $145 million in Ninjacart, a fresh produce supply chain startup, with Walmart.