Flipkart claims that it has crossed 100 million registered users on the platform, 6 months after it crossed 75 million users. The company says that its user base now is 63% of India’s wireless and wireline broadband connections in India which, according to TRAI data is at 160 million. Flipkart obviously does not mention how many of these are active users.
Last December, Flipkart’s #FlipTrends2015, a year end analytics and trends report of 50 million shoppers between January 2015 and December 2015, found that its top shoppers were single, male and worked in an office. A large chunk of people in the age group 25-34 shopped on Flipkart, followed by people aged 15-24, 35-44 and over 44 years of age.
The 100 million users club so far:
– Note that last August, Paytm claimed to have crossed 100 million users in the country who carried out over 75 million transactions every month.
– The Microsoft owned LinkedIn claims to have 37 million users in India and over 100 million in the Asia Pacific region. LinkedIn APAC represents 22% of LinkedIn’s global user base of over 450 million.
– In March, Facebook Lite, which officially launched in India and Philippines in June last year, crossed 100 million users.
– In January this year, Hike Messenger claimed that it crossed over 100 million registered users and 40 billion messages monthly.
Layoffs at Flipkart
Last month, Flipkart denied “allegations of a layoff,” instead, going on a defensive about its ‘transparent evaluation process’ which allows it to identify employees who meet and do not meet its performance standards. The company said that this was a regular yearly exercise in which 1% of the workforce was affected. Economic Times had reported that Flipkart had laid off 700-1,000 of its employees to make it a “lean organisation”.
Recent developments at Flipkart:
– Last month, Flipkart bought Jabong from Global Fashion Group for $70 million.
– In June, Flipkart shut down its Ping chat feature along with its image search.
– In May, Flipkart’s logistics company Ekart launched a courier service called Ekart Courier to build a direct consumer facing business.
– In April, it bought bought payments company PhonePe.
– In February, it shut down its grocery delivery service Nearby.
Hires and exits at the company
– In July, Lalit Sarna, head of Flipkart’s payments product design, and Sunil Gopinath, head of technology for the marketplace division, left the company.
– In June, Flipkart hired Kalyan Krishnamurthy again to oversee category design organisation. In May 2013, Krishnamurthy had been appointed as the Interim CFO by Flipkart, when the then CFO Karandeep Singh had resigned.
– In the same month, Flipkart restructured its technology team and elevated its Engineering Head Peeyush Ranjan as the group Chief Technology Officer. It also hired former CTO of Micromax Informatics Ashish Agarwal as senior Vice President of Engineering.
– In May, the company had promoted Samardeep Subandh as head of categories, Anil Goteti to head the marketplace and Ajay Veer Yadav as VP of mobiles category.
– In April, Punit Soni, chief product officer Flipkart, resigned after a year’s stint at the ecommerce company.
