Flipkart has invested Rs 961.4 crore in Instakart Services Pvt. Ltd., which operates its logistics arm eKart, reports VCCircle. The investment was made by Flipkart's Singapore-based group company Klick2Shop Logistics Services International Pte. eKart has allocated 15.38 crore shares to Klick2Shop at Rs 62.51 per share. Earlier, in January 2016, eKart had secured Rs 666.49 crore from Klick2Shop by allocating 66.64 crore shares at Rs 10 per share. It's worth noting that in February, Flipkart had suspended its consumer-facing courier service Ekart Courier nine months after launching it. Ekart's warehousing solutions and end-to-end logistics and supply solutions processes 30,000-40,000 orders a day for third-party businesses, excluding the volumes generated by Flipkart and Myntra. Around the same time, Ekart’s head Saikiran Krishnamurthy quit Flipkart following another top-level rejig in the company, and was recently replaced by Amitesh Jha, who has been with Flipkart for nearly seven years. Flipkart has already raised close to $4 billion this year: $2.5 billion from SoftBank's Vision Fund in August, and $1.4 billion from Microsoft, eBay and Tencent in April. Amazon's logistics push In June, Amazon India’s logistics arm Amazon Transportation Services (ATS) got an infusion Rs 207 crore from Singapore-based Amazon Corporate Holdings and Amazon Malaysia. It also received Rs 67 crore from the parent company in September 2016. And now ATS is reportedly looking to get another Rs 400 crore infusion from the parent company to expand its logistics footprint in the country. In fact, filings with the registrar of companies showed that it has got board approval to increase its authorized share capital. The company also opened its 41st fulfilment centre (FC) in Hyderabad,…
