Paytm Mall eyes international expansion; bolsters team with four new appointments

Paytm Mall, the e-commerce arm of Paytm, announced the appointment of four new executives its senior management team, including one to launch and expand an international business. A statement from the company said that Sanjeev Misra, who joined as Senior Vice President – International Markets, will help launch and expand the firm’s business internationally. “I am excited to join Paytm Mall team and will leverage this opportunity to expand our Partner Merchants’ offering to the international markets,” he said in a release. While the company has given no details on its expansion plans, reports suggest that the SoftBank backed company will be focusing on launching operations in southeast Asian countries, including Japan.

Prior to this, Misra served as the Vice President of Business & Renewable Energy for the Adani Group, which is preceded his stint at the Reliance Group. The three other appointments are – Vikram Kher has as Vice President – Mobile Business, Suresh Vasudevan as Vice President – Technology and Manjunath CK as Vice President – Electronics.

Kher worked with Amazon, where he managed several categories for India and Europe before the move to the Paytm subsidiary. He held leadership roles in companies like Philips, Castrol, NRB and HPCL. Vikram will be heading the Mobile Phone Business and will also be driving brand relationships for Omni-channel strategy, the statement said. 

Before this, Vasudevan worked at Amazon as the Head of Engineering for Alexa Skills Certification platform. In the past, he has worked as VP Engineering at Unicel Technologies and held leadership roles at Sifymall.com and mChek. He will lead the efforts to strengthen the technology function for specific projects at Paytm Mall, the release added.

Manjunath CK was the Director, Online Business at LeEco India (LeTV) before this move. In the past, he has held leadership roles at Micromax, Samsung and Bharati Airtel. He will lead the omnichannel strategy at Paytm Mall, the company said.

Furthermore, the company also announced that it will hire over 1,000 new employees to its key teams, including Technology, Product, Management, amongst others this year. A new 50,000 sqft office Bengaluru, to house its new employees, is also a part of its aggressive hiring plans for the year, the statement said.

A global player in the making?

Parent company Paytm has recently announced the expansion of its services to Japan, where the homegrown firm is partnering with SoftBank to launch a digital payment service. Although the move doesn’t involve Paytm Mall in any way, it does point to the fact that the company plans to tap the international markets. Some experts believe that launching a payments service would naturally be followed by launching the firm’s other services, including its e-commerce business. However, there is no official word on what the companies roadmap looks like.

More directly though, reports indicated that Chinese sellers may soon be able to list their products in the Indian e-commerce space, as Alibaba and Paytm have initiated a plan to lure Chinese vendors to sell on Paytm Mall. According to the report by ET, Alibaba has recently announced that it has established a complete supply chain solution with the Indian company. Hence, the move could also facilitate Indian vendors to sell their products in the Chinese market. Given the hiring spree and the recent $200 million funding from SoftBank, its safe to assume that the company is gearing up to up expand its presence.