Flipkart to Venture in Groceries and Focus More on Furniture Market

Flipkart, India’s top e-retailer, is looking to add new categories to its platform, one of them being groceries. The company is also planning a overhaul for the Furniture business in 2017. The move by Flipkart can be considered as a strategy to outplay Amazon.com in the booming Indian market.

Binny Bansal, Flipkart’s Chief Executive said that the company is planning to experiment with grocery sales in 2017 and wants to scale up its operations over a three-year period. He also added, “There is definitely a room to build a profitable grocery business in India, but it’s hard and that doesn’t mean it’s not possible”.

Bansal also said that Fashion and Clothings will remain Flipkart’s best-selling category in the coming years, but he thinks that online groceries have the potential to grow and come at par with fashion and electronics in six to eight years.

India, the country with over 1.25 billion population, is seeing a rapid growth in the number of people who are interested in buying products online, ranging from clothes to smartphones. The recent success of Big Basket and Grofers have also made India ‘the fastest growing e-commerce market’.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch report, which stated that value of goods sold online in India will be $188 billion by 2025, has proved the above statement.

Indian websites like ‘Urban Ladder’ and ‘Pepperfry.com’ have established themselves in online furniture market of India despite the country being more inclined towards traditional carpenters and local stores.

Flipkart is also there in the furniture market but the company is nowhere near success, therefore, the e-retailer wants to increase the variety and relaunch the store in coming three to four months.

Binny Bansal also said that the company may go for Initial Public Offer (IPO) within 5 years for expansion purpose. He said that Flipkart, backed by Tiger Global Management and Accel Partners, has cash reserves which can last up to three years and that the company will look to raise money in the future.

The company, which launched itself in 2007 in India, owns the fashion portal Myntra which bought its rival Jabong for $ 70 million, earlier this year and became India’s largest online fashion retailer.

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21 November 2016
Rohan Jaitly