In a bid to gear up for the next wave of e-commerce opportunity in India, Flipkart is acquiring around 300 acres of land in Karnataka, Haryana and West Bengal to set up logistics parks. Walmart-owned Flipkart is expected to invest Rs 5,000 crore which in turn would generate around 50,000 direct and indirect jobs.
According to Business Standard, the capacity expansion is likely to give an edge to Flipkart over Amazon and other rivals which are locking horns to grab a pie of an exponentially growing India's online retail business.
One of the people aware of the development said, "The Flipkart team is sourcing land privately in Bengaluru and has identified four sites. In West Bengal, construction is expected to start soon. For Gurugram, the land has already been identified for the purpose." The proposed logistics parks will have state-of-art facilities. The cost of the operations will be further reduced by deploying mechanised warehousing.
The logistic parks will act as freight aggregation and distribution hub, and leverage technology for intelligent transport systems. Moreover, these parks will be set up on the principle of sustainability to check any wastage of any natural resources in the area. Company's official spokesperson said that the infrastructure through these warehouses and logistic parks would help Flipkart to add the "next 200 million customers". Notably, as per an estimate by Morgan Stanley, India's online retail market is likely to touch a whopping $200 billion by 2028, from around $30 billion in 2018.
The company also rubbished rumours about the possible exit of Flipkart Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Kalyan Krishnamurthy. The company spokesperson called them "completely baseless and inaccurate". Flipkart further reiterated that Walmart President and CEO Doug McMillon has shown full faith in the leadership of Flipkart group companies.
In a statement after he met Kalyan Krishnamurthy, McMillon said, "I met with Kalyan (Krishnamurthy), Sameer (Nigam), and their leadership teams and was excited to see how the Flipkart, Myntra, and PhonePe teams are driving the industry with innovative solutions to serve its diverse and growing ecosystem."
"There is tremendous progress and we are making a difference. Kalyan, Sameer, and their teams have our full support to continue executing the growth strategy for our e-commerce business in India," he added.
