Ahead of IPO, Flipkart rejigs core leadership

Ahead of IPO, Flipkart rejigs core leadership

HUL’s Hemant Badri appointed senior vice-president - supply chain.

Flipkart

NEW DELHI: E-commerce giant Flipkart has brought on Hindustan Unilever's Hemant Badri as senior vice-president – supply chain as the Walmart-owned company readies itself for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) by the end of this year, to take advantage of booming online sales that has boosted valuations.

Additionally, two senior executives – Amitesh Jha and Ranjith Boyanapalli – have been assigned new responsibilities. The leadership changes came into effect 1 March 2021.

Badri will head the Ekart-Myntra supply chain as well as the Jeeves-F1 priorities at Flipkart. Before making the move to the e-commerce platform, he was global vice-president of planning, analytics and customer experience, and vice-president of planning for European operations at the global firm’s headquarters in Netherlands at HUL. He was also part of the FMCG major's global supply chain leadership team.

Jha, who was leading the Ekart-Myntra supply chain and Jeeves-F1 operations, has been assigned a new role in category design operations (CDO) and marketing, merchandising and monetisation (M3) organisation, where he will oversee the consumables, customers and marketing charters.

Boyanapalli, who heads the fintech and payments group, will take up the additional responsibility of customer experience, marketplace and the central liquidation team (CLT).

This latest reshuffle in Flipkart's top management follows the rejig in the company's board of directors in December, bringing in four new members, including CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy. HDFC CEO Keki Mistry, Walmart’s global chief technology officer Suresh Kumar and Walmart’s executive vice president for international strategy and development Leigh Hopkins were the other new board members of the company.

Walmart now owns an 82.3 per cent stake in Flipkart and has hired Goldman Sachs to explore an initial share sale of the online retailer in the US to raise $10 billion by selling around 25 per cent in the Indian entity.