Flipkart on Monday announced a strategic and commercial partnership with the Adani Group.
Flipkart which is one of the biggest Indian e-commerce firms has reportedly have entered into a strategic tie-up with Gujarat-based Adani Group. The company plans to work with Adani logistics so that they can strengthen their supply chain infrastructure and serve the needs of their ever-growing customer base, as mentioned by the Adani Group in a regulatory filing.
Also, at Adaniconnex Private Limited Chennai-based facility, the company Flipkart has decided to set up their third data center which will provide the expertise of AdaniConneX and solutions in terms of data technology. With this partnership, Flipkart will be able to meet the growing demand for e-commerce in western India and will also help to provide support to many sellers in terms of providing market access to its thousands of sellers and MSMEs.
This would be done when Adani Group will construct a fulfillment center, which will be of the size of about 534,000 sq. ft. in their logistics hub in Mumbai. This fulfillment center is expected to start operating in the third quarter of the year 2022 and would accommodate a total of about 10 million units of sellers’ inventory.
Not only will this partnership help in strengthening the supply chain infrastructure and support MSMEs along with many sellers, but this step will also help in increasing local employment and create more than 2500 direct jobs and several other indirect jobs.
When talking about this strategic and commercial tie-up, Karan Adani who is the Chief Executive Officer of Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone (APSEZ) mentioned that he was quite delighted to watch such fastest-growing businesses come together to build one of the most crucial infrastructures that the country needs. He also mentions the role of Aatmanirbhar India in this. According to him, this is all that Atmanirbharta should be about.
He also said that this partnership has got a unique business model associated with it and that they see this as a huge opportunity for Flipkart to enhance its physical and digital infrastructure. He also says that Flipkart is one of those companies that has been successful in defining the adoption of e-commerce in India with both, the value the company creates as well as their consistent innovation in terms of technology that it provides to its consumers, he says that they are looking forward to this partnership in terms of putting in their mutual strengths in this to give importance to their customers and the development of Indian MSME ecosystem.
From Flipkart’s side, Kalyan Krishnamurthy, who is the Chief Executive Officer of the Flipkart Group, said that Adani Group had truly been remarkable in building infrastructure throughout India. Praising the group, he said that they have brought in a unique combination of green energy, logistics, data center infrastructure capabilities, and real estate.
He says they as a company are happy and delighted to have gotten into such a partnership with the Adani Group that will help them strengthen their technology and supply chain infrastructure.
Flipkart Group’s focus has always been towards the fact that their customers should get full accessibility to a plethora of products that are made available to them via a huge number of sellers coming from different parts of the country with the continuous innovative efforts that are put in by the company to provide greater affordability to these customers. Therefore, to make this a reality, technology, and logistics play a very crucial role. According to Kalyan Krishnamurthy, who is the Chief Executive Officer of the Flipkart Group, this particular investment will enable them in strengthening their capabilities and presence in India majorly to support several sellers and MSMEs, increasing jobs and developing growth at the same time.
An insight into the origin of Flipkart
The founders of the company- Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, back in the year had been pursuing their B.Tech degree from IIT Delhi. The summer break, when most of the students were headed back to their hometowns, was the time when these two met as they had not completed their projects on the given time and were required to complete them in the common lab. However, their friendship began when they had to move together to Bangalore after graduation along with another pair of guys from their college.
At that time, Binny was working with Sarnoff and Sachin was working with a corporation named Techspan. In the year 2006, Sachin had started working with Amazon and in the year 2007, Binny joined Amazon as well. After quite a while, both of them got fed up with their jobs and started brainstorming.
As it was seen both of them were quite fascinated with the e-commerce sector and decided that they would start a shopping website wherein the users will be able to compare different products. They decided to have an internet site which will enable users to check different prices of products from different websites and help them get the clearest and effective value for their money.
while they were going through many different e-commerce websites, they knew that the online shopping experience was quite bad and that the websites were quite poorly designed and that they would never buy anything from those websites nor would they want others to do the same.
Therefore, while they were brainstorming for their shopping website which would work on the principle of comparison, they thought of building a website that was much better than the ones they saw in terms of design and experience, Their main aim was to provide their customers with a much better shopping experience. They were confident that they would be able to achieve those goals considering their keen interest in technology.
So, without wasting any more time, both of them decided to quit Amazon and put in about 4 lakh rupees in the business started working for the development of Flipkart starting September 2007.
