Walmart-owned Flipkart will let go of 1,000 employees, which represents around 5 percent of its total workforce, as part of its annual performance review exercise, as per Moneycontrol.
The company had around 22,000 people on its payroll. The total strength does not include employees from e-commerce fashion portal Myntra.
Flipkart initiates these performance-based job cost cuts every year and the fresh reduction in workforce is along those lines, too.
Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy held a townhall with employees on January 25, during which he said that the company’s financial health is improving. He added that Flipkart will be in much better shape by the end of the year. It is possible that Flipkart’s IPO will be pushed to 2025 as the unit economics will be better, a person aware of the developments told Moneycontrol.
The CEO also said that Flipkart’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) project has taken shape and is currently being tested out with a small set of users.
The e-commerce company having a UPI offering of its own strengthens its entire ecosystem. The idea is that customers, while shopping, use Flipkart’s UPI and stay on the platform instead of having to switch between multiple apps to make payments.
To ensure Flipkart is well capitalised, its parent, Walmart — the US-based retailer — even infused $600 million, as reported by Moneycontrol last month. The fresh infusion was at a time when Flipkart’s planned public market listing has been delayed. Flipkart was earlier eyeing a listing in 2022-23.
While $600 million would help Flipkart run operations until then, there will likely be another pre-IPO round later.