COMING OF Age

Flipkart approaches the end of its teen years in the embrace of Al, Gen Z, and quick commerce—as public markets beckon

- PAYAL GANGULY AND NAINI THAKER

In 2018, Rajneesh Kumar was part of the $16 billion deal process that saw United States-based retail giant Walmart acquire a 77 percent stake in Flipkart. Kumar was, at the time, chief corporate affairs officer and director with Walmart India. The Flipkart he saw back then believed in the philosophy of move-fast, fail-fast, and rebuild.

After joining Flipkart Group as chief corporate affairs officer in 2018, Kumar says he saw the company's DNA evolve right before his eyes. In the Flipkart of today, innovations are first tried out in a controlled environment and governance is embedded in all experiments from the time they are mere concepts. In Kumar's words, the horizontal ecommerce company, which began life as an online bookseller in 2007 before morphing into India's answer to Amazon, now has “brakes, so that it can drive faster” with confidence.

So, where is that drive-faster, with confidence-taking Flipkart as it enters the last of its teen years and prepares to launch its maiden public issue at a time when the buzz in Indian ecommerce is largely about the post-pandemic phenomenon called quick commerce (Qcomm)?

Indeed, Qcomm has changed the way people think of not only online shopping but all shopping. Weekly buying at stores has given way to impulse clicks on apps. Before the pandemic, online deliveries arriving in one day to three or even a week was acceptable. Deliveries are now expected in 10 to 30 minutes. Every segment is riding the QComm wave. From phones to gaming consoles, personal care to printouts of documents, food to domestic help, and everything else in between comes with the promise of 10-minute delivery. In the short period after the pandemic, QComm has quickly come to corner nearly two-thirds of all online grocery orders and promises to grow at 40 percent annually till 2030, according to a report by Bain & Company published in March last year.