The company initially started as an online bookstore. Later, it also started selling other items such as movies and mobile phones. Now the company offers more than 80 million products spread across more than 80 categories. It has the capacity to delivery eight million shipments per month.
In June , Flipkart announced its partnership with the Telangana government to deploy drones to deliver medical supplies in remote areas amid the COVID pandemic. The FC is spread across 2. On October 23, Flipkart acquired a 7. Flipkart recorded order placements per second during their annual Big Billion Days Sale event in October. Business doubled every three to six months, and investors kept pumping hundreds of millions of dollars so Flipkart could grow even faster.
Sachin, the co-founder with the big vision, transformed into a daring businessman, relishing the high-risk game that was internet entrepreneurship. In Binny, Sachin had the ideal foil. While Sachin took the bold decisions, Binny was more thoughtful about how to implement them.
Along with their outstanding team, they seemed unstoppable. As Flipkart rose irrepressibly, the company uplifted the entire startup ecosystem. The belief — held by other entrepreneurs, investors, startup employees, as well as those who had chosen to stay out — that India could sustain a thriving startup scene grew stronger. But in its ultra-consumerist vision, its belief that it would take its rightful place alongside the American and Chinese internet giants, as well as in its subsequent stumbles and its extraordinary but narrow wealth creation, Flipkart is a parable of the post-liberalisation era that has delivered substantial gains, but eventually fallen far short of its promise.
This is the story of how the Bansals built Flipkart into a multi-billion-dollar powerhouse, succeeded where dozens had failed, made entrepreneurship into a desirable occupation, over-reached, lost control of their creation, and were forced to sell out to a retailer whose dominance they had once dreamt of emulating.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory. The founders of Flipkart were an ideal team. While Sachin Bansal took bold decisions, Binny Bansal was more thoughtful about how to implement them. But it was one of the photographs released the next day that was far more striking. Stay Updated.
Welcome Onboard! We tell your stories. So, in September , the two Chandigarh natives quit their jobs, pooled together Rs 4 lakh from their savings and launched Flipkart. Binny and he spent the second half of writing code for the site, picking up books from local book shops, responding to customer queries and making deliveries.
Four years on, the two-man show has turned into a blockbuster. It employs 4, people and will grow to 33, staffers by March next year. The website offers It claims to ship more than 30, items per day across categories. The company is not yet profitable, but reported revenues at Rs 50 crore for the last financial year.
It projects a spectacular jump to Rs crore in revenues by March next. Numbers aside, Sachin and Binny, who just happen to share a surname, have accomplished something much more significant. Till recently e-commerce had been a non-starter in India.
When the first ecommerce adventurers tried their luck during the infamous dotcom era of , their ambitions collided with harsh realities. The number of Internet users in the country was at a measly two to three million. By the middle of , the Bansals were confident that the market was finally ready for a high-quality e-commerce company. Several things had changed between and Broadband networks were rapidly penetrating into small town India.
Several years of a booming economy had created a new class of consumers with significantly higher disposable incomes. The number of Internet users had swelled to close to 40 million. Indian consumers, both in the metros and Tier I and Tier II cities, were buying airline and railways tickets online and had started to warm up to items such as electronics, music, shoes and apparel.
A bunch of new Internet startups, mostly in areas such as online classifieds and personalised gifting, had risen from the ashes of the dotcom crash. Flipkart stepped in to plug that gap. And in doing so it has redefined the ecommerce business in India. It already runs four software development centers here and a local site would be the next logical step.
It would also be entirely natural for Amazon to ease its entry here by acquiring Flipkart.
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