 "Not a good year for India's beloved Flipkart")
The strangest thing happened on Friday last week. Flipkart was advertising OnePlus smartphones on its store, even though the phone maker claimed an exclusive agreement with Amazon. As one can imagine, this created confusion in the industry. A seemingly flummoxed Carl Pei, co-founder and CEO of OnePlus, tweeted to Sachin Bansal asking for clarifications.
This happened just as Flipkart was to launch its last “sale” event of the year, supposedly focused on exclusive device and appliance launches.
To add to the embarrassment, Carl went on to state how he doesn’t approve of the price cut Flipkart hinted at for the sale.
Troublingly, this isn’t the only awkward moment the frontrunner (depending on who you ask) of India’s startup and e-commerce movement has had to face this year – often overshadowing some strides in business.
2016 has been cruel to Flipkart in many ways, despite fluffy stories in the mainstream media in the early days. The company’s year began happily enough with a new CEO, and a jab at Amazon.
But soon after, it shut down its grocery delivery app, Nearby, less than five months after the company started testing it.
Then, the company saw a valuation cut — the first in a series of similar markdowns it would see through the year. At first, it was easy to look at the bright side — in fact, I even argued that the cut by Morgan Stanley wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for a company with bloated valuations looking for funding. After all, Morgan Stanley only held a minuscule stake in Flipkart. It wasn’t a lead investor.
This is an excerpt from the article published on Tech In Aisa. You can read the full article here.
This is an excerpt from the article published on Tech In Aisa. You can read the full article here.
