Flipkart

Timeline

1. 2007Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal start Flipkart from a two bedroom flat in Koramangala, selling books online.Each founder's family put in about Rs 200,000
2. 2008The site was reported to be taking about 100 orders a day within its first year.
3. 2010Flipkart buys WeRead, the digital books business of Lulu.com.
4. 2011Acquires Mime360 and the Bollywood content library Chakpak, moving into digital media.
5. 2012Buys Letsbuy, an online electronics retailer, and launches Flyte, a DRM free music store.Flyte was shut in June 2013
6. 2014Acquires Myntra for about 280 million dollars and holds the first Big Billion Day sale.The sale sold goods worth about 100 million dollars in 10 hours
7. 2015Buys 34 per cent of the mapping firm MapmyIndia for about Rs 1,600 crore.
8. 2016Acquires the UPI payments startup PhonePe and, in July, the fashion site Jabong for about 70 million dollars.
9. 2017eBay sells eBay.in to Flipkart and invests 500 million dollars; Kalyan Krishnamurthy becomes chief executive.
10. 2018Walmart agrees to buy a 77 per cent stake for about 16 billion dollars; the deal closes on 18 August.Sachin Bansal exits, Binny Bansal resigns as CEO in November
11. 2019Launches Flipkart Video and the Samarth programme for artisans, weavers and craftspersons.
12. 2020Starts Flipkart Wholesale and buys Walmart India, including the Best Price cash and carry business.
13. 2021Raises 3.6 billion dollars in a round led by GIC, SoftBank and sovereign funds, valuing the group at about 37.6 billion dollars.
14. 2021Acquires the travel portal Cleartrip and launches Shopsy, a reseller marketplace.
15. 2022Completes the separation of PhonePe, with Flipkart shareholders getting direct stakes.Flipkart paid out about 700 million dollars to employee stock holders
16. 2023Walmart confirms an infusion of 600 million dollars as part of a planned one billion dollar round.
17. 2024Binny Bansal leaves the executive team in January and sells his remaining stake to Walmart.
18. 2024Launches Flipkart UPI with Axis Bank in March and Flipkart Minutes, a quick commerce service, in August.
19. 2024Google invests 350 million dollars in Flipkart in May as part of the one billion dollar round.
20. 2025Reports revenue of about Rs 82,787 crore for the year ended March 2025, with a loss of about Rs 5,189 crore.
21. 2025Moves its domicile back from Singapore to India through an internal restructuring.
22. 2026Flipkart Internet becomes the group holding company after government approval, clearing a step towards an Indian listing.
23. 2026Flipkart Minutes expands to about 1,200 micro fulfilment centres across more than 150 cities.

What it does

Flipkart Internet Private Limited runs the marketplace that most Indian shoppers know simply as Flipkart. It is the country's largest homegrown online retailer, headquartered in Bengaluru and controlled by the American retailer Walmart. The company started with books, added mobile phones and electronics, then fashion, home goods and groceries, and now also sells through a wholesale arm, a quick commerce network and a reseller app called Shopsy.^[1]

The business model is a marketplace rather than a shop. Flipkart does not own most of the goods sold on its platform; sellers list products, Flipkart collects the payment, arranges delivery through its logistics arm Ekart and takes a commission. That is why the company's most valuable assets are not warehouses but the sellers, the delivery network and the app on the customer's phone.^[5]

A 2023 report by the research firm AllianceBernstein put Flipkart's share of Indian e-commerce at about 48 per cent, ahead of Amazon India and the smaller but fast growing Meesho. The company competes hardest in mobile phones and fashion, and it has been pushing into the categories Amazon has historically been weaker at, especially fashion through Myntra and groceries through Flipkart Minutes.^[4]

Group companies sit under the same roof. Myntra handles fashion, Cleartrip handles travel bookings, Ekart runs the delivery fleet, Flipkart Wholesale serves small shopkeepers, Shopsy serves resellers on social media, and super.money offers credit first UPI services. PhonePe, the payments app that began inside Flipkart, was separated from the group in 2022 and is now an independent company.^[1]

History

Flipkart was founded in October 2007 in Bengaluru by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, who are not related. Both were alumni of IIT Delhi and both had worked at Amazon, and the company began in a two bedroom apartment in Koramangala with about Rs 200,000 from each founder's family. The first version of the website sold only books, and it was reported to be handling about 100 orders a day by 2008.^[1]

The bookshop years taught the company two lessons it never forgot: cash on delivery and a generous returns policy both mattered more to Indian shoppers than a wide catalogue. In 2010 Flipkart bought WeRead, a digital books business owned by Lulu.com, and in 2011 it bought Mime360 and the Bollywood content library Chakpak, which led to Flyte, a digital music store launched in 2012 and shut in June 2013 because free streaming sites had already made paid downloads pointless.^[1]

Growth came from widening the catalogue and buying rivals. Flipkart acquired the electronics retailer Letsbuy in 2012, and in 2014 it was the exclusive Indian seller for a string of popular phones including the Moto G, the Moto E and the Xiaomi Mi 3. That same year it bought the fashion retailer Myntra for about 280 million dollars.^[1]

The company also invented a festival it would return to every year. On 6 October 2014, timed to its anniversary and the Diwali season, Flipkart held a one day event it called Big Billion Day. It sold goods worth about 100 million dollars in ten hours and then spent the following week answering complaints about payment failures and items that went out of stock mid order. Later editions were stretched into multi day events restricted to the mobile app, and by 2017 the company was selling 1.3 million phones in 20 hours during one of them.^[1]

By the middle of the decade Flipkart was spending heavily to stay ahead. It bought 34 per cent of the digital mapping firm MapmyIndia for about Rs 1,600 crore in December 2015, acquired the UPI payments startup PhonePe in April 2016, and bought the fashion site Jabong from Rocket Internet for about 70 million dollars in July 2016.^[8]

In April 2017 eBay agreed to sell its Indian business to Flipkart and invest 500 million dollars in the company, a partnership that never delivered the promised international seller network. Three months later Flipkart offered between 800 million and 900 million dollars for its main domestic rival, Snapdeal, and was turned down by the Snapdeal board.^[1]

Acquisition by Walmart

The most consequential event in Flipkart's history was not a product launch but a sale. On 4 May 2018 it was reported that Walmart had won a bidding war with Amazon, and on 9 May 2018 Walmart announced it would take a 77 per cent controlling stake for about 16 billion dollars. The deal valued Flipkart at roughly 21 billion dollars and made it the largest acquisition of an Indian company by a foreign buyer at the time.^[1]

The ownership changes came quickly afterwards. eBay sold its stake back to Flipkart for 1.1 billion dollars and relaunched its Indian operations. SoftBank sold its entire 20 per cent holding to Walmart without disclosing the terms. The transaction closed on 18 August 2018, with Walmart also putting in 2 billion dollars of fresh equity. Within days Walmart raised its holding to 81.3 per cent.^[1]

Founders left on their own terms and then were pushed. Sachin Bansal exited after the Walmart deal closed. In November 2018 Binny Bansal resigned as chief executive after an allegation of serious personal misconduct; Walmart said its investigation did not corroborate the complainant's assertions but had found lapses in judgment, particularly a lack of transparency in how he responded. He stayed on the board for years and finally left the executive team in January 2024, selling his remaining stake to Walmart.^[16]

Indian trader bodies protested the takeover, arguing that a foreign retailer with deep pockets would crush domestic shops. Much of that argument was really about the rules on foreign investment in marketplaces, which forbid an online platform from holding inventory itself. Flipkart's answer was a structure in which the marketplace, the wholesale buying arm and the logistics company are separate entities, a structure the Indian press had already been writing about since 2014.^[7]

Walmart's presence brought capital discipline and one other thing Flipkart had been missing: an exit route. Under the 2018 agreement, minority shareholders could require Flipkart to look at an initial public offering after the fourth anniversary of the closing, at a valuation no lower than the one Walmart itself had paid. That clause is the reason the company's listing plans have been discussed in public since 2022.^[1]

Fashion, Myntra, Jabong and Shopsy

Fashion is the category where Flipkart has been strongest against Amazon India, and most of that strength was bought. Myntra, acquired in 2014 for about 280 million dollars, was already the leading fashion store online, and it was kept as a separate brand with its own app. Jabong, bought for about 70 million dollars in 2016, was folded into Myntra two years later.^[1]

Myntra had itself been assembled through acquisitions. It bought the fashion and lifestyle site Jabong from Rocket Internet, adding a young urban customer base that overlapped only partly with Flipkart's own shoppers. By 2018 Flipkart's own fashion business had been described as catching up with Myntra inside the same group, which is why the two keep separate apps rather than merging catalogues.^[11]

The group also invested in the supply side of fashion. In July 2020 Flipkart took a 27 per cent stake in Arvind Youth Brands, the Arvind Fashions subsidiary that owns the Flying Machine label, for about 35 million dollars. That was followed in October 2020 by a 7.8 per cent stake in Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail for about 204 million dollars, a deal that gave the marketplace a shareholder relationship with one of India's largest apparel makers.^[1]

Shopsy, launched in July 2021, attacks the same market from below. It is a reseller platform: individuals and small businesses list products on social media using Shopsy's catalogue and earn a margin on each sale, with much of the catalogue in low price brackets rather than brands. By December 2021 Shopsy had entered grocery delivery across 700 cities, and it is one of the entry points through which the group hopes to reach shoppers who do not yet buy online.^[1]

Groceries, wholesale and quick commerce

Groceries are a hard business online because the basket is small, the margins are thin and the customer expects the goods within hours. Flipkart entered the category in stages. In 2020 it launched Flipkart Wholesale, a business to business marketplace for kirana stores and small enterprises, and as part of the same push it bought 100 per cent of Walmart India, which ran the Best Price cash and carry chain. That purchase gave the group physical warehouses, cold storage and a supply chain it did not have to build.^[1]

Flipkart Quick, rolled out in 2020, promised delivery in 90 minutes for groceries, home accessories, mobile phones and stationery, using neighbourhood stores as dark stores. It was an experiment in micro fulfilment that the company returned to with more force in August 2024, when it launched Flipkart Minutes, a ten minute delivery service aimed at the quick commerce market that Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart had opened up.^[1]

By 11 September 2026 Flipkart said Flipkart Minutes was operating about 1,200 micro fulfilment centres across more than 150 cities, a distribution built by converting small warehouses and back rooms into picking points within a few kilometres of the customer. Quick commerce matters to Flipkart beyond groceries: the same network can carry medicines, electronics accessories and festival stock, and it is the part of the business Amazon has been slowest to match in India.^[1]

Wholesale and health complete the picture. Flipkart Health acquired Sastasundar Healthbuddy in November 2021 and launched the Flipkart Health Plus app in April 2022 for medicines and diagnostic services, though the Sastasundar partnership ended in January 2025. The health foray is the group's attempt to reach into pharmacy retail, which remains dominated by neighbourhood chemists.^[1]

Payments: PhonePe and super.money

Flipkart's payments story began with a small acquisition. PhonePe, bought in April 2016, was a young app built on the Unified Payments Interface, the system run by the National Payments Corporation of India that lets a customer pay any merchant from any bank account. Under Flipkart's ownership PhonePe became the largest UPI app in the country by transaction volume.^[6]

Rather than sell it, Flipkart gave it away in a corporate sense. In December 2022 the spin off of PhonePe was completed, with Flipkart's shareholders receiving direct ownership stakes in the payments company. The group then announced a cash payout of about 700 million dollars to current and former employees who held employee stock options in Flipkart, a rare move in Indian corporate history because the payout came from the value created by the separation rather than from an outside buyer.^[1]

Payments remain close to the marketplace even without PhonePe. In March 2024 Flipkart launched Flipkart UPI in partnership with Axis Bank, which lets shoppers pay merchants outside the app and keeps a payments relationship with customers who are used to paying by cash on delivery. In August 2024 the Flipkart backed app super.money was launched with credit first UPI services, aimed at users who want a small line of credit attached to their payments account.^[1]

Ekart and the supply chain

Ekart is Flipkart's own logistics arm and one of the reasons the company could promise two day delivery to small towns before its rivals could. It was separated as a company that can also serve other ecommerce players, and it carries the last mile for the marketplace, for Myntra and for Flipkart Wholesale.^[5]

The delivery fleet is also where Flipkart's labour disputes have concentrated. In 2015 about 400 delivery executives working with Ekart went on strike to protest conditions, complaining of seven day workweeks, long hours and a lack of clean toilets and medical help for riders injured in accidents. In 2016 a delivery executive named Nanjunda Swamy was allegedly murdered by a customer who did not have enough money to pay for an order, and Flipkart responded with a safety programme called Project Nanjunda that added an emergency button, the Nanjunda button, to the app used by field staff.^[1]

The group has continued to add supply chain capability by buying it. Its 2015 purchase of a 34 per cent stake in MapmyIndia was explicitly about delivery operations, since mapping data decides how routes are planned and how long a promise is credible. The company has also invested in customer engagement software, buying a stake in EasyRewardz in 2019, and in 2020 it bought the augmented reality startup Scapic and the intellectual property of the gaming firm Mech Mocha.^[8]

Revenue and financials

Flipkart Internet Private Limited, the entity that runs the marketplace, reported revenue of about Rs 82,787 crore for the year ended 31 March 2025, an increase of more than 17 per cent over the previous year. Its loss widened to about Rs 5,189 crore in the same year. That combination, fast revenue growth with a large loss, has been the company's shape for most of its life and is the single most important fact about its financials.^[2]

Early numbers were tiny by comparison. Flipkart's reported sales were about Rs 40 million in the year ended March 2009, about Rs 200 million in 2009-10 and about Rs 750 million in 2010-11, and the company reported a loss of about Rs 2.81 billion for 2012-13 while raising fresh money almost every year.^[1]

The funding history is a long series of rounds at rising valuations. Accel India put in about 1 million dollars in 2009, Tiger Global about 10 million dollars in 2010 and 20 million dollars in June 2011, and by 2012 the company had closed a 150 million dollar round led by MIH, part of the Naspers group, which itself once valued the business at roughly Rs 9,900 crore.^[12]

The largest early round came in July 2014, when Flipkart raised 1 billion dollars from Tiger Global, Accel, Morgan Stanley Investment Management and the Singapore sovereign fund GIC. In December 2014 a 700 million dollar round valued it at 11 billion dollars and came with a filing to be treated as a public company in Singapore. By August 2015 Flipkart said it had raised a total of about 3 billion dollars across 12 rounds from 16 major investors.^[13]

Investment continued after Walmart took control. In July 2021 the company raised 3.6 billion dollars in a round it described as pre IPO, at a valuation widely reported as about 37.6 billion dollars. In December 2023 Walmart confirmed it would put in 600 million dollars as part of a one billion dollar plan, expected to value the company at roughly 5 to 10 per cent above its previous valuation of about 33 billion dollars. In May 2024 Google invested 350 million dollars in the company.^[1]

One number to treat with care is gross merchandise value, the total value of goods sold on the platform, which is far larger than Flipkart's own revenue because most of the money belongs to sellers. The company has also run a venture arm, Flipkart Ventures, with a 100 million dollar corpus to invest in startups that join its accelerator programme.^[1]

Shareholding and ownership

Walmart holds roughly 85 per cent of Flipkart, having started at 77 per cent in August 2018 and moved to 81.3 per cent within months as founders, eBay and SoftBank sold. The remaining shares sit with a small group of early investors, including Tiger Global, Accel and funds associated with the original venture rounds, plus employees who hold stock options.^[1]

The ownership chain has changed shape twice. For most of its life Flipkart was held through a Singapore company, Flipkart Private Limited, which in turn owned eight Indian entities led by Flipkart Internet. That structure was designed for a time when Indian rules made it hard for a foreign owned company to hold inventory or raise capital abroad, and it was the subject of a long running foreign investment investigation.^[5]

In 2025 that structure was reversed. Flipkart moved its domicile back from Singapore to India, and after government approval Flipkart Internet became the holding company for the group. The move was reported as a step towards an Indian stock exchange listing, and it simplifies a chain that once had shareholders owning a Singapore company that owned Indian companies that owned the brands customers actually know.^[3]

Since 2022 the incentive to list has been contractual as well as financial. Walmart's original filing with the United States regulator said minority shareholders could require Flipkart to consider an initial public offering after the fourth anniversary of the 2018 closing, at a valuation no lower than what Walmart paid. That anniversary passed in 2022, and the domicile reversal in 2025 was widely read as preparation for the same event.^[3]

Employees and offices

Flipkart's corporate workforce was reported at about 22,000 people in January 2024, not counting Myntra, and that number excludes the thousands of delivery partners and warehouse staff employed through Ekart and third party logistics firms. Most of the corporate staff sit in Bengaluru, with large offices in other metros and fulfilment centres spread across the country.^[1]

Headcount has been cut when the company missed its plans. In January 2024 Flipkart was reported to be planning to lay off between 1,100 and 1,500 employees as part of an annual performance review cycle, at a time when the group was preparing for a listing and tightening costs. The company has also used automation inside fulfilment centres, which reduces the number of people needed per order even as volumes rise.^[1]

The group's field workforce has been a recurring subject of complaint and reform. Delivery partners are typically engaged as contractors rather than employees, which keeps costs down but also means their working conditions are governed by contracts with logistics partners rather than by Flipkart itself. Flipkart has responded with safety measures such as Project Nanjunda and with a Fairwork India rating in 2021 that placed it at the top of a list of 11 platforms assessed on pay, conditions, contracts, management and representation.^[1]

Acquisitions and joint ventures

The company has made about 22 acquisitions and 27 investments, spending more than 415 million dollars on the acquisitions alone. The pattern is consistent: buy the leading player in a category the marketplace cannot build quickly, keep the brand, and use the marketplace to feed it customers.^[1]

The important acquisitions in order are WeRead in 2010, Mime360 and Chakpak in 2011, Letsbuy in 2012, Myntra in 2014, Appiterate in April 2015, PhonePe in April 2016, Jabong in July 2016, Walmart India in 2020, Cleartrip in April 2021 and Sastasundar Healthbuddy in November 2021. Appiterate, a Delhi based mobile marketing automation firm, is typical of the smaller buys: a technology team and a product that the marketplace then used across its own app.^[9]

Some purchases were minority stakes rather than control. Flipkart bought 27 per cent of Arvind Youth Brands, 7.8 per cent of Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail, 34 per cent of MapmyIndia and a stake in EasyRewardz, in each case to secure supply, data or technology rather than to own the company outright. Cleartrip's Middle East business, including the Flyin.com website, was sold to Wego in 2022, showing that the group will also prune what does not fit.^[1]

Joint ventures have been fewer. The most notable was a partnership with Walmart for wholesale sourcing, and the abandoned eBay arrangement of 2017, where Flipkart was to gain access to eBay's international sellers and instead ended up buying back eBay's stake a year later.^[1]

Competition

Flipkart's main rival is Amazon India, and the two have traded the lead in different categories for a decade. Flipkart has been described as dominant in fashion and neck and neck with Amazon in electronics and mobile phones, while Amazon has been stronger in subscriptions and in the Prime bundle of video and delivery. In 2017 Flipkart held about 51 per cent of Indian smartphone shipments against Amazon's 33 per cent, and by 2023 the AllianceBernstein estimate put the whole company at about 48 per cent of the online retail market.^[10]

The market share number is contested, which is itself informative. Meesho has grown faster than both large players from a smaller base, and the same 2023 comparison that gave Flipkart 48 per cent of the market also named Meesho the fastest growing platform in the country.^[4]

The newer competition comes from below. Meesho sells at lower price points with a reseller model similar to Shopsy, and it has grown faster than either large marketplace. Quick commerce has created a second front: Blinkit, now owned by Eternal, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart deliver groceries in minutes, and Flipkart Minutes is the group's answer. In travel, Cleartrip competes with MakeMyTrip and the online travel agencies rather than with Amazon.^[4]

Flipkart's advantages are its seller base, reported at about 1.1 million in 2022, its app in eight Indian languages as of 2021, and Ekart's delivery network. Its disadvantages are the cost of paying for growth in a market where the largest competitor has a global balance sheet behind it, and the fact that the marketplace model caps the margin Flipkart can earn on each order.^[1]

Domicile shift and the coming listing

For years Flipkart was owned through Singapore, which made it easy for global investors to hold shares and impossible for Indian retail investors to buy any. That changed in 2025, when the company moved its domicile back to India, and in 2026, when Flipkart Internet became the holding company after government approval for the internal restructuring. The Moneycontrol report on that approval described it as clearing a key step towards a domestic listing.^[3]

A listing would be the largest Indian technology offering since Paytm's in 2021, and it would give Walmart a way to realise part of a 16 billion dollar investment. It would also give Flipkart's Indian employees and early investors a real market for their shares rather than a private one arranged by the company. The company has not published a timetable, and no draft offer document had been filed at the time of writing.^[3]

The business that would be listed is not the same business Walmart bought. PhonePe has been separated, the entertainment and ticketing arms have been trimmed, the wholesale and health businesses have been added, and quick commerce now consumes a large share of new investment. What remains is a marketplace, a fashion group, a travel business, a logistics arm and a grocery network, all of them chasing customers who shop both online and in the shop down the road.^[1]

Controversies and criticism

The longest running dispute has been about foreign investment rules. In November 2012 the Enforcement Directorate opened an investigation into Flipkart for alleged violations of the foreign direct investment rules under the Foreign Exchange Management Act, and the company's offices were raided at the end of that month with documents and computer hard drives seized. In August 2014 the agency said it had found violations, and the Delhi High Court held that several e-commerce firms including Flipkart had breached the rules. A public interest litigation hearing followed in January 2016, where the court asked the Reserve Bank of India for the latest circular on foreign investment policy.^[14]

Discounting has drawn complaints from competitors and traders. In 2014 the Future Group and other retailers filed complaints with the Ministry of Commerce and Industry alleging that the Big Billion Day discounts were predatory, and the ministry said it would look into them. Five years later the government was still examining complaints about Flipkart's festival sale, which is a reminder that the fairness of marketplace discounting in India has never been settled.^[16]

Flipkart also walked into the net neutrality fight. In April 2015 it was a launch partner for Airtel Zero, a scheme in which apps paid a telecom operator for data used by customers, and critics said the arrangement violated net neutrality by making some services cheaper than others. Flipkart pulled out of the programme within days after the criticism.^[1]

Health and safety questions have produced the most serious complaints. In September 2014 a Flipkart deliveryman was alleged to have molested a housemaid in Hyderabad and her employer sued the company, arguing that offline delivery services needed regulation. The 2015 Ekart strike, the 2016 murder of a delivery executive and repeated reports of roadside accidents involving riders led to the Project Nanjunda safety programme and to research on the quality of the offline workforce that platforms hire through contractors.^[1]

Product quality and seller conduct have also been contested. In February 2016 the Maharashtra drug regulator took action against Flipkart and other online sellers for selling medicines without a valid licence, and problems with sellers have been raised repeatedly by vendors who complain about unfair policies, weak logistics and returns caused by consumer fraud. In 2022 the Lucknow police arrested a group of people who had cheated the company by ordering Apple products and returning the packages with bricks inside, a scam that has also been reported against other platforms.^[15]

Reading the numbers

Flipkart is a company whose size is easy to overstate and whose profitability is easy to understate. The marketplace does not own most of what it sells, so its revenue is a commission and a services fee rather than the value of the goods, while its costs include marketing, delivery subsidies and the discount it pays to make prices attractive. A year of 17 per cent revenue growth alongside a loss of Rs 5,189 crore is not mismanagement so much as the price of competing with Amazon in a market where customers are price sensitive and delivery is expected to be free.^[2]

The valuation numbers need context too. Flipkart was valued at 11 billion dollars in 2014, 15 billion dollars in 2015, about 37.6 billion dollars after the 2021 fundraiser, and about 33 billion dollars by 2023 when Walmart put in fresh money at a flatter valuation. Those swings follow the global funding cycle more than the company's own trading, and the difference between 33 and 37.6 billion dollars is not visible in any customer facing metric.^[1]

The three numbers worth watching from here are the loss against revenue, the share of orders delivered within a day and the number of Flipkart Minutes dark stores. The first says whether the path to profit is real, the second is the operational promise the brand is built on, and the third decides whether the group can hold its ground in quick commerce, which is where the next battle for the Indian shopper is being fought.^[1]

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