Time and again, the flipkart house has spoken about “Customer delight”, their one and only
one success mantra. They believe that most of the Indian companies lack this particular spirit
which is of paramount importance to survive in a hyper competitive global market. Since its inception they had CoD(Cash on Delivery) ,a 30 day No-Questions-Asked-Return offer along with
the common discounted pricing ,doorstep delivery and EMI options, which works like ambrosia
for the urban time starved Indian customer. And this sheer obsession with customer satisfaction
has worked well for them for sure. In FY 2012-13, their revenue was a whooping INR 1180
crore.
A recently published report by Edelweiss Securities Limited, India‟s foray into the worldwide
web is only going to get deeper. The report estimates that by 2016, there will be 336 million
netizens, up from the 120 million internet users in 2011. According to National Agenda for Information & Communications Technology and Electronics there are going to be 175 mn broadband connections by 2017. Time spent online by Indians per day has increased from 21 million
hours in 2006 to 48 million hours in 2013. It will reach 168 million hours by 2015. Companies
like Flipkart are buoyed by these statistics.
But it‟s not all hunky-dory by the way. This financial year, they expect to show investors Rs
2,500 crore in revenues, a 400 percent growth over last year‟s numbers. And this January
they failed to Convince General Atlantic Partners‟ investment committee to invest $150-200
million into Flipkart at an overall valuation of somewhere between $750 million to $1 billion. They were denied because the investment committee couldn‟t “understand” flipkart‟s
accounting strategies or numbers. They figured that at the pace at which Flipkart was building
infrastructure and adding people, it would need at least $2 billion in annual sales to just break
even.