Walmart’s Flipkart Slows Hiring in Face of Strict Competition

Flipkart, the Walmart-owned Indian eCommerce company, is ending its string of acquisitions and slowing its hiring as it deals with tough competition from Amazon and Reliance.

In an interview published Saturday (Nov. 5), CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy told The Financial Times that his company was moving away from the spending spree that saw it spend close to half a billion dollars on a range of different industries.

“We’ve stopped, or we’ve taken a pause, in these M&As,” he said. “What we’ve decided as a company is that in the next one to two years, we will make sure that these big investments we make see a lot of customer adoption, and then we will go to the next set of M&As.”

Krishnamurthy added that the company would not cut staff, but it would hire “significantly less than the last couple of years.”

The news comes less than two weeks after reports that Walmart was considering raising up to $3 billion for Flipkart.

As PYMNTS noted at the time, Walmart’s position as one of the world’s largest retailers positions it to expand its investment in Flipkart’s India operations. Walmart acquired a 77% stake in the company in 2018, spending $16 billion. Later that year, the company said that it could take Flipkart public in four years.

India has been an important front in Walmart’s eCommerce war against Amazon, as the country has 1.4 billion people, with internet penetration steadily growing at 47% after years in the single-digit territory.

This year also saw Meta Platforms join the battlefield, teaming with Indian eCommerce company JioMart to let customers buy groceries using Meta’s WhatsApp chat. Meta has worked with Jio’s parent company Reliance Technology since 2020. The social media giant invested $5.7 billion in the company, receiving a 9.9% stake.

Despite the presence of two tech giants and retail goliath, Krishnamurthy insisted India’s eCommerce space was large and vibrant enough to accommodate large competitors, telling the Financial Times the industry remains “vibrant, given the size of the market.”