Understanding Contemporary Organisations

This article provides an analysis of Flipkart's business model, with a focus on financial management and marketing. It also explores how the various departments in the company interact and influence each other. Flipkart is a leading Indian e-commerce company known for its trustworthiness and consumer-friendly approach.

Running head: UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY ORGANISATIONS
Understanding Contemporary Organisations
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1UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY ORGANISATIONS
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Discussion..................................................................................................................................2
Financial management analysis of Flipkart............................................................................2
Marketing analysis of Flipkart...............................................................................................3
How the departments in Flipkart reflects their integration....................................................4
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................5
References:.................................................................................................................................7

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Introduction
The marketing environment is rapidly changing in the contemporary world and so is
the trend of it by the customers. The local environment has drastically changes in terms of
social, infrastructural and economic terms, especially in India. This paper would elaborate on
presenting a brief analysis of the business model of Flipkart, with a special emphasis on their
financial management and marketing. It shall further analyse how the various departments in
the company interacts and their influence on one another. It is to note that Flipkart is one of
the leading Indian E-commerce company and it has successfully positioned itself as one of
the highly trust worthy and consumer friendly brands.
Discussion
Financial management analysis of Flipkart
The month of October of the year 2016 was a make or a break month for Flipkart. It
was facing high competition from Amazon and had conceded its market share on the basis of
month-on-month. As India had banned the FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) in the online
retail, the company has devised very complex maze of several inter-linked and independent
entities which receive huge amounts of money that it raise for building integrated e-
commerce business.
It is also to mention that Flipkart sources its goods and products from the
manufacturers and sells them to the third part sellers who then offer those goods to the
shoppers. The company provides logistic services and technology platform and takes
commission on each and every sale made for its site (Datar 2018). This is how Flipkart
operates. At present, about 6 rounds of investments from above 15 investors and different
acquisitions, the corporate structure of the company would make proud the older Indan
conglomerates. Most of the entities of this company finally result to the final holding entity,

3UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY ORGANISATIONS
the Flipkart Private Limited (FPL) that was set up in the year 2011 in Singapore (Prasad and
Rao 2015).
Flipkart has become very important to the Tiger Global Management as well.
However, for boosting up the leadership position of itself, Flipkart have infused about 338
crore dollars into Myntra, an online fashion store in the year 2014. With the same, the
company has also acquired Jabong in 2016 with a deal of 70 million dollars. It has invested
about 176 million dollars in the fashion arms of these two brands. In the year 2018, Walmart,
a leading retail chain of U.S acquired 77% controlling stake in the company for 16 billion
dollars, valuing it at 22 billion dollars. It is also to mention that at present, this company
holds 39.5% of the market share of e-commerce industry in India.
Marketing analysis of Flipkart
Flipkart follows B2C (Buyers to Consumer) model (Srivastava 2017). It has over 75
million of registered users who had helped this company in achieving five billion dollars
Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) of the sales in the year FY15. It is to mention that GMV is
an indicators of the company performance on the basis of the total value of merchandise that
is sold by the organisation at a particular period. “Big Billion Days” is one of the most
successful campaign of Flipkart till date and it has helped it in increasing the rate of its sales
at the time of festive seasons in India (Nigam and Maqbool 2018). Furthermore, “No
Kidding, No Worries” is its new ad campaign that addresses the long-held concerns linked
with the online shopping of the customers.
It is to note that Flipkart makes use of psychographic and behavioural strategies in
order to segment the market for catering the needs of its customers. Along with the increase
in per capital income and the change in the buying patterns of the company, the customers are
getting more equipped and more comfortable with purchasing goods online. Moreover, the

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company makes use of the undifferentiated targeting strategy due to the fact that the
customers from demography buy products online that is available to each and every one
where delivery is possible. Flipkart has positioned itself as a customer friendly and a trust
worthy e-commerce brand in the market. The tagline of Flipkart is “Flipkart matlab bilkul
pakka”.
Flipkart sells everything right from books, air conditioners, clothing and accessories,
computers to cosmetics. With the same, the items sold on the Flipkart website have the same
warranties of brand like the ones in the physical showrooms. Very recently, the company has
launched its personal product range as well and they are known as “Digiflip” (Kumar and
Pamula 2018). The company functions in India and is headquartered in Bangalore,
Karnataka. It sells merchandise by means of WS Retail, It provides its own platform to the
other companies who are interested in selling their products. Flipkart websites and mobile
application are very easy to access. At first, Flipkart used to personally buy the books and
used to couriered them to the customers. Gradually, it opened its warehouses where it stored
the goods safely. Its warehouses are present in Kolkata, Noida, Hyderabad, Bangalore,
Mumbai, Delhi, Pune and Chennai. Moreover, discounts of about 35% are allowed on a
periodic basis in order to boost up the sales in Flipkart and to maintain the competitive edge.
For making payments, it also allows cash payment, Debit card or credit card payments and
even, by swiping the cards at the time of delivery.
How the departments in Flipkart reflects their integration
Flipkart has several departments including finance, marketing, technology, logistics,
vendor acquisition, customer support, operations, HR and Admin and the internal tech
support. Logistics deliver the Flipkart sellers and order the products. It also ships for all the
prlatforms as well. Apart from this, there are also other departments running in Flipkart like
internal audit, fashion and electronics. However, it is to state that all the departments work in

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sync and they reflect their integration (Laudon and Laudon 2016). The goal of Flipkart team
is to synchronise the information technology along with the business objectives and business
cultures and to align the technology with its goals and business strategy.
Flipkart always hire the top talents who ensure that the brand maintains its successful
position in the market. The entire team works together in order to achieve a common goal and
that is of becoming global e-commerce leader. Along with 9 vice presidents and 14 vice-
presidents, the company appears to develop a powerful foundation in order to face the rapid
growth and development in the sector and it stills strive to do more in this field. It would
further modify its organisational structure as per the change in the local Indian e-commerce
industry (Freitas 2018). There are layers of presidents, senior vice-presidents, senior
directors, managers, vice-presidents and directors. Flipkart has made a significant transition
in terms of its organisational structure when it moved from website to mobile application.
It is to note that the recruitment and selection of Flipkart is something that makes all
the difference. It always ensures that the leaders that it induce are well woven into its
organisational fabric. It always strive from bringing in top level executives in order to
manage and promote its future growth and development. Right from ensuring that the new
candidates are ready to unlearn to assisting them in understanding and adjusting well in the
start-up environment of Flipkart, the company has put in place different processes in order to
make sure that its structures do not crack amid in the current evolution.
As mentioned above, in the year 2018 of August, Walmart, a leading retail chain of
U.S acquired 77% controlling stake in the company for 16 billion dollars, valuing it at 22
billion dollars (Samper, Giovannucci and Marques Vieira 2017). This deal has simply lifted
the net worth of the employee stock of Flipkart, comprising of the unvested shares to about 2

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billion dollars as per the report of ET. Also, Walmart offer 100% of the buybacks of the
vested shares by the employees of Flipkart.
Conclusion
Hence, from the above analysis it is to state that Flipkart is at present inn its growing
stage. Its sales revenue is increasing with each passing year. It follows B2C business model
that provides ample of shopping opportunities to the customers in Indian market in effective
way.

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References:
Srivastava, R., 2017. Consumer Feedback Analysis Through Social Media for B2C
Electronic Companies in India. International Journal of Business Analytics and
Intelligence, 5(2), p.30.
Nigam, A. and Maqbool, A., 2018. Flipkarts Big Billion Day Sale-Then and Now: A
Comparison. International Journal on Customer Relations, 6(1), p.58.
Prasad, C.S.D. and Rao, S.S., 2015. Competition in the Indian E-Commerce Sector: The Case
of Flipkart. Gavesana Journal of Management, 7(2), p.22.
Kumar, R. and Pamula, R., 2018. Social Book Search: a survey. Artificial Intelligence
Review, pp.1-45.
Laudon, K.C. and Laudon, J.P., 2016. Management information system. Pearson Education
India.
Samper, L., Giovannucci, D. and Marques Vieira, L., 2017. The powerful role of intangibles
in the coffee value chain. Economic research paper, (39).
Freitas, K., 2018. The Future of Work: New Roles and Capabilities for HR Thanks to Social
Media. NHRD Network Journal, 11(2), pp.35-43.
Datar, M., 2018, July. Data Science at Flipkart-An Indian E-Commerce company.
In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge
Discovery & Data Mining (pp. 2868-2868). ACM.