India’s home grown e-commerce giant Flipkart announced on Monday that it has entered into a strategic and commercial partnership with Adani Group. This newly formed partnership will help the Walmart owned company in improving its supply chain infrastructure and thereby enhancing its capabilities to serve its rapidly growing customer base.
As part of this strategic & commercial partnership, Adani Group will construct a massive 534,000 sq ft fulfillment center in Mumbai. This state-of-the-art logistic hub will be subsequently leased to Flipkart to cater the growing demand of online shopping in Western region and support market access of scores of small sellers and MSMEs in the region. This fulfilment center will go operational in Q3 of 2022 and boost enormous capacity to store 10 million units of sellers’ inventory at any given point of time. The sprawling center, in all likelihood, is expected to produce 2,500 direct jobs and indirect jobs.
Additionally, this partnership will also allow Flipkart to build its third data center. This data center will be built at Adaniconnex’s Chennai facility. For all those who don’t know, Adaniconnex is a new joint venture formed between EdgeConneX and Adani Enterprises Limited.
Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Chief Executive Officer, Flipkart Group, said, “The Adani Group is unmatched in the way it has gone about building infrastructure across India. What it brought to us was a unique combination of logistics, real estate, green energy, and data centre infrastructure capabilities. We are delighted to initiate our association with the Adani Group to strengthen our supply chain and technology infrastructure.”
He further added “At the Flipkart Group, we are focused on ensuring that our customers get access to a wide range of products made available by sellers across the country as we continuously innovate to drive greater affordability. Our logistics network and technology stack are instrumental in making this a reality. These investments will help us strengthen our presence and capabilities in India to support MSMEs and sellers while also accelerating job creation and growth.”
With Walmart acquiring Flipkart in 2018, the latter has now got the war-chest to take on Amazon. Flipkart and Amazon, both of which are American companies, are currently the two biggest players in the industry. India’s burgeoning e-commerce industry, more or less, has now been reduced into a two horse-race. Other e-commerce players like Paytm Mall and Snapdeal succumbed to the consolidation wave after Amazon entered India’s e-commerce market.