Look who is back in Flipkart as head category management to stop Amazon’s juggernaut

Flipkart has brought back former chief financial officer Kalyan Krishnamurthy, who will be heading the category management team, at a time when Amazon is aggressively expanding its presence in India.

Krishnamurthy is a managing director at Tiger Global, the largest investor of Flipkart.

"The decision to bring back an old time Flipkart-hand-Kalyan-to strengthen our leadership team, was taken by the management team led by Binny (Bansal). Kalyan will head category design organisation and will report to Binny," Flipkart spokesperson told ET.

It is not clear whether he will remain an employee with Tiger Global Management.

Krishnamurthy, who had joined Tiger Global as director of finance for portfolio companies in 201, had joined Flipkart as an interim CFO in early 2013.

“Kalyan is a very analytical man. He's going to work at bringing in efficiencies and optimisations in the marketplace categories," one of the people privy to the plans at Flipkart told ET.

In his earlier role, Krishnamurthy was also senior vice president of retail Krishnamurthy joined back Tiger Global when Flipkart appointed Sanjay Baweja as its new CFO and appointed Myntra co-founder Mukesh Bansal as head of commerce platform in late 2014.

Industry experts suggest this appointment is quite crucial for Flipkart as Amazon is pushing its efforts in India.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos announced additional $3 billion investment in India and also cut sellers’ commission recently; few days after Flipkart had increased the same.

Reportedly, Amazon said it grew shipments by 150% during first quarter of the calendar year Flipkart has not disclosed its sales numbers for 2016, saying customer satisfaction is its key metric now.

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