Swords are drawn; Snapdeal and Flipkart are challenging each other to become numero uno

After Snapdeal’s CEO Kunal Bahl openly declared war against Flipkart, the latter company did not sit back and came out with a scathing reply.
Bahl said that he aimed at overthrowing Flipkart to become India’s largest online marketplace. Now, Flipkart fired back saying that no online retailer in the country would be even half its size by March 2016.

Head of commerce Mukesh Bansal told ET Flipkart will sell goods worth $10 billion (Rs 65,000 crore) during fiscal 2016.

The war of words between the two e-Commerce marketplaces comes ahead of the festive season.

This year, the contest is going to be more aggressive as e-tailers are backed by stores of investor money like never before.

Bansal wants to sell goods worth $100 billion in five to seven years and as per him the retail industry would be worth $1 trillion with online sales accounting for 15-20% of the total.

He claimed Flipkart will have more than 70% market share, helping them cross $100 billion.

As per Chief Business Officer Ankit Nagori, Flipkart's fashion category, including Myntra, has crossed $1.5 billion in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) already.

GMV is an important metric that online retailers use to measure growth, and valuation is dependent in large part on this number.

Meanwhile, Snapdeal has raised $500 million from Foxconn, SoftBank and Alibaba, whereas as per reports, Flipkart have closed $700 million in funding.

The pre-Diwali sale will be closely watched, also because of Flipkart’s flop ‘Big Billion Day’ last year.

Flipkart recently hired top technology talent from Google and Motorola to lead product development.

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