Flipkart
is an e-commerce company.
Founded
in October 2007 by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, both graduates of the Indian
Institute of Technology Delhi and former Amazon employees. In the start, the
company focused on online book sales with nationwide shipping.
In 2008
Flipkart gradually gained traction, and was receiving one hundred orders per
day. Flipkart bought WeRead, a social book discovery service based in
Bangalore, from Lulu.com in 2010.
It is based
in Bangalore, Karnataka, India, and registered as a private limited company in
Singapore. Before expanding into other product categories such as consumer
electronics, fashion, home essentials, groceries, and lifestyle products, the
company initially focused on online book sales.
Walmart
purchased a 77 percent controlling stake in Flipkart for US$16 billion in
August 2018, valuing the company at around $20 billion.
The
service primarily competes with Amazon's Indian subsidiary and Snapdeal, a
domestic competitor. Flipkart had a 39.5 percent market share in India's
e-commerce industry in March 2017. Flipkart has a dominant position in the
apparel segment, thanks to its acquisition of Myntra, and has been described as
"neck and neck" with Amazon in the sale of electronics and mobile
phones. Flipkart also owns PhonePe, a UPI-based mobile payment service.