Binny Bansal is the new CEO of Flipkart

In a major rejig at India’s top e-commerce portal Flipkart, Binny Bansal, Co-founder, will be the CEO while Sachin Bansal and present CEO will move on to the post of Chairman. Mukesh Bansal, Founder of Myntra, will head entire commerce business and report to Binny Bansal. Mukesh will have to let go of the fashion discovery platform. He had earlier sold Myntra to Flipkart. These changes are a step towards building India’s largest internet company, a move made ahead of public listing on the US bourses in the next few years.

As per experts, Sachin Bansal will focus on the external environment, Binny Bansal will manage the business and be its public face. This reshuffle is a sign of maturity of the firm that is the largest in India. The move is also significant because it comes at a time when Flipkart is facing a stiff competition from Snapdeal, which is backed by Japanese investor SoftBank and American behemoth Amazon. Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon control 80 per cent of India’s e-commerce market.

Binny Bansal, shy and reserved, built the backend network of suppliers since 2007 when Flipkart was an online bookseller. He is essentially an operations person who is known to have an eye for detail. He built Flipkart’s customer experience that helped it initially to win customers and investors. He is reported to have said that ‘we will continue to build world-class customer experience, expand our supply chain infrastructure to reach all parts of India, drive innovations in mobile commerce and bring in disruptive technologies’.