Kalyan Krishnamurthy back at Flipkart

The re-appointment of Kalyan Krishnamurthy as business head at Flipkart seems to be the company’s latest attempt to revive sales growth as chief executive officer Binny Bansal is running short of time to turn around India’s largest e-commerce company, which has been ceding ground to rival Amazon India. Krishnamurthy, an executive at Flipkart’s largest investor Tiger Global Management, joined Flipkart this week as head of category design, one of Bansal’s most significant moves since he took over as CEO last January. The appointment comes after a rough start to the year for Flipkart. Since Binny took over as CEO, three of Flipkart’s senior most executives, commerce platform head Mukesh Bansal, chief business officer Ankit Nagori and product head Punit Soni have left. Flipkart’s valuation has been marked down by four of its investors and the company is struggling to raise funds at its preferred valuation.

This is Krishnamurthy’s second stint at the company. In his previous stint, Krishnamurthy, first as interim CFO, improved Flipkart’s so-called unit economics by pruning costs. After that, as head of categories, he helped devise the company’s sales events strategy which catapulted Flipkart’s revenues. Krishnamurthy was also one of the key architects of Flipkart’s first Big Billion Day, a Diwali sale which has now become an annual event.