Flipkart CEO reassures staff, says will honour all job offers

Walmart-owned ecommerce marketplace Flipkart has assured its employees that there would be no pay cuts and that all job offers, including internships, will be honoured.
In a virtual townhall, the first after the ongoing 21-day nationwide lockdown was put in place, Flipkart Chief Executive Officer Kalyan Krishnamurthy assured over 6,000 employees that Flipkart was “financially healthy”.

“Flipkart is safe and (financially) healthy. There is no cause to worry. And the key priority is to keep all employees safe,” said a person who attended the meeting citing the key takeaways from Krishnamurthy's address.

A mid-level manager told ET that the assurance has helped at a time when there have been conversations of layoffs and salary cuts across organizations, and Flipkart has seen business suffer after the Covid-19 virus outbreak.

ET on Wednesday reported that various firms had started laying off staff and, in some cases, asked employees to take pay cuts as they look for ways to weather the impact of the pandemic.

Flipkart's business has been severely hit by the lockdown after its top-selling categories such as smartphones, electronics and large appliances became unavailable. While its grocery platform Supermart is taking orders, the e-commerce firm’s fashion portal Myntra has temporarily suspended services during the 21-day shutdown.

On the impact of Covid-19 on businesses, Krishnamurthy said that this is an opportune time to scale partnerships with offline and kirana stores and work together to serve communities. “We need to ensure we continue to build a flexible supply chain and innovate on scale.”

Taking cues from China's experience, Krishmanuthy told employees that they should expect the category mix between online and offline to change, with online likely to go up. "We will continue to collaborate with offline and the ecosystem," he said. Last week, ET reported that Flipkart was looking to ramp up its capacity to deliver essentials to customers, including procuring permissions to stock food at its warehouses, use railway freight to move goods and cabs to enable last-mile deliveries.