The e-commerce portal Snapdeal is aggressively bidding to create a products and services ecosystem that is similar to the one created by the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. It will have a lot that will be riding on the firm’s newly appointed product chief, Anand Chandrasekaran.
Snapdeal being the country’s leading online marketplace is trying to race ahead of its prime rivals Amazon and Flipkart. The firm is a rush to diversify and build the capabilities in another rapidly growing internet commerce segment – utilities payment and digital bill.
Until lately, Anand Chandrasekaran aged 36 years was the Chief Product Officer at Bharti Airtel, the largest telecom operator inIndia. He led the product strategy for Airtel Money and the music streaming service Wynk.
Being alum ofStanfordUniversity, he has played a major role in the launch of the highly criticized Airtel Zero that was stated to have violated the concept of free internet by the net neutrality supporters.
His appointment at Snapdeal comes within months after Punit Soni who worked with Google joined Flipkart for a similar role. Chandrasekaran’s role is expected to be wide ranging than that of Soni as Flipkart remains to be focused only on the e-commerce products space.
Snapdeal is following a series of buyouts and the latest one is $450 million (approx. Rs 2,870 crore) for the acquisition of the mobile recharge service Freecharge. The portal has started providing services such as mobile recharge, online bill payment and home and personal loans as it grabs a larger slice of the consumer market inIndia.
Regarding this new role, Chandrasekaran claimed that he is looking forward to work with Snapdeal and build a highly scalable, innovative, sustainable and future ready technology firm. Snapdeal expects that its new bets will start to pay off from this fiscal year. The Chief executive of Snapdeal, Kunal Bahl indicated that he expected Freecharge, the mobile recharge platform to contribute $1 billion to the overall gross merchandise sales of the firm by March.
