June 22, 2014: Flipkart which has tie up with Federation of Indian Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises and National Centre for Design and Product development is holding talks for tie up with manufacturing clusters such as Tirupur and Ludhiana. This move is seen as part of the strategy to bring more sellers on board so as to meet the demand. According to reports, Flipkart is trying to follow the model followed by big retail giants like Alibaba. Alibaba one of the largest Chinese e-commerce marketplace has about 20 lakh SMEs on-board.
On this development, Ankit Nagori, Vice President, Marketplace, Flipkart was quoted as saying, “We are targeting manufacturing clusters and would sign up partnerships with Surat, Agra and Ludhiana, where synthetic apparels and leather items are manufactured.” Flipkart presently has got about 3,000 sellers of whom most are Small and Medium Enterprises. According to estimates, there are less than 20,000 SMEs who supply to online retailers in India and the online retail market is expected to touch Rs.50,000 crore by 2016.
Flipkart has plans to grow the seller based to 12,000 by the end of this financial year and increase its market share in the clothing segment to 70 per cent. Presently it has got a market share of 50 per cent.
