Ekart to focus on non-Flipkart company revenue in 2017

Ekart, the logistics arm of Flipkart, is increasingly focusing on third party clients as a means to drive its revenues in future. The company, which currently gets 10% revenues from third party deliveries, has set a target of generating 50% revenues from non-Flipkart companies in next two years. The firm counts PayTM and Shopclues as its largest third party clients with 30,000-40,000 shipments per day, and accounts for majority of the 10% share. Majority (90%) of the business comes from the internal firms i.e. Flipkart, Myntra and Jabong.

Ekart has been focusing on improving its internal performance metrics and customer experience in 2016, and has been able to reduce its costs by Rs 20 per shipment i.e. ~20%. Ekart head Saikiran Krishnamurthy said that “Our speed has improved 2 days since January 2016, during Big Billion Days sale (in 2016), we were over 20% faster than last year (2015) with 20% lower manpower”. Ekart also launched a courier business and pilots in hyper local delivery business under the brand name eQuick Services last year. The courier business will now be repositioned to target enterprise market as well.

Technology driven logistics business is expected to grow at record pace in the coming 5 years with the market size expected to increase from $1.4 billion in 2015 to $9.6 billion in 2020. Ekart has also been expanding its network, from 3,800 pincodes at the start of 2016 to 5,555 pincodes at the end of year. The company has a warehouse capacity 7.5 million cubic feet and over 2,500 alternative delivery partners.