Flipkart Minutes to set up 800 dark stores by 2025-end: CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy

Flipkart Minutes to set up 800 dark stores by 2025-end: CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy

Flush with funds, Flipkart Minutes – the quick commerce arm of Walmart-owned e-commerce platform Flipkart – is aiming to set up as many as 800 dark stores by the end of 2025, as per the company’s group chief executive officer (CEO) Kalyan Krishnamurthy.

This comes at a time when India’s quick commerce market is growing at a scorching pace, with companies such as Zomato-owned Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart expanding rapidly in an increasingly competitive market.

“We launched our own quick commerce product nine months back with just about 100 (dark) stores, and we are already close to 300 (dark) stores now. By the end of this year, we will probably get to 800 (dark) stores, that's the vision we have,” Krishnamurthy said at Walmart’s annual Investment Community Meeting on April 9.

Flipkart’s expansion plans in India come over a week after its Singapore-based parent entity pumped in as much as Rs 3,249 crore (around $382 million) into the marketplace business, in an internal funding round.

The capital will help the Walmart-owned firm’s budding quick commerce business to expand its footprint in an increasingly competitive market. Incumbents like Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart have, of late, been on an expansion spree, setting up dark stores at a rapid pace to claw away market share.

Flipkart’s plans to set up 800 dark stores by the end of this year will still put it far behind the competition. As of the December quarter (Q3 FY25), Blinkit had 1,007 stores, while Swiggy operated 705, as per regulatory filings. Until February, Swiggy’s close rival Zepto was operating around 750 stores.

Market leader Blinkit is now targeting to reach 2,000 dark stores by the end of 2025. Meanwhile, by the end of March 2025, both Swiggy and Zepto had expressed plans to set up 1,000 and 1,200 stores, respectively.

To fend off competition, Flipkart – which has been late to hop on the quick commerce bandwagon in India – plans to invest in building its supply chain capabilities.

“The customer segment for this particular product (quick commerce) is very sophisticated, with high expectations. The most important aspect of making this business successful is the supply chain behind it, which has to be scalable, technology-enabled, agile, and reliable,” Krishnamurthy added.

However, like its competitors, Flipkart’s quick commerce efforts will be limited to the top urban markets, where the demand for quicker deliveries is higher.

“For the top 50 cities and the more affluent user base, we will lead with speed, service, convenience, and national brands…And the moment you come down to the next customer segment, we lead with selection and value, and make sure speed-related service becomes hygiene,” Krishnamurthy said.

To be sure, a large proportion of revenues for quick commerce players currently come from India’s top eight markets. According to a recent report by Blume Ventures, these platforms are likely to face hurdles such as a low total addressable market (TAM), tapering growth in monthly transacting users (MTUs), and increased competition from e-commerce players, as they look to scale beyond the top consumer markets, Moneycontrol reported earlier.

Eye on AI

Krishnamurthy also emphasised that Flipkart is investing heavily in leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), and making efforts to integrate the technology across all the company’s verticals.

“AI has to become the culture of the company. That is our vision. It should not be restricted to a team, a function or a product,” he said.

On the business side, Krishnamurthy said that, other than corporate functions, Flipkart has classified its product and engineering verticals into three buckets – end consumer-facing, merchant facing (Flipkart has more than a million merchants listing products on the platform), and supply chain.

According to the CEO, one of the biggest opportunities, and challenges, of operating in a country as diverse as India, is personalization.

“How do you match the over 200 million catalogue size to the over 500 million users. And that is where, today, we are using AI in the biggest way. There is a lot of work to do but that is the biggest investment we are making,” he said.

Taking the example of Myntra, Flipkart’s lifestyle marketplace, Krishnamurthy said that AI is allowing customers to have a more interactive shopping experience via features like dynamic videos of products, instead of simple images.

Moreover, the company is leverage AI to target India’s 350-400 million young users, aged between 15 and 30 years old.

“These young users behave a bit differently. Mostly e-commerce platforms across the world, when you look at the app or the product page, they are very text and image heavy. These users want videos. So, we are using AI very heavily to convert all of these catalogues into videos and giving sellers the tools to do that in a cost-effective way,” Krishnamurthy concluded.

As per the CEO, in India, Flipkart currently has more than 500 million users, with a product catalogue size of more than 200 million products.