The e-commerce arm of Paytm Group, Paytm Mall is undertaking a significant restructuring of its top and mid-level managerial teams, amid speculations that the firm is shifting its focus on catering to its merchant ecosystem through B2B category and an offline-to-online consumer businesses.
The firm has moved Sudhanshu Jain, chief financial officer of Paytm Bank, as the financial comptroller of the online business, said company executives.
It has also brought on board Bharti Balakrishnan, senior director with Alibaba Group, to lead certain unstructured categories including fashion, home and kitchen, and Varun Gupta has been elevated to lead its groceries vertical. Srinivas Mothey is slated to join as the new Chief Marketing Officer of the firm. Raghu Chakravarthi has moved from BigBasket to Paytm Mall to build the tech team for the O2O aspirations of the firm.
Senior vice presidents who had been tasked to lead critical functions such as marketing and customer acquisitions, Saurabh Vashishtha and Amit Bagaria have quit Paytm Mall.
The developments come at a time when the company is working to catch up on the gap between itself and its competitors Amazon and Flipkart. Also, the company is now planning to focus more on the wholesale and O2O (online-to-offline) segments, due to a mounting losses.
“We will focus on expanding on our O2O success. Small shops and sellers have unprecedented opportunity to expand online. Our O2O technology suite and mall as consumer destination will give them necessary support to expand to new consumer base. Majority of our business is expected to come from our O2O (delivery from local store), 15% wholesale and 35% from warehoused items.” – Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder, Paytm
For the year ended March 2018, Paytm Mall recorded revenues of Rs.776 crore and incurred a loss of Rs.1,805 crore. The entity has till date raised fundings from Alibaba Group, SoftBank Group and SAIF Partners, among others.