26 September 2017, India:
One of India’s largest e-commerce marketplace Flipkart has acquired F1 Info Solutions to strengthen its ‘after-sales services’ for the smartphone and electronics category as per the report by ET.
“We want to give our customers a comprehensive service ecosystem that takes care of the repair and service needs of all their products,” said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO, Flipkart. “With Jeeves and F1 Info Solutions now, we’re closer to that goal.”
The F1 Info founder Shammi Moza will join the Jeeves team as a senior director and head the business for Flipkart. Moza will report to Abhijit Upadhye, vice president at Flipkart and head of Jeeves, TOI reported. “With this acquisition, we will get access to 150 offline service centers for F1 Info which have expertise in servicing smartphones, laptops, computers and other electronics products. Around 50 of these centers are owned by F1 Info while the rest are run by on franchisees,” said Upadhye.
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Established in 2012, F1 Info Solutions is a neutral service provider with a distributed repair service network of around 158 centers in 135 cities. F1 Info’s team of about 900 people comprises mostly technicians. The company has partnerships with leading brands like Apple, Samsung, HP, Lenovo, Sony and Asus.
SoftBank Vision Fund recently invested a record $2.5 Billion in Flipkart. After this financing round, Flipkart will have in excess of $4 billion of cash on balance sheet. Vision Fund joins Tencent, eBay and Microsoft in the current financing round, significantly increasing the investment capital available to Flipkart. This investment round allows Flipkart to further its mission to transform India and SoftBank to invest in a market leader with scale.
Flipkart, one of the largest e-commerce marketplace in India was founded on 2007 by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, both alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. They worked for Amazon and left to create their new company incorporated in October 2007 as Flipkart Online Services Pvt. Ltd. The first product they sold was the book Leaving Microsoft To Change The World to a customer from Hyderabad. Flipkart now employs more than 33,000 people.
Also Read: SoftBank Vision Fund Invests a Record $2.5 Billion in Flipkart
