Backed by decline in finance cost, Flipkart trims loss

Flipkart group, the e-commerce behemoth's holding company based in Singapore has reported a 42% increase in group revenue in FY 19, according to regulatory filings accessed by business intelligence platform paper.vc.

The filings state that the company has managed to achieve a 63% reduction in losses from Rs 46,895 crore ($6.6 billion) in 2018 to Rs 17,231 crore ($2.42 billion) for FY19.

Flipkart’s Singapore holding company filed its annual financial statement on Thursday. The financials reveal the performance of the company post its acquisition by the American retail giant Walmart in August last year.

The filings say that Flipkart posted Rs 42,878 crore in revenue from contracts with customers with total revenue touching the Rs 43,615 crore ($6.14 billion) - a whopping 42% increase in group revenue from the previous year’s revenue of Rs 30,644 crore ($4.32 billion).

However, according to Paper.vc, “The massive decline in expenditure is due to a steep decline in finance costs rather than overall optimisation in operating expenses. Finance cost comprised a large part of expenditure in FY’18 expenditure, largely attributed to the accounting treatment of convertible securities. If one were to exclude finance costs, overall group expenditure actually went up by 118%.”

Meanwhile, overall expenses went down significantly from a Rs 46,895 crore ($6.6 billion) to Rs 17,281 crore ($2.4 billion).

Significantly, since Walmart took over, employee benefit expenses have shot up by 58% to Rs 4,254 crore ($600 million).

The filings also reveal interesting details such as those relating to Flipkart's new, more aggressive acquisition strategy since Kalyan Krishnamurthy took over, with the group spending $46.8 million on acquisition in FY ‘19, including $21.4 million on the September 2018 acquisition of Israel-based Upstream Commerce and $10.5 million on the acquisition of Bengaluru-based Liv AI.