Also in this letter:
■ With rising fuel costs and few perks, many Ola, Uber drivers want out
■ Digital health platform Mfine lays off 500 employees
■ Visa bets big on commercial payments in India
Flipkart forays into home services to rival Urban Company
Ecommerce firm Flipkart has quietly entered the home services business, starting with AC servicing, sources told us.
Details: It is providing the service through Jeeves, an after-sales services company it acquired several years ago.
The service is live in cities like Bengaluru and Kolkata and will be extended to other cities soon.
Flipkart’s home services business is likely to also include washing machine repairs and other similar offerings going forward.
Competition: This means Urban Company (previously Urbanclap) finally has a new competitor after several of its peers faded away a few years ago. Since then, it has become a nationwide at-home services provider. Unlike Urban Company, however, Flipkart will not offer beauty services, our sources said.
We reported on April 6 that Tata Digital was also looking to enter the at-home services space.
At your service: Until now, Flipkart has used Jeeves to offer installation services to consumers who buy things like ACs, washing machines and furniture on its platform.
Now, consumers can get their ACs serviced regardless of where it was bought from.
“They (Flipkart) have been building these capabilities for years now and are opening up to consumers now directly. Directionally, it will get extended to the main categories where such services are needed, periodically” a person aware of the matter said.
This marks Flipkart’s entry into another new business, after travel and epharmacy.
We reported previously that Flipkart has also opened up its logistics arm Ekart to other ecommerce firms.
With rising fuel costs and few perks, many Ola, Uber drivers want out
Frequent users of app-based cab services are facing more trip cancellations, higher fares, longer wait times, and drivers who refuse to go to certain locations or demand extra money for switching on the air-conditioning.
Commuters are, in short, getting a raw deal as a steep increase in the price of CNG and slashing of incentives by cab aggregators such as Ola and Uber have put many drivers in a tough spot, experts said.
After pandemic-induced lockdowns, a weak revival in demand put many drivers and vehicle owners out of business, resulting in an acute shortage. Regular customers soon started choosing personal vehicles or other modes of transport.
Supply crunch: While there has been a huge increase in demand in the business commute and weekend travel segments, a severe supply crunch has hit the taxi and commercial passenger vehicle segment hard, said Neeraj Gupta, founder of Meru Cabs, which was acquired by M&M last year.
The number of drivers in Bengaluru has fallen to 45,000 from 100,000 before the pandemic period, said Tanveer Pasha, president, Ola Uber Owners and Drivers’ Association.
Drop in registrations: According to data sourced from the government’s Vahan database, there has been a sharp drop in registrations of new commercial taxis over the last two years. Overall, registrations dropped 28% to 65,221 units in 2021.
Perks galore: Last week, Uber hiked fares by 10-15% across many cities to increase its drivers’ earnings amid soaring fuel rates, and also offered them things like flexibility on payments and visibility of destinations to retain them on its platform. Ola has also introduced similar changes.
TWEET OF THE DAY
Digital health platform Mfine lays off 500 employees
Mfine has laid off around 500 employees, people in the know said, becoming the latest to cut jobs as startups struggle to raise funds.
The job cut accounts for about half the workforce at the Bengaluru-based company, which had been hiring until last month, according to media reports.
Eight and counting: Mfine is the eighth company in the startup space to lay off employees since April. It has let go of employees in data science, engineering and product departments.
We reported on May 19 that used-car platform Cars24 had laid off more than 600 of its employees.
Over the past few weeks, close to 3,000 contractual and full-time employees have been fired from Cars24, edtech firms Unacademy, Vedantu and Lido Learning, social commerce startups Meesho and Trell, and furniture rental startup Furlenco.
Some of these companies and other startups may look to cut more jobs, people in the know said. The layoffs come at a time when startups are finding it increasingly hard to raise funds after a record year in 2021.
Visa bets big on commercial payments in India
Visa is making a big bet on business-to-business (B2B) payments in India.
The payments major is bolstering its corporate card-based solutions for commercial statutory payment use cases such as payments to suppliers, reconciliation and GST-based payments, a top executive said.
Visa will explore long-term partnerships with fintech firms to provide solutions to the value chains of corporates and B2B suppliers, and may even look at investing in some fintechs, said Sandeep Ghosh, who was recently appointed as group country manager for Visa India and South Asia.
The fintech partnerships it is scouting are in the areas of dynamic underwriting solutions, as it looks to help more small and medium businesses (SMBs) receive financing and benefits.
Visa estimates that almost 25% of all card payment transactions for the industry in India are B2B in nature.
Indian IT firms take M&A route to tap top talent, boost capabilities
The top buzzword among Indian IT service providers these days is M&A.
These mergers and acquisitions are primarily intended to build capacities around cloud computing, cybersecurity, and application transformation as software service exporters scamper to meet client demand.
Most of these M&As are driven by an urge to strengthen their presence at the deal table, although absolute deal sizes are trending lower overall.
As clients focus on end-to-end transformation solutions, the more capabilities that a system integrator can offer, the more it will be able to tap a larger share of the client’s business.
The LTI-Mindtree merger, the largest in the Indian IT services ecosystem in recent history, is only the first of many. M&As will increase markedly in the coming months as valuations plummet and the demand for talent reaches unprecedented levels, analysts said.
War on attrition: Meanwhile, IT services providers are going all-out to arrest attrition rates amid a war for talent in areas such as digital, data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain and cloud computing.
Apart from increments and bonuses, leading software service exporters like Wipro, Cognizant, Mindtree, Tech Mahindra and Mphasis are offering special bonuses, stock options, upskilling and reskilling initiatives, internal job moves, access to higher education programmes, and work-from-anywhere.
Infosys board extends Salil Parekh’s term by five years
The Infosys board has reappointed Salil Parekh the company’s chief executive officer and managing director for five more years, subject to the approval of shareholders.
Parekh has been CEO and MD at Infosys since January 2018. He took over the role from then interim CEO and MD and company veteran UB Pravin Rao. Rao had been appointed following the abrupt exit of CEO Vishal Sikka in August 2017 over disagreements with the company’s founding members.
In the three fiscal years to March 2022, the company’s revenue has outstripped that of larger rival Tata Consultancy Services. In FY22, it also clocked 19.7% revenue growth in constant currency — its fastest in 11 years. It also won ET’s Company Of The Year award for 2021.
Other Top Stories By Our Reporters
Paytm board approves stake hike to 74% in new general insurance unit: The board of One97 Communications, the parent entity of fintech firm Paytm, has approved a plan to hike its stake in Paytm General Insurance Ltd to 74%, as the latter intends to apply for a new general insurance licence.
AWS expects cloud demand to remain high in India: Amazon Web Services expects demand for its cloud services to remain high in India, as the world is unlikely to go back to the pre-pandemic ways of working. “I think the realisation that technology matters was always there, but the pandemic brought urgency to it,” Puneet Chandok, president of commercial business, AWS India and South Asia at AISPL, told ET.
IndMoney appoints new CTO: Wealth management platform IndMoney said it has appointed Dhruv Pathak as its chief technology officer. Pathak was a founding member of the technology team of travel app Goibibo, which was also founded by IndMoney founder and chief executive Ashish Kashyap.
Jewellery exporter eyes EV batteries, chip fabs: Thirty-year-old jewellery exporter Rajesh Exports plans to enter high-tech segments such as EV batteries and semiconductor display fabs through large, multi-year investments. “We will invest about Rs 50,000 crore over seven years in the electric vehicles division, executive chairman Rajesh Mehta told us.
Global Picks We Are Reading
■ Ukrainian man loses life savings in ‘stablecoin’ crypto slump (The Guardian)
■ Apple looks to boost production outside China (WSJ)
■ Are you bad at texting? Here are the new rules for 2022. (The Washington Post)
Today’s ETtech Morning Dispatch was curated by Zaheer Merchant in Mumbai and Judy Franko in New Delhi. Graphics and illustrations by Rahul Awasthi.
