In new data, Flipkart sees slowing sales growth, still sells $217 million worth of stuff in 1 year

Indian’s top e-store Flipkart is still in it for the long haul, nursing financial losses whilst building its user-base and cultivating fast-soaring sales. That’s the picture from a new document filed by Flipkart with India’s Registrar of Companies. It shows that Flipkart brought in Rs 1,345 crore – $217.4 million – in sales revenue in the most recent financial year, which is 2.7-times higher than the figure (Rs 480 crore; $78.2 million) in the previous year.

The data, as spotted by TechCircle, for the financial year ended March 31, 2013, and is the newest statistic available.

But Flipkart’s growth is slowing. While India’s e-commerce industry is still in its nascent stages, perhaps Flipkart is closer to saturation on its current addressable market. In the fiscal year before last, Flipkart grew by a factor of 10, compared to 2.7x in the newest figures.

Still aiming at $1 billion

Still, the TechCircle crew points out, even with this rate of slowdown in revenue growth, Flipkart is still on course to hit its much-vaunted target of $1 billion in sales revenue for full-year 2015. The blog expects the next figure, based on its own calculations, to be Rs 3,000 crore, which is $485 million at current exchange rates.

Flipkart’s document shows that while the Flipkart.com site itself posted Rs 2 crore in profit ($323,260), the entire Flipkart India company saw its net loss rise by a factor of three to Rs 192 crore ($31 million) in the newest data.

The e-store is diversifying with a view to the long-term, and a lot of changes happened in 2013. First the site added a marketplace for merchants, emulating the “department store on the web” model taken by Rakuten and Alibaba’s Tmall. Then the site a launched a Paypal-esque e-payment service that those merchants could use; that e-payments platform, called Payzippy, opened to the public last week and is now in use on a number of other e-commerce sites.

Flipkart raised over $550 million in funding this year in order to sustain its losses and help it grow.

(Source: TechCircle)

(Editing by Josh Horwitz)