Paytm Mall moves around management to restructure focus of the firm

Paytm Mall seems to be in a frenzy to clear out its pile of mounting losses and move forward to reduce some distance between itself and the two dominating e-commerce portals Flipkart and Amazon.

To do this, Paytm Mall has opted for management rejigs to be one of its routes. After foodpanda, in what can be called the second such rejig this year, Paytm Mall has been restructuring top and mid-level executive teams to suit its O2O and B2B plans with the help of its sister concerns.

Sudhanshu Jain, former Chief Financial Officer or Paytm Payments Bank has been moved to the Mall to act as Financial Comptroller of the online business. Senior Director with Alibaba Group, Bharti Balakrishnan, will now be managing unstructured segments like home and kitchen and fashion.

Srinivas Mothey is slated to join as the new Chief Marketing Officer of the firm after Senior Vice Presidents of marketing and customer acquisition Saurabh Vashishtha and Amit Bagaria quit.

Raghu Chakravarthi has moved from BigBasket to Paytm Mall to build the tech team for the O2O aspirations of the company.

When ET had asked Vijay Shekhar Sharma about its plans to shut down B2C and focus on B2B, he had denied that speculation but had revealed that the company plans to strengthen it O2O business.

A copy of Alibaba’s Tmall business, the O2O is being seen as another path to success as the company claims that it makes a majority of their business for them. Wholesale and warehoused items bring in 40 per cent of the revenues, unlike offline-to-online.

This strategy is slated to help the company catch up on the gap between itself and its largest competitors Amazon and Flipkart. Another thing that the company has learned from these two is how to leverage its wholesale business.

In November last year, the company had set up its wholesale business arm. As per inside sources and as Entrackr had exclusively reported, this arm is going to be another prime focus of the Mall when the B2C business is expected to scale down.

Going further it would be interesting to see how much these strategies actually help Paytm Mall in controlling its losses that amounted to Rs 1,787 crore in FY18, and how much gap it closes while chasing Flipkart and Amazon.