Snapdeal ropes in senior legal executives from Johnson & Johnson, Flipkart

To keep up with evolving regulatory and legal developments in the e-commerce sector, Softbank-backed online market place Snapdeal has hired three senior legal executives.

The company roped in Prankur Chaturvedi, who was legal counsel at Johnson & Johnson for last two years, to take care of its contact and compliance wing whereas Mansi Airi, a former senior associate at Priti Suri and Associate, is serving as Senior Legal Manager at Snapdeal for past two months.

In April, Snapdeal had poached Vijay Srivastava, who served as Senior Legal Counsel at Flipkart. Vijay is now designated as Associate Director in the firm.

As per general counsel of Snapdeal, Smriti Subramanian, the company wants to have a good in-house team of experts to help is handle regulatory and legal aspects of the e-comm business.

After recent hiring, Snapdeal's legal team strength has grown to 10.

Of late, tech startups firms including Zomato, Swiggy, Flipkart have been on the lookout for legal talents and aggressively hiring them.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Anand Piramal, Executive Director of the Piramal Group had announced to pour in an undisclosed amount in Snapdeal. Piramal made the investment in his personal capacity.

He hailed Snapdeal’s execution strategy to tap tier 2-3 cities, online shoppers. Over 80% of its users are said to be from smaller cities.

After much talked about deal called off between Sapdeal and Flipkart in 2017, the company focused on building a differentiated business, on value-priced merchandise.

Due to this in the last two years, Snapdeal has made a turnaround in revenues with profitable unit economics.

According to financial results of FY19, Softbank-backed firm consolidated revenues grew to Rs 925.3 crore in 2018-19 as compared to Rs 535.9 crore in 2017-18, marking a sharp increase of nearly 73% in a 12-month period.

Simultaneously, the firm also managed to significantly reduce its loss to Rs 186 crore in FY19 from Rs 611 crore reported in FY18 – a drop of nearly 71%. In the same period, Snapdeal’s revenue from operations grew 87% YoY.

The development was reported by ET.