There have been reports doing the rounds that Walmart will merge Myntra and Jabong, under the new Walmart dispensation, the Flipkart management has decided to move the Jabong team out of Gurugram and take it to Bengaluru, Flipkart’s headquarter city.
It also decided to merge several back-end operations and functions between Jabong, Myntra and Flipkart Fashion in order to have a lean organization. It was at that point reported that some 150 to 200 people may be given the pink slip as part of this restructuring.
Now, it appears another 200 employees may find themselves out of the Jabong team in the next few days, according to an Economic Times report.
This report claims that the CEO Ananth Narayanan held a brief interaction with the Jabong staff and gave them this news that another 200 of them will lose their jobs. The idea is to have common staff handling functions of technology, marketing, category, revenue, finance and creative across Myntra and Jabong. This part has been confirmed by the company officially, without commenting separately on the removing of employees from the Jabong team.
The question that everyone seems to be asking is what will be the future of Jabong within the overall plans that Walmart/Flipkart has for the fashion category. When pressed on this, the company sources seem to affirm that there is no plan to dump Jabong and that it will be an independent platform. The changes are being planned only for the support services and the front-end will continue unaffected, they maintain. The company believes Jabong has a customer base, particularly among women and is popular in certain geographies. Pulling it out many not be beneficial to the company.
Many of the changes now being witnessed have some connection, even remotely, to the exit of Binny Bansal, following the “serious personal misconduct” charge and the decision to ask Myntra CEO Ananth Narayanan to report to current Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamoorthy.