Two senior executives resign from Snapdeal's Bangalore centre

E-commerce firm Snapdeal, owned by Jasper Infotech Pvt. Ltd, continues to see senior-level churn.

This time, the company's two associate vice presidents Balaji Hariharan and Hemanth Kota have resigned, a report in The Economic Times stated citing people aware of the development.

Hariharan served as the head of growth and product management at Snapdeal Payments and Digital Services, while Kota led the product management efforts for supply chain management, their LinkedIn profiles show.

Hariharan joined Snapdeal in February 2015, prior to which he has had stints at Amazon and Microsoft. Kota was previously with Tesco and Hewlett-Packard and subsequently joined the home-grown e-commerce firm in August 2015. Both operated from Snapdeal's innovation centre in Bangalore.

"At Snapdeal, we do not comment on individual departures. People joining and leaving the team are normal corporate movements, not necessarily requiring a response in each instance," a Snapdeal spokesperson said in response to an email query from VCCircle.

In the past four months, Snapdeal has seen several senior executives quit the firm. Last month, FreeCharge's chief executive Govind Rajan resigned just nine months after being appointed to lead the e-commerce company's digital payments arm.

Head of corporate development Abhishek Kumar and senior vice president and Shopo head Sandeep Komaravelly also quit in the month of February. In November last year, Vijay Ghadge, chief operating officer at Snapdeal's in-house logistics arm Vulcan Express Pvt Ltd, had left the company barely four months after joining the firm.

Besides senior-level exits, in the last week of February, Snapdeal decided to layoff 500-600 employees across its e-commerce marketplace and subsidiaries. In fact, after these layoffs, Snapdeal's regional centres in Mumbai and Bangalore were expected to have an employee count in single digits or low double digits.

Also, Snapdeal recently underwent a restructuring, following which each category business unit now has four broad work streams—portfolio management, key accounts management, brand alliances management, and products life-cycle management.

In January, media reports said the company was in talks with its investor Softbank Group Corp to raise fresh funds at a lower valuation ranging between $3 billion and $4 billion.

Losses at Snapdeal, however, more than doubled to Rs 2,960 crore (around $436 million) for the financial year ended March 2016. The firm's consolidated loss widened to Rs 3,315 crore from Rs 1,328 crore in 2014-15.

Snapdeal's rival Flipkart has also seen senior-level exits recently at both the flagship marketplace as well as subsidiary online fashion retailer Myntra. Myntra's supply chain head and senior vice president Rajul Jain, who was one of the co-founders of lifestyle e-tailer Yebhi.com, quit the firm sometime in December last year.

Apart from CXO-level exits, Flipkart saw its chief product officer, chief financial officer, chief technology officer and chief business officer quit last year. The company has seen a strong churn in the second layer of leadership as well. There has also been a slew of exits at the senior vice president and vice president levels.