When a midlevel business-operations manager at Flipkart joined the e-commerce giant’s Bengaluru office three years ago, he took two smoke breaks a day. At least one doubled as a running briefing: which senior leader was on the way out, which team might be next under scrutiny.

He has since lost count, of both the breaks and the exits. “Initially, people leaving was regarded as routine,” he said. “Now, it feels like too much to be routine.”

The latest high-profile one is Myntra CEO Nandita SinhaThe KenFlipkart needs the magic of Nandita Sinha—the Myntra boss who wasn’t supposed to be one, under whom the fashion platform had turned profitable. Her leaving surprised some, but not others. Myntra, after all, has had a new chief roughly every three years.

Over the past two years, at least a dozen senior executives, including longtime CFO Sriram Venkataraman, have either left or been moved out of key roles. Several of these departures followed prolonged internal disagreements, at least four executives told The Ken.

At the centre of this churn is Kalyan Krishnamurthy, the CEO of the Walmart-owned company.

Five years ago, he believed Flipkart already had the talent it needed. It could buy its way into new categories. That confidence powered its bets in health (via Sastasundar), travel (Cleartrip), and more.

But few have delivered as expected.

Flipkart’s core business is still growing, with its B2C arm reporting over Rs 20,000 crore in revenue in FY25 (a 17% jump from FY24) and losses narrowing 37% to below Rs 1,500 crore. But Flipkart Health, once positioned as a serious push, has been wound down after remaining a sub-scale, roughly Rs 35–40 crore business. Cleartrip continues to bleed, clocking losses of roughly Rs 650 crore. 

Meanwhile, someone else built faster.

Meesho went after the part of the market Flipkart underweighted—small sellers and price-sensitive users in non-metro India—and scaled. It then went further by becoming a publicly traded company in December. At one point in April, its stock jumped 14%.

© The Ken