Sachin Bansal & Binny Bansal on M&A / Acquisitions

A string of acquisitions between 2012 and 2016 — Letsbuy, Myntra for about 280 million dollars, Jabong for roughly 70 million, and PhonePe in April 2016 — assembled the building blocks of a horizontal marketplace. Myntra in particular gave Flipkart a dominant apparel franchise, while PhonePe positioned it inside the UPI payments race alongside Paytm.

In April 2017 eBay agreed to fold its Indian arm eBay.in into Flipkart and put 500 million dollars of fresh capital into the combined entity. The strategic logic — access to eBay's international seller base — was never realised in practice, and the asset was quietly wound down later, a reminder that cross-border marketplace integrations rarely survive the press release.

Walmart outbid Amazon in May 2018 to acquire a 77 percent controlling stake in Flipkart for roughly 16 billion dollars, valuing the company at about 22 billion. The deal, the largest e-commerce acquisition on record at the time, also saw co-founder Sachin Bansal exit the company he had led for almost a decade, with the remaining management reporting into Walmart eCommerce US head Marc Lore.

When the Walmart transaction was announced, Sachin Bansal stepped out immediately while Binny remained Group CEO until leaving in November 2018, after which he continued on Flipkart's board for strategic direction. The sequencing — Sachin out, Binny stays briefly, then exits — insulated the integration from a sudden leadership vacuum at a moment of intense scrutiny.

Binny described the sale itself as a discipline of sustained optionality: the company had raised billions, scaled to leadership, and at the right moment allowed a strategic acquirer to write the final cheque. The decision was less an admission of capitulation to Amazon's war chest than a calibrated exit at the top of a valuation cycle.