Flipkart leases office space in Bangalore

BANGALORE: Flipkart, the country’s biggest e-commerce company, has leased 152,000 square feet of commercial office space across three locations in Bangalore, as it seeks to expand operations and consolidate.

The leasing deals, done in March and April, are the biggest by any online retailer in the country so far.

Three people aware of the development told ET that the company is looking to move its operations from some of its smaller offices in Bangalore to save cost.

"The new office will function as a back office for Flipkart and will be used for developing new application, order processing apart from incubating new ideas," one of these people said.

Among the spaces booked by the company are 106,000 sq ft in Mantri Commercio, 37,674 sq ft in Salarpuria Tech Point and 9,000 sq ft in Brigade Court. Bangalore-based Flipkart refused comment for the story.

Last week, Flipkart had acquired fashion portal Myntra for around Rs 2,000 crore to create an entity with $1.5 billion annual sales, marking the country’s biggest merger and acquisition transaction in the e-commerce space.

Flipkart and Myntra, which will remain as separate entities, are looking to scale fashion business jointly. The two firms together have 26 million registered users with 5.2 million daily visitors.

"The future of fashion business in India will be e-commerce and we expect fashion to be the largest category for Flipkart soon," Sachin Bansal, CEO of Flipkart, had said after the Myntra deal.