Tony Navin quits Snapdeal in a series of top-level exits
Top-level exits continue at Snapdeal, India’s third largest e-commerce company, as Tony Navin, head of partnerships and strategic investments, decided to move on after a seven-year stint.
Top-level exits continue at Snapdeal, India’s third largest e-commerce company, as Tony Navin, head of partnerships and strategic investments, decided to move on after a seven-year stint.
Navin’s exit comes in quick succession of two other bigwigs -- Abhishek Kumar and Sandeep Komaravelly -- exiting the company.
Kumar was responsible for the $400 million acquisition of FreeCharge mobile wallet, and Komaravelly was the head of mobile customer-to-customer marketplace Shoppo, which was merged into FreeCharge.
Snapdeal confirmed Navin’s exit. “After a long and successful stint spanning nearly 7 years, Tony Navin will be moving on, on account of his relocation from India for personal reasons. We wish him all the very best,” the company said in a statement.
Navin’s exit comes a day after the company’s key investor SoftBank announced that its losses from two of its largest portfolios in India, Snapdeal and Ola, amounted to $350 million.
Sources say Snapdeal is reportedly in discussion with SoftBank for another fresh round of investment, but at a lower valuation, of around $4 billion. That’s lower than $6.5 billion, in its last round of funding.
Snapdeal has found itself squeezed between Flipkart and Amazon -- both are in a market share battle, fought over by offering huge discounts to attract customers.
To keep pace, Snapdeal too offers huge discounts, resulting in huge losses. In 2015-16, Snapdeal posted a loss of Rs 3,316 crore, up from Rs 1,328 crore last year.
In discussions with HT earlier, Snapdeal co-founder Kunal Bahl had said he wants to steer the company away from the gross merchandise value (GMV) battle, and focus on unit economics and profit margin growth.
However, the exits at a crucial juncture when Snapdeal is going through transition, can be detrimental, experts said.
“This will have some major impact. Top level exits in quick succession raises question on stability. But, the positive side is that Snapdeal was trying to do too many things at the same time, and is now focusing on fewer things to get its act right,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, CEO and chief analyst at Greyhound Research.