"The Singapore holding firm of Indian e-commerce platform Flipkart filed its annual financial statement on Thursday. The financials reveal how the e-tailer has performed after Walmart acquired 77 per cent of its equity in August 2018 for $16 billion (Rs 1,07,662 crore)," the Chennai-based financial data platform Paper.vc said in an e-mail statement to .
According to the posted financials, the group firm (Flipkart) managed to achieve a 63 per cent reduction in losses to $2.42 billion (Rs 17,231 crore) for the fiscal under review, from the $6.6 billion (Rs 46,895 crore) loss posted in 2017-18.
"Flipkart posted a record revenue of $6.04 billion (Rs 42,878 crore) from contracts with customers and total revenue rose 42 per cent annually to $6.14 billion (Rs 43,615 crore) in financial year 2019 from $4.32 billion (Rs 30,644 crore) a year ago (FY 2018)," said the statement.
The decline in expenditure is attributable to a steep reduction in finance costs rather than overall optimization in operating expenses, it said.
"Finance cost comprised a large part of expenditure in the previous fiscal (FY 2018), attributed to accounting treatment of convertible securities," said the statement.
Significantly, since Walmart took over, employee benefit expenses have shot up 58 per cent to $600 million (Rs 4,254 crore).
The filings also reveal hitherto undisclosed details such as those relating to Flipkart's new acquisition strategy since its Chief Executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy joined the group.
"The group spent $46.8 million on acquisitions in fiscal 2018-19, including $21.4 million on Israel-based Upstream Commerce in September 2018 and $10.5 million on the Bangalore-based Liv AI.
Paper.vc also tracks privately held companies operating in India and the private investment market.
( With inputs from IANS )