Flipkart on course to touch $1 bn in annual sales

Bangalore: India’s largest online retailer Flipkart.com said it was on course to sell goods worth as much as $1 billion annually on its website, achieving its target a year in advance.

Flipkart becomes the first e-commerce website to achieve the $1 billion mark in gross merchandise value (GMV, or value of goods sold on the site), meaning that the company’s latest monthly sales figure, multiplied by 12, would cross $1 billion.

The company, which has raised roughly $560 million in funds from investors including Naspers, Accel Partners and Tiger Global, had said in March 2011 that it aimed to achieve GMV of $1 billion by 2015. In March 2011, the company’s GMV was just $10 million, it said in a statement. Flipkart keeps a cut of the GMV as its net sales.

Competition in India’s e-commerce space has been increasing rapidly with the entry of the world’s largest online retailer Amazon.com, which launched its India’s marketplace in June. Other large sites such as Jabong, Snapdeal and Myntra have all raised between $50 million and $180 million over the past year to keep funding their growth.

The Indian e-commerce market is worth $3.1 billion, excluding travel, and is estimated to grow to $22 billion in five years, according to a report by CLSA.