Bengaluru: Ekart, the logistics arm of the Flipkart Group, was built to do one thing: deliver Flipkart and Myntra parcels across India efficiently and on time. That role has now become far more complex.
In the past two years, Ekart’s existing fulfilment centres have taken on a new role of feeding a network of dark stores, or micro-fulfilment centres, set up closer to consumers for Flipkart’s quick-commerce app Flipkart Minutes. These dark stores stock fresh categories such as dairy, vegetables and perishable, cold-chain items that Ekart’s network had never handled before Minutes came along.
Flipkart’s executives told Mint in an exclusive interview that they built this new layer without setting up a parallel logistics network from scratch.
“Making Minutes faster and bigger within just two years would have been impossible if Ekart wouldn’t have been around,” said Hemant Badri, senior vice-president and head (supply chain, AI transformation, new business, customer experience and re-commerce) at the Flipkart Group, crediting the existing fulfilment-centre network—not new dark-store spending alone—for how quickly Minutes was able to scale.
The numbers are large. Ekart’s shipment volumes for Flipkart and Myntra have grown 25-30% year-on-year, while Minutes has expanded to over 1,000 dark stores across 130 cities in under two years.
Bank of America estimated in June 2026 that Flipkart’s daily active users stood at 85 million, with its fashion and lifestyle arm Myntra at 21 million. ICICI Securities put Flipkart’s e-commerce GMV (gross merchandise value) share at 50-60%, with annual shipment capacity of over 3 billion units and roughly 95% pin-code coverage.
Ekart was set up in 2009 as Flipkart’s in-house logistics arm, folded back into the parent company in 2015, and spun off again as a separate entity a year later to serve external clients alongside Flipkart and Myntra. Today, it counts IKEA India, Nykaa, Tata Cliq, and Jockey India among its roughly 300 external clients, though these still make up a modest 5-7% of its overall revenue.
Ekart has now opened up its supply chain to all MSMEs, D2C brands, and FMCG companies through a new franchise model and scaled dedicated warehousing capabilities, executives told Mint. It has launched with 300+ franchise outlets across Surat, Mumbai, Delhi, and Bengaluru and is aiming to expand to more than 1,000 outlets by the end of 2026.
Same network, different speeds
Ekart treats fulfilment centres and dark stores as two ends of the same supply chain, rather than separate systems, allowing one network to serve both quick commerce and traditional e-commerce.
“We are not creating a curated supply chain for every entity. We are creating a common supply chain. The same warehouse is able to leverage the core supply chain and also extend its arms to fulfilling the store requirement — the same warehouse is powering the growth of stores, as well as the normal growth of our fulfilment to the normal model of e-commerce,” said Renuka Singaram, vice-president (supply chain) at Flipkart, describing a network built to serve Flipkart’s marketplace, Myntra and Minutes at once by reusing warehousing, line-haul and last-mile capacity across all three.
The strategy is also central to Ekart’s cost-efficiency argument. Automation across its fulfilment centres has climbed from a low base to 60-70% today, targeting 80-90% next year—a shift executives say has helped cut unit costs by roughly 40% over the past few years as FY25 losses narrowed.
Nitin Jain, managing director at consultancy Protiviti Member Firm for India, offers a more measured assessment. He said the real fight in quick commerce isn’t network reach, it’s dark-store density.
“Enough orders within a 2-km radius is what makes 10-15 minute delivery work. Ekart’s existing footprint gives Minutes a meaningful head start in expansion by improving reach and capital efficiency,” Jain said. Though the network was originally designed for parcel logistics rather than hyperlocal fulfilment, the old backbone gives Flipkart Minutes an initial advantage, but not a real competitive edge, he argued.
“The real test is how fast the company builds skills specific to quick commerce, from running dark stores to forecasting hyperlocal demand,” Jain added.
Reach beyond metros
Ekart’s expansion strategy leans heavily on geography it says it already owns. “For us, penetration wasn’t the hard part — the customer connection and the supply chain were already there, so we just had to plug Minutes into it,” Badri said, describing tier-III and tier-IV towns as ground Ekart had already claimed long before quick commerce arrived.
“Who would have imagined quick fulfilment in towns like Gorakhpur and Bihar Sharif?” Singaram said.
Mint reported in June how Minutes is focusing on pushing beyond metros to compete with quick-commerce rivals Blinkit, Zepto, and Instamart.
The expansion, however, also puts real demands on daily operations. Stocking of fresh produce at dark stores happens in a tight morning window, one executive said, describing the discipline this requires across the network. “By 6 o’clock, every single one of our stores has to be live — the milk, the bread, the eggs, all of it, because that’s when parents are making breakfast before school,” Badri said.
“As Minutes scales, there is a risk of operational resource contention within Ekart, particularly during peak demand periods, as quick commerce requires dedicated riders, warehouse capacity and faster fulfilment,” according to Protiviti’s Jain.