Walmart-owned e-commerce major Flipkart has entered into a strategic and commercial partnership with the Adani Group to enhance its supply chain infrastructure and set up its third data centre in the country.
The online retailer announced on Monday that it had partnered with Adani Logistics to build a 534,000 square-foot fulfilment centre at the latter’s upcoming logistics hub in Mumbai that will be leased to Flipkart.
It added that it will also set up its third data centre at Adaniconnex’s facility in Chennai, which is a joint venture between EdgeConneX and Adani.
“The
Group is unmatched in the way it has gone about building infrastructure across India. What it brought to us was a unique combination of logistics, real estate, green energy, and data centre infrastructure capabilities,†said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO at Flipkart Group.
Flipkart said that the fulfilment centre will become operational in Q3 of 2022 and will house 10 million units of seller inventory. It added that the upcoming facility will create 2,500 direct jobs and thousands of more indirect jobs.
On the data centre front, Flipkart said it will design the brand new facility for its growing infrastructure needs and will help it in storing data locally. The company added that it would have one of the largest private cloud deployments in the country with the new addition.
“This is what Atmanirbharta should be all about,†said Karan Adani, CEO at Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone, which own Adani Logistics. “This broad-ranging partnership across our logistics and data centre businesses is a unique business model, and we see this as a great opportunity to serve Flipkart’s physical as well as digital infrastructure needs.â€
Neither company disclosed the financial aspects of the transaction.
The partnership between Flipkart and Adani on the physical as well as digital infrastructure side comes at a time when the government is looking to introduce new restrictions on e-commerce marketplaces as well as digital businesses on the kind of data on Indian customers they will be allowed to store, share and process as part of its non-personal data policy.
