Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce marketplace, has acquired F1 Info Solutions, a mobiles & IT repair services company with a pan-India presence of owned and franchised centres.
F1 Info Solutions will be a part of Jeeves, a Flipkart company, India’s largest 3rd party service provider for large & small home appliances and furniture, and will significantly expand Flipkart’s offerings to the entire lifecycle of mobiles, IT products and consumer electronics, from sales to after sales to repair services.
Established in 2012, F1 Info Solutions is a neutral service provider with a distributed repair service network of around 158 centers in 135 cities. Focussed on comprehensive repair and service of mobiles, IT products, consumer electronics, AV devices and smart classroom technology, the firm has close to 1000 employees, including technicians, and handles more than 50,000 service calls every month across the country. F1 Info Solutions is also a service partner of several global mobile and IT brands such as Apple, Samsung, HP, Lenovo, Sony and Asus, among others.
The acquisition adds complementary capabilities to Jeeves’ existing expertise in large appliances and furnitures, along with a huge network of service centres — a tremendous benefit for Flipkart customers who can now walk into an F1 Info Solutions store to get their devices repaired.
“Flipkart is the top destination for mobile phones in India and having created the market for online smartphones from scratch, we’re now taking our offerings several notches higher. F1 Info Solutions is an entrenched player in this segment, and its expertise and scale is a big capability add-on for us. We’re delighted to welcome them to Flipkart. Ultimately, we want to give our customers a comprehensive service ecosystem that takes care of the repair and service needs of all their products. With Jeeves and F1 Info Solutions now, we’re closer to that goal,” said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO, Flipkart.
Shammi Moza, F1 Info Solutions co-founder and CEO, will be joining Flipkart as a Senior Director as part of the deal, and will continue to hold responsibility for the business. He will report to Abhijit Upadhye, Vice President at Flipkart and the head of Jeeves.
Since its foray smartphones into 2014, Flipkart has brought to Indian customers the latest exclusive mobiles sourced from global manufacturers, made affordable by innovations such as No Cost EMI, Product Exchange and BuyBack Guarantee — all of which helped catalyse the smartphone revolution in India. With F1 Info Solutions, Flipkart’s end-to-end capabilities in mobile phones becomes a critical service differentiator as compared to other e-commerce entities in India. Customers, as a result, can extract the maximum value for money for their mobiles and IT purchases on Flipkart.
