Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: Walmart-owned Flipkart continues to expand its outreach initiatives to bring compact firms into the e-commerce fold. The IPO-bound e-commerce corporation has announced a partnership with IIM Sambalpur in Odisha to assist compact firms, artisans, and weavers sell on Flipkart’s marketplace. Flipkart mentioned in a statement that an “operational framework to support under-served communities” will be produced by means of this partnership to improve their industry attain. According to the programme, Flipkart’s executives will share operational know-how, industry and customer insights with firms.
“By combining institutional learning and practical industry experience, we aim to provide entrepreneurs best practices and deeper insight on how to leverage e-commerce for their growth. We are hopeful that weavers, artisans and farmers will leverage this opportunity to showcase their skills and high-quality traditional heritage products to a national consumer base and reach new heights and recognition,” mentioned Prof Mahadeo Prasad Jaiswal, Director, IIM Sambalpur. The collaboration extends Flipkart’s partnerships with academic institutions.
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Last year, the corporation had tied-up with IIT Patna to assist develop market-focused applied analysis in the places of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Machine Learning (ML) for students and professors to work closely with Flipkart on analysis projects. The corporation also functions closely with the Indian Institute of Science (IISC), IIT (Kharagpur, Bombay, and Kanpur), IIM (Ahmedabad and Kolkata), and a couple of foreign universities like Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, San Diego to create technologies such as style recommendation, query understanding, attribute extraction, demand arranging, solution categorization, critique helpfulness, provide chain management, fraud detection, and next basket prediction.
“Our team’s expertise, technology, learnings and insights serving a pan-India market will come very handy for MSMEs, artisans, and the Indian handicraft industry through this partnership with IIM Sambalpur,” mentioned Rajneesh Kumar, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, Flipkart Group. Under the Flipkart Samarth initiative, the corporation had partnered with various states which includes Odisha to assist onboard Odia brands such as Boyanika, Utkalika, and Sambalpuri Bastralaya, amongst other people, on its e-commerce marketplace.
Meanwhile, Flipkart along with its founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal have been issued a “show cause notice” in early July by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) asking them why they shouldn’t be fined $1.35 billion for allegedly violating foreign investment laws, Reuters had reported on Thursday. According to the report citing an ED official, the case was associated to an investigation with respect to allegations that Flipkart had attracted foreign investment and a associated party, WS Retail, and then sold goods to buyers on its buying web page, which was prohibited below Indian laws.