Online marketplace Snapdeal.com is looking to consolidate its offices and relocate to a campus-style office in Gurgaon by June for its employees whose numbers have jumped fourfold in just a year.
Snapdeal’s new 450,000 sq. ft campus in Gurgaon can house close to 4,500 employees. However, the company, which currently has eight offices in South Delhi’s Okhla region, plans to retain some of the existing offices.
“We have grown from 1,200 employees to 5,000-plus in one year. The pace of hiring might not be the same next year but the ramp-up will continue and hence, consolidation was necessary,” said Saurabh Nigam, vice-president of human resources (HR) at Snapdeal.
Snapdeal, run by Jasper Infotech Pvt. Ltd, has already handed offer letters to 200 students from management colleges and close to 450 candidates from engineering colleges who will join the organization by May.
The new campus will house the technology, category, finance and HR teams, while the sales and customer services team will continue to work out of the Delhi offices, said Nigam.
Snapdeal has been searching for a location for more than six months, but suitable properties were not easily available, according to Nigam.
“Working out of seven, eight buildings is inefficient and it was a drain on our resources, and our endeavour has been to consolidate the teams so there is no loss of productivity,” said Nigam.
The company’s new campus will have amenities such as a medical centre and a food court, and will also have facilities such as a library, gym, spa and a crèche for working parents.
The average rent per month in Gurgaon could vary from Rs.58 to Rs.83 per sq. ft, according to industry experts.
Given the pace at which Snapdeal is growing, it will soon have to start looking for an even larger space. According to Nigam, the campus in Gurgaon has been leased for a minimum of three years and the company is not looking for a bigger space immediately. The company will take a call on a bigger campus based on the growth it witnesses in the coming year.
Snapdeal offers close to 11 million products across 500-plus categories on its platform. It currently has 100,000 sellers on board and delivers to 5,000-plus cities and towns in India.
The company is backed by large investors such as Japan’s SoftBank, which pumped in about $627 million in October 2014, becoming the biggest investor in the online retailer. Some of the other investors includeBlackRock, Temasek, eBay Inc., Premji Invest, Intel Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners.
Flush with foreign capital, e-commerce firms are on a hiring spree.
India’s largest e-commerce firm Flipkart.com, too, is building a 1.5 million sq. ft campus in Bengaluru that will have a capacity of housing 12,000 people. The campus is expected to be completed by 2017.
“Despite an influx of new office space in peripheral markets, prime office locations will continue to suffer from a deficit of large quality space. Consequently, rental values in such prime markets might continue to witness growth in the near to medium term,” according to CBRE’s India office market report for first quarter 2015. CBRE is a commercial real estate services and investment firm headquartered in Los Angeles.
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