Fashion e-commerce portal Myntra to earn profits by 2016

The fashion e-commerce portal of Flipkart, Myntra, expects to earn profits by 2016, with a gross merchandise value, (the total value of sales on the platform) of $1 billion (Rs6,500 crore), double the sales expected this year.

The Flipkart-owned company is pushing more users to adopt its smartphone app and might replicate the parent's light web format which was re-introduced by the latter in November.

''By investing in differentiating experience, we will become a profitable business at scale. Currently, we are operating at $500 million annualised GMV and we plan to cross $1 billion by 2016 in a profitable manner,'' said Ananth Narayanan, chief executive of Myntra, on Monday, Business Standard reported. This year's $500 million GMV would mark a 66 per cent growth over last year.

Myntra, if it were to turn profitable, would be the first large Indian e-commerce company to do so and could help Flipkart offset some of its losses. Flipkart acquired Myntra in May 2014 for Rs1,200 crore and was awash in red due to  growing competition from global rival Amazon and local rivals Snapdeal and Shopclues.

"Overall, I think we are on a great trajectory, we are roughly at about $500 million in GMV as of today. We are growing between 60-70% month-on-month... We will try and get to a billion dollar GMV in 2016," PTI quoted the Myntra CEO as saying.

The company's profitability push was on a good track and would get profitable again by end of next year, he added.

Stating that consumer centricity was growing by a huge notch, Narayanan said: "Our monthly active users is roughly about 7.6 million; our repeat rate is highest in the industry -- we are now at 80%."

"Our app only strategy is working - if you just look at the repeat consumers, if you look at the life time value of the consumer and how happy they are - all of that are actually working."

"Consumer centricity stand point is a big focus area for us. One other focus area in consumer centricity is we have something called Net Promoter Score which is NPS, our goal is to be consistently ten points NPS higher than any other player..." Narayanan added.