One of the leading brands in the e-commerce branch today, Flipkart, has made quite an announcement. The company has plans to introduce Electric Vehicles (EVs) for its last mile deliveries, as part of Flipkart’s sustainability commitment. The company has an aim to reinvigorate efforts towards building technologies for solving crucial environment and civic issues. The e-commerce giant would replace as much as 40% of its existing last mile fleet of delivery vans with EVs by March 2020, by starting in a phased manner. As part of this plan, nearly 160 electric vans shall be deployed before the end of 2019.
In the last 6 months, Flipkart had conducted multiple pilots for EV deployment in its supply chain and witnessed impressive performance results. It is also setting up the necessary charging infrastructure at its hubs in order for it to be able to deploy EVs at large scale and ensure their seamless operations. These efforts will also help in reducing our carbon emissions by over 50%. At present, Flipkart has already deployed 8 EVs in Hyderabad, 10 in New Delhi and 30 e-bikes in Bangalore.
“The induction of EVs across our supply chain is one of the major steps toward sustainability. We see tremendous growth opportunity in electric freight mobility from a greener supply chain perspective, which will play a key role in building a robust supply chain for the future. These efforts will help us meaningfully contribute towards electric mobility by reducing our dependence on conventional power sources while bringing cost efficiencies for the business. In this process, we also hope to create an ecosystem for the adoption of electric mobility in India,” said Amitesh Jha, Senior Vice-President, Ekart and Marketplace at Flipkart.
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“As a committed corporate citizen, we at Flipkart understand our responsibility regarding the environment and running our business in a more sustainable way. Our vision is to replace a significant portion of our last-mile delivery with EVs in the coming years and also contribute towards clean and sustainable mobility. Our team is working with local ecosystem partners to help them co-design concepts for electric vehicles best suited for the growing e-commerce industry. We believe these small but meaningful steps in this direction will go a long way in paving the way for larger adoption of EVs in the country,” said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Group CEO, Flipkart.