Entry level hiring picks up in e-commerce industry
Hiring trends in India’s fledgling e-commerce sector suggest that online trade is flourishing even as the government mulls over opening the sector for FDI. Funded by generous venture capitalists, both Indian and foreign, e-commerce is booming in India, “and so hiring in the e-commerce sector is also booming,” says Sanjay Singh, recruitment consultant with Bangalore based Ikya Global.
“Incremental hiring in the past one year has gone up by 70% and is expected to improve further as ev- ery Indian player is busy expanding their business network.” With the sole aim to meet customer expectation, every company having a strong presence in India, like flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal, is hiring across every vertical like logistics, warehousing et cetera to strengthen their supply side management.
About 80% of the hiring process is taking place at the entry level while the rest pertains to higher positions. Higher secondary pass-outs, eligible for entry level positions, are groomed by the companies for 15 days before deploying them on the floor. The starting sal- ary of Rs 13,000 per month together with a performance based regular increment, “has kept the voluntary attrition rate very low,” says Singh. But going forward as the sector expands, and with the possible entry of global e-commerce companies like Alibaba, the voluntary attrition might gather pace.
India’s $ 17 billion electronic commerce industry is expanding its wing in the Indian market to leverage the consumption boom of the internet savvy middle class. Electronic goods followed by digital gadgets sell the most in online trade. The apparels come next. The e-commerce has been expanding at over 30% in the past three years and is expected to boom further in next three to four years wherein the saturation is expected to hit the sector. Business lobbies are persuading government to open up the sector for foreign investment provided global giants like Amazon source 50% of their inventory from domestic companies. They argue that doing so would bring in more competition which consumer relish the most. Analysts feel that with foreign investment, the global knowhow and the sector’s best practices would anyway flow in with it.
Analysts believe that rising internet penetration in the country would facilitate more online commerce. India currently has about 220 million of internet users, and as the nation’s pursuit of “Digital India” gathers pace, this number is projected to swell to over 500 million in next four years. Going forward over 70% of India’s netizens would be accessing the web thorough mobile phones. This would facilitate more online trade helping ecommerce to become a $100 billion industry by 2019. While the CNX Nifty, which was quoting at 8,433 levels last month dropped over 5% to below 8,000 levels, everybody was touting the Indian equity markets to fall even further and slip below the 7,600 technical barriers. However, the stock markets have taken a complete u-turn this week with the 50 share index rallying over 3% to touch 8,226 levels. What has led to this sudden renewed optimism and change in sentiment is due to a couple of factors translating across the globe. While Greece is a hopeless case and Grexit is imminent in the Eurozone, the dovish stance taken by the US Federal Reserve on maintaining key interest rates intact for the time being helped push our indices higher. This halted the outflow of money from the country by foreign portfolio investors. Our domestic stock markets were encouraged by better than expected monsoon figures for the month of June along with inflation expected to remain in control thereby, pushing the RBI to cut interest rates in the near future. Moreover, in the June monetary policy announcement the RBI Governor had mentioned that any further rate cut decision would depend on favourable data about the monsoon. Apart from the uptrend in the Indian Rupee, the index heavyweight Reliance Industries Ltd stock gained around 11% in one week to touch Rs 990 levels, trading at its highest levels since December 2014. Many brokerage houses have revised their earning estimates outlook for the stock to accumulate at the current levels with more room on the upside. But traders are still not fully convinced on this six-day rally and now are preparing for the June expiry contract settlement and firmly expect the Nifty to resist the 8,360 hurdle in the next ten days. After touching a high of 30,000 BSE index in March 2015 riding on the hope rally of the new government, the stock markets are currently taking a realty check. Fund managers, analysts and brokerage houses are trying to find stocks which have eluded them and missed their radar. There are many large and old manufacturing companies in the country which are in the restructuring mode and one of them is the B.K. Birla Group owned well diversified Century Textiles and Industries Ltd. There have been unconfirmed reports but denied by the management that the textiles and cement division could be sold off to a Birla family member company and the paper division to a large FMCG conglomerate in Kolkata. The Century stock currently quoting at Rs 667 is an excellent buy with a price target of Rs 825 in twelve month time horizon. Rajiv Kapoor is a share broker, certified mutual fund expert and MDRT insurance agent.