Can Ecom Express’s IPO succeed when Delhivery’s stock has failed to deliver?

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Mumbai: Early last year, Ecom Express’s investors were looking for a successor to take over the reins from T.A. Krishnan, the third-party logistics (3PL) company’s co-founder and chief executive.

Hobbled by a long illness, Krishnan, a Blue Dart veteran who had formed Ecom Express in 2013 with three former colleagues, had stepped down from day-to-day operations. Unable to find anyone suitable within the logistics world, the company’s headhunters turned to a different industry, telecom, seeing some parallels with the logistics landscape. Telecom had started out as a fragmented sector, with multiple operators jostling for the same customers.

Many big names, including the Tatas and Anil Ambani’s Reliance Communications, would exit the field, while others would get acquired. Ecom Express eventually picked Ajay Chitkara, the former head of Airtel’s enterprise arm, because he had steered the business through the turbulence in the telecom sector and turned it into a ₹22,000 crore behemoth. In a sign of the scale he had built at Airtel, when Chitkara resigned in June 2023 after a 23-year stint, the telecom giant appointed four CEOs to take over the various divisions he had been managing.

Chitkara took the helm of the business-to-consumer (B2C) logistics-focused Ecom Express in September 2023. A month later, Krishnan passed away. For Ecom Express, this was the second such blow after co-founder Sanjeev Saxena died in 2020.

The new CEO thus found himself in the driving seat of a company with stunted revenue growth and a bottom line still deep in the red. Ecom Express’ top line has barely moved, growing just 2.2% to ₹2,609.2 crore in FY24. Worse, it suffers from an overdependence on one customer,