Hyderabad: E-commerce giant, Flipkart, opened its largest fulfilment centre here in Hyderabad on Friday, taking its total warehouse strength in the country to 17. Spread over 2.2 lakh square feet and with a storage capacity of 5.89 lakh cubic feet, this is Flipkart’s 17th warehouse in the country.

Telangana Finance Minister Eatala Rajender formally inaugurated the Flipkart’s largest fulfilment centre in the country at Gundla Pochampally on the city outskirts in the presence of Binny Bansal, co-founder and COO, Flipkart.

The facility provides 17,000 direct and indirect jobs. The company claims this is the first fully automated warehouse in the country. The automated state-of-the-art fulfilment centre is expected to ship out 1.2 lakh items every day. Bansal said the warehouse was designed to provide easy access to e-commerce services for sellers, while providing faster and seamless services to customers.

The firm delivers six lakh orders a day. Equipped with a 1-km-long conveyer belt with ‘intelligent’ systems attached to it, which is expected to reduce motion wastage by 75 percent, the centre has automated sorters to separate shipments based on pin codes. It can sort 6,000 shipments an hour.

Flipkart also plans to invest $500 million in a nationwide warehouse network of 80-100 fulfilment centres across the country over the next four-five years. Half of them would come up in tier-II and tier-III towns.

Flipkart has pumped in Rs 400 crore to set up the 16 warehouses across the country and is looking to invest Rs 2,000-2,500 crore in the next 4-5 years to strengthen its supply chain.