Road to riches: Ecommerce firms like Flipkart, Snapdeal say they too can make their low-level workers millionaires

NEW DELHI: InfosysBSE 3.45 % founder Narayana Murthy's chauffeur and personal assistant had hit headlines in late 1990s for having crossed the wealth barrier - when value of their stock options skyrocketed. Office boys, warehouse supervisors, clerks, receptionists and other non-managerial employees of some of India's sharpest ecommerce firms can cross that same barrier, provided their firms offer a buyback or they get listed or there's an M&A activity.

Flipkart, Snapdeal, ShopClues and Infibeam are among e-commerce notables that have stock options for lowerrung, non-managerial staff. A typical example of the next inspiring wealth creation story may well be Shambu Biswas. He joined a six-member Bangalore startup as an office boy in 2009 and received employee stock options (Esops). That startup is Flipkart, expected to be valued at around $5 billion after the next round of fund-raising.

Esops given to Biswas, who earns Rs 15,000 a month now, can at that time cross the Rs 10-lakh mark. They are worth around Rs 7 lakh currently. And the good thing for Biswas and six other Flipkart employees at the level of administration assistants and operations executives, who between them hold 0.07% of the company's Esops, is that they don't have to necessarily wait for an IPO.

Flipkart can offer to buy back and indeed, Biswas sold 10% of his Esops last year and put Rs 40,000 in a fixed deposit. For lower-rung employees, this is a game changer - the value of their Esops, Flipkart says, is between four and thirteen times their annual salaries. Flipkart's rival Snapdeal told ET it has four employees at the lower level who have Esops. But Snapdeal refused to share details of these. Neither did it answer questions on how employees can encash these Esops. Snapdeal is value   at about a billion dollars.