Amazon working with govt agencies to push MSME exports in India: Director Bhupen Wakankar

So we started in 2015, with a small cohort of about 100 sellers. Over the last eight years or so, we’ve grown to over 1.25 lakh sellers. So it’s grown quite dramatic, just in terms of the number of sellers. And in terms of the business, we’ve delivered $8 billion in cumulative exports in the past eight years, with a target to go to $20 billion by the 10-year mark, which is 2025. That tells you we’ve done $8 billion in eight years, but the other $12 billion will happen in the next two years. That’s the kind of acceleration we are seeing. The first $5 billion took seven years, the last $3 billion in three year and a half, and so on.

There are three or four partners in the ecosystem. One is the central and state governments, second is what we call as key opinion formulators such as trade bodies, export promotion councils, or organizations like FICCI, CII, and so on. Third is other partners, logistics, service providers, banks, or VCs, who can help with the funding side of things. And then there’s the technology side, where Amazon helps. What we have done over the last two years is specifically start forming partnerships at all levels. For example, we’ve now signed a MoU with the Ministry of Commerce to, over the next three years, look at 75 top districts that account for nearly 80 per cent of our exports today. We want to drive awareness and education of E-commerce exports. We’re going to go at a district level and leverage the infrastructure and the on-ground presence that DGFT has, plus tie up with local domestic export promotion councils that may be active in that area, and drive awareness of how they can easily get articles on platforms, and then also educate them on how to use these digital marketing tools or how to create shipments for cross border, manage payments, compliance and tax.

If you look at traditional B2B exports or old economy exports, they’re usually done by very large companies, and they would typically export anywhere between 10,000 to 20,000 unique products. They deal with large quantities, but fewer shipments every time. With the advent of E-commerce exports and with the technology maturity of the tools, what we’ve seen is over the last eight years, 1.25 lakh exporters have now exported over 26 crore unique products and sold to over 200 million plus prime members in the world. So it has stopped being a place where only large players can participate because they have the marketing budgets to understand customer research, they have the budgets to negotiate, cross border logistics, and so on and so forth. That whole paradigm has shifted completely, where even a small company that is of 3-5 people can source 10 to 15 products, list them on amazon.com and still be able to run a business that is a million dollars or more. And it’s direct, it’s no longer just B2B, at some point it’s directly B2C.