Jeff Bezos, founder and Chief Executive of the world’s largest e-commerce company Amazon, has said that India is an example of a market where the company has been able to build services and initiatives that can be replicated globally.

Bezos, who is quite bullish on the Indian market, was referring to the marketplace model operated by its subsidiary Amazon.in.

Bezos also mentioned that Amazon will start an availability zone, a simple storage service, in India under its cloud business Amazon Web Services, which has already clocked $10 billion in annual sales.

“India is another example of how we globalise an offering, like marketplace through customer obsession, and a passion for invention,” Bezos said in an annual shareholder letter filed with the US market regulator Securities and Exchange Commission.

Significance of India Referring to the marketplace model in India, where third-party sellers can sell to consumers on its platform, Bezos said the company had launched initiatives like Amazon Chai Cart and Amazon Tatkal – specific to the Indian market – to get more local sellers on board its platform. He added that these are some initiatives that could be replicated in global markets.

Amazon, which entered India through a marketplace model in 2013, has about 1 lakh sellers. Amazon India’s arch rivals Flipkart and Snapdeal, who have been operational in the market for over six years, have 80,000 and 2 lakh sellers respectively.

Bezos mentioned Amazon Tatkal, an initiative that enables small businesses to get online in less than 60 minutes, that was launched less than a month back but has reached over 25 cities.

“The service was launched after we found that there was a lot of interest in selling online, but sellers struggled with the belief that the process was time-consuming, tedious and complex,” he said in the letter, where India found a special mention.

He said the “Chai Cart” programme, inspired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Chai pe Charcha” initiative, was launched last year for small business owners in rural areas has travelled 15,280 km across 31 cities, served 37,200 cups of tea and engaged with over 10,000 sellers.

Amazon has committed about $7 billion to India to counter competition from domestic players and the entry of global players like Alibaba and Rakuten. India’s e-commerce market is expected to reach $48-60 billion by 2020, from $4.47 billion in 2014, according to a UBS report.

Amazon India’s sales rose six-fold to ₹1,022 crore in 2014-15. However, losses also moved up to ₹1,723 crore in FY15 from ₹321.3 crore in FY14, according to public documents available with RoC.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW