After a decade of operations in India, Seattle-headquartered Amazon is setting its sights on the next 200 million users. With substantial capital investments and a commitment to digitising MSMEs and expanding the company’s omni-channel focus, Amazon’s profitability playbook for India is well on its way to success, says Manish Tiwary, Vice President and Country Manager of Amazon’s India Consumer Business
Amazon made three pledges. One was digitisation; digitise 10 million small businesses by 2025. The second was employment; create 2 million incremental jobs directly or indirectly by 2025, $10 billion of exports. The current statistics are – Digitisation of 4.1 million people, jobs to 1.1 million people and exports have hit $5 billion
“ONDC is a neutral network; it can’t be competition to anyone. Right now it is doing a lot around restaurants where we are not active. If the ONDC piece works, it will help create better pipelines on all sides. But it is early days, I don’t see anything as competition right now. We have started working with them," says Manish Tiwary
While responding to a question on competition to existing e-commerce duopoly (of Amazon and Walmart-backed Flipkart) in India, Manish Tiwary said, "I wouldn’t call it a duopoly. When you start something new, there will always be one or two players initially, others will observe for some time and then step in. The biggest industrial houses are in there—Tata, Reliance—and then there are the others like Flipkart, Nykaa"
"Amazon Pay is being used by 8.5 million local stores and small businesses, while Amazon Pay UPI is being used by more than 80 million customers. Whether it was on the customer front, the seller front, or the logistics front, we had to innovate for India. And that goes to show that you have to think differently about India," says Manish Tiwary
"As a business, we believe that we need to look at new ways to fulfil customer needs in a sustainable manner. Amazon is a company of builders. Sometimes you say, ‘These things are working, let’s scale them’ or ‘These things are not working, let’s change or close [them]’ and then you start other experiments. Food delivery was an experiment; we stopped it last year. Epharmacy is something we are interested in. We work closely with Apollo [Pharmacy]," says Tiwary
The growth of Amazon Prime is based on two pillars, shopping and entertainment. Tiwary says, “What drives that growth is how much of free shipping you get and at what speed. Prime one-day delivery is available on millions of items. On entertainment, you get access to some of the best content. Entertainment is not only OTT, it also includes Music, Kindle, and various other programmes”
“We’ve operated across many countries, and the people running Amazon in India have a great deal of expertise in the country. The best thing to do—which is what we’ve done in India—is to take the global learnings and dovetail them with the learnings from India. There have been ups and downs but we are pretty much on our journey to achieving profitability as per the playbook,” says Tiwary
Amazon is trying to innovate as much as possible, to engage more and more customers. Tiwary says, “We have acquired a company called GlowRoad that is into social commerce, which will help us in this journey. For sellers, we have a programme called Smart Commerce, which is a suite of SaaS tools to help small stores digitally upload their inventory to a marketplace or create a storefront. If we are attractive enough, a lot of them will come on board Amazon.”