Amazon.com Inc is to invest US$3 billion more to build its business in India, stepping up its bet that the country will become a major online shopping market that will fuel sales growth.
The latest commitment, unveiled by CEO Jeff Bezos at the US-India Business Council’s leadership summit in Washington, more than doubles Amazon’s total pledged investment since 2014 to US$5 billion.
Amazon has targeted India for international growth after pulling back from China due to fierce competition from that country’s e-commerce giant, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴). In addition to seeking new customers, Amazon is also looking in India for new inventory to sell globally.
Photo: AFP
Amazon, which gets most of its international revenue from the UK, Japan and Germany, does not break out sales from India. Revenue from a group of other international markets, including India, reached US$7.4 billion last year, or 6.9 percent of total sales.
Amazon, which debuted in India in 2013, has been spending to challenge local e-commerce companies Flipkart Internet Private Ltd and Snapdeal.
Bezos said at a conference last week that Amazon is opening more distribution centers and doing more last-mile deliveries.
Bezos also highlighted achievements in India in his annual letter to shareholders. They included the roll out of Seller Flex, which uses Amazon sellers’ warehouses to store other products sold on Amazon, helping the company quickly expand its delivery capabilities. Amazon’s cloud-computing division is also developing new infrastructure in India.
“We have already created some 45,000 jobs in India and continue to see huge potential in the Indian economy,” Bezos said in a statement from the council, where Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to executives from US companies.
“Our Amazon.in team is surpassing even our most ambitious planned milestones,” he added.
Amazon has a long-term vision to be the primary middleman connecting factories in India and China with customers in the US and Europe.
Amazon is expanding its Fulfillment by Amazon service, which provides storage, parking and shipping for independent merchants selling products on Amazon’s Web site, into a global logistics network, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg.
India is a key country from which it can source goods directly and sell to its customers around the world.
Internet use in India is booming, with Web shopping on track to make up 25 percent of total retail sales by 2020, with the number of online shoppers topping 175 million by then, according to a report by Google and AT Kearney Inc.
“One of the top-level lessons is that we have done much more local market customization in India than we did in China,” Bezos said at a Recode conference last week. “In China we did some local market customization, but we mostly tried to roll out what had worked well for us in Japan, Germany, UK, Spain, France, Italy, the US, etc., and it needed more local market customization.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained