Close on the heels of a potential consolidation of e-commerce companies in India with some firms even close to winding up, US-based online retailer Amazon’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has claimed that the firm is the fastest growing marketplace in India, and announced continued investment in technology and infrastructure for its Indian operations. “It’s still Day 1 for e-commerce in India, and I assure you that we’ll keep investing in technology and infrastructure while working hard to invent on behalf of our customers and small and medium businesses in India,” Bezos said in a statement. Amazon released its earnings for the January-March quarter, reporting a net income of $724 million on a topline of $35.71 billion. As per Bezos’ “Day 1” theory, which he detailed to Amazon’s shareholders in a letter last year, “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.” Despite beating revenue and profit estimates for its global operations, Amazon is yet to break even in its Indian operations, and its investments come at a time when competition among e-commerce firms including Flipkart, Snapdeal, Shopclues, in a market that is heavily dependent on steep discounting of products. This was also reflective in Amazon’s March-quarter losses in international operations, where India is one of the key markets, widening to $481 million, compared with $121 million a year ago. During the three-month period, sales from international operations stood at $11,061 million, while the expenses were at $11,542 million. Analysts also recently pegged that with a possible merger of Snapdeal with Flipkart, the competition of the latter with Amazon would begin leading to another 12-18 months of high discounting. For Amazon though, India has proved to be a key market. In a post-earnings analyst call, Amazon’s chief financial officer Brian T Olsavsky said, “As far as level of investment is concerned, it is certainly one of our important investment areas. We see a lot of potential for the country and our business there”. “In India, we started from scratch and have built a lot of things ourselves. And it’s always going to depend on the country that the dynamics in that country both for retail, for online, and for foreign investment. But a real key factor in all of this generally is management bandwidth as well,” Olsavsky said. Bezos, who has met Prime Minister Narendra Modi at least twice in the last two-and-a-half years — in October 2014 and June 2016, had announced in incremental $3 billion investment in India during his 2016 visit, taking the firm’s total announced investment to $5 billion.
