From a Mumbai-based textile company that has become one of the most popular brands in the bed-linen category on Amazon’s US marketplace to a Bengaluru-based electronics toy manufacturer that expanded its presence beyond India and the US to the UK, Canada, Australia and the UAE — several MSMEs have grown as a part of Amazon’s Global selling Programme (GSP). The online retailer’s GSP, which has clocked $2 billion in sales from India since its launch in 2015, saw the highest exports last year from cities like Delhi, Jaipur, Mumbai, Surat, Bengaluru and Indore. This January, Amazon had aimed for its GSP — which comprises 60,000 Indian exporters — to reach $10 billion in exports by Indian sellers by 2025. Mumbai-based NMK Textiles, which was established in 2006, manufactured and exported high-end bed linens to large department stores in the US and Canada. However, after 2016, the company saw its offline exports business slowing down, pushing it to rework its supply chain and launching its new brand on Amazon GSP in 2017. In the past three years, NMK Textiles’ brand California Design Den has seen an over 100 per cent y-o-y growth in Amazon’s US marketplace, which paved the way for its expansion into other Amazon marketplaces. By 2022, the brand aims to post $100 million in sales on Amazon’s GSP. “We will continue to empower Indian micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) at Amazon. We are committed to digitise 10 million MSMEs, create 1 million incremental jobs and drive $10 billion in e-commerce exports by 2025,” Amit Agarwal, senior vice-president & country head, Amazon India, said at the launch of the third edition of Amazon Global Exports Digest. The gross merchandise sales on the GSP from India grew by 47 per cent year-on-year (y-o-y) in 2019, with Amazon’s flagship Prime Day sales posting 72 per cent on-year growth for exporters from the country. According to the Amazon Global Exports Digest 2020, released Monday, solid sheets, kitchen linen, toys, towels, apparel, spices and leather bags were among the top exported items from the Western part of India on the GSP, with the highest contributors from the region being Jaipur, Mumbai, Surat, Ahmedabad, Udaipur and Pune. Jodhpur and Kota in Rajasthan, and Bharuch in Gujarat featured among the top emerging cities from where goods are being exported. Similarly, Bengaluru-based PlayShifu, which started as an indigenous augmented reality-based recreational solution for Indian children, expanded to five other countries clocking eight times y-o-y growth on Amazon’s global selling platform in the first three years of the company’s operations since 2016. PlayShifu was an outlier in India’s southern region, from where the key categories to be exported include jewellery, leather journals, kantha quilts, tapestry, home décor products and herbal extracts. Another Mumbai-based MSME Aromatan Cosmetics — which sells incense and fragrances on Amazon — saw rapid growth on the GSP, with the company being able to expand from its traditional markets. “We have been making bakhoor, the most authentic and the purest form of incense, for 107 years. Our product range is consumed by people all over the world. We have been traditionally exporting to the Middle East and Africa. But Amazon has given us a tremendous opportunity to directly serve customers in the US and Europe. We have rapidly grown from daily earnings of $200 to $2,500. We are excited to see this growth within a year and are committed to making this a $2 million sales platform in next two years,” said Taha Nabee, vice-president, Aromatan Cosmetics. Listing the priority areas where Amazon India is working on to increase exports of India-made goods on its platform, Agarwal said that the company’s “work with various state governments and industry bodies on creating more awareness about e-commerce exports on ground, end-to-end digitisation of processes for MSMEs to get started off as exporters, and building effective yet low cost logistics solutions is progressing well”.
