BENGALURU: Amazon has said it was so surprised by its growth in India that it had decided to put a whole lot more focus on it.
At Amazon’s earnings call following its latest results announced last week, CFO Brian T Olsavsky said in response to an analyst’s question on India: “What I can say about India is when we see a positive surprise, we double down on it. That’s kind of our policy, and India is that kind of surprise. So we’re very happy, very encouraged early on with what we’ve seen in the ramping of the business, the level of invention going on for both customers and sellers.”
The Street, which reported this, also said Olsavsky did not detail specifics on the company’s investments in India but mentioned that improving price and delivery speed in the region were priorities.
Last year, CEO Jeff Bezos had announced a $2-billion investment in Amazon’s e-commerce business in India, the country that is seen to be growing the fastest for Amazon in this segment. And just last month, Amazon told TOI that it would establish multiple data centres in India in 2016, with an investment of many millions of dollars, to service customers moving to cloud services.
Andy Jassy, the head of Amazon Web Services (AWS), said the investment could scale to billions of dollars as the region grows. “We have grown very, very quickly in India,” he had said about cloud customers.
Amazon’s is now seen to be the biggest online store in India with more than 25 million products for sale, about 5 million more than Flipkart’s. That’s some accomplishment, considering it started in India only in 2013, six years after Flipkart.