Amazon To Digitise 10 Mn Small Businesses, Create 2 Mn Jobs In India By 2025

US-headquartered ecommerce giant Amazon has highlighted some ambitious plans for India in its earnings report for the quarter ended June 30, 2023.

“By 2025, Amazon India has a goal to enable cumulative ecommerce exports of $20 Bn, digitise 10 Mn small businesses and create 2 Mn jobs in India,” Amazon stated in its earnings report.

Marking its 10 years in India, the company said its India unit enabled cumulative ecommerce exports of over $7 Bn.

The ecommerce behemoth posted a net profit of $6.75 Bn for Q2 2023 against a loss of $2.03 Bn a year ago. The international segment still accounted for only 22% of Amazon’s global earnings, with North America accounting for a whopping 61%.

The ecommerce giant’s cloud infrastructure arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), accounted for nearly 17% of Amazon’s total revenue during the three months ended June 30, 2023.

Amazon’s announcement has come after CEO Andy Jassy met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in June. Post the meeting, Jassy said the ecommerce giant will invest another $15 Bn in India over the next seven years.

The move would take Amazon’s total investment in India to $26 Bn. A major chunk of the additional investment – $12.7 Bn to be precise – is coming via AWS to support the growing demand in the country.

In May, AWS said the investment in the data centre infrastructure will support around 1.32 Lakh full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs in Indian businesses each year.

In July, the ecommerce giant also announced that the cumulative exports from its platform in India are on track to cross the $8 Bn mark in 2023. The target is part of the Amazon Global Selling program, which claims to have onboarded 1.25 Lakh exporters since its inception.

At the time, Amazon said that more than 1,200 exporters achieved sales worth INR 1 Cr or more in 2022. Further, Indian exporters hosted their products on eighteen international marketplaces on Amazon, including countries such as the US, the UK, Canada, Mexico, Germany, and Italy, among others.

In India, Amazon is competing with Walmart for a chunk of India’s trillion-dollar ecommerce and retail market. While Amazon grew organically in India, Walmart just bought Flipkart in 2018, giving it an instant lead in the market. Since then, Amazon and Walmart have been working to capture the offline retail market.