A major part of the current Indian Government’s manifesto was its ‘Make In India’ initiative. The country has been pouring more and more resources to make good on this promise, and now Amazon wants to chip in. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO has announced a plan to ship $10 billion worth of India made products to support the Make In India initiative and expand its online marketplace. The company plans to achieve this by 2025.
This announcement was made at the two day summit for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) by Jeff himself, vowing to invest $1 billion to achieve this goal and expanding small and medium scale companies in the country.
In his speech, Bezos reminisced the time he started Amazon 25 years ago as a small scale business himself, where he told everyone how he did not just deliver but wrapped the products by hand.
This isn’t Bezos’ first big endeavour in the country. A few days back, Amazon made a deal with the second biggest retailer in the country, Future Retail in an initiative to expand in to offline retail as well, as the Indian marketplace is still street dominant. The move was hastened up with the surprise soft launch of Reliance-backed Jiomart.
The company is excited about its future with Future Retail, said Amit Agarwal, SVP and Country Head of Amazon India. In a statement, he said “Future Retail’s national footprint of stores offering thousands of products across fashion, appliances, home, kitchen and grocery will now be available to millions of customers shopping on Amazon.in, in hours across 25+ cities,”.
Amazon has become a household ecommerce name in the 1.5 billion strong Indian market. The company, like most foreign consumer companies, sees the potential in the vast numbers of the country, with almost half a billion people online due to one of the cheapest rates of data around the world. With that in mind, Amazon has developed services and devices exclusive to India, to make sure that more and more people accept Amazon in the offline heavy country, launching specific versions of Alexa designed exclusively for the Indian market, to rolling out of Prime Now in several parts of the country.
