In a move that would significantly boost Amazon’s already large logistics footprint in India, the US ecommerce behemoth has announced new partnerships with two of the world’s largest state-owned logistics enterprises — the famed Indian Railways, and India Post — country’s state-owned mail service.
The announcements came at Amazon’s annual India summit focused on small businesses – Smbhav.
Both Indian Railways and India Post are behemoths in logistics, to say the least, and by far, provide the most comprehensive coverage across the length and breadth of the 1.4Bn-strong India. Indian Railways runs the 4th largest railway network globally, and is responsible for a staggering 1.4 billion tons of cargo transport in 2022 alone. India Post on the other hand, is the world’s most widely distributed postal system, and services every available pin code in the country. The 164 years old service also links itself to global postal and delivery networks.
With India Post, Amazon would look to enable smaller businesses sell globally, tapping into the postal service’s global connections. The railways tie-up on the other hand, will enable further expansion into India’s domestic network.
For a few years now, ecommerce companies in India have found it hard to move beyond the Tier-1/metro consumers that they have already tapped into. Aggressive efforts from both Walmart-owned Flipkart, as well as Amazon have been on, to push ecommerce into Tier II/III and even Tier IV towns further, as companies scramble to add more customers to a rather stagnated ecommerce consumer growth. With Railways and India Post partnerships, Amazon is making yet another attempt to crack that.
