Amazon infuses Rs 1,125 crore into India unit ahead of festive sales

The fresh infusion will provide more ammunition to Amazon to compete aggressively against Walmart-owned Flipkart and billionaire Mukesh Ambani-run Reliance Industries' JioMart in the upcoming festive season.

Amazon Corporate Holdings Private Limited, Singapore and Amazon.com Inc Limited, Mauritius have pumped in Rs 1,125 crore into Amazon Seller Services, regulatory documents sourced by business intelligence platform Tofler, showed. Amazon Seller Services allotted equity shares to these entities for the said transaction on September 17, 2020.

Amazon did not respond to queries. In June this year, Amazon had pumped in fresh capital to the tune of Rs 2,310 crore into Amazon Seller Services. In January this year, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had announced USD 1 billion (over Rs 7,000 crore) investment in India to help bring small and medium businesses online. Previously, the online retail giant had committed USD 5.5 billion investments in India, one of Amazon's most important markets outside of the US and a key growth driver.

Amazon rival Flipkart had announced raising USD 1.2 billion funding led by parent Walmart in July - which valued the e-commerce company at USD 24.9 billion. Interestingly, Reliance Industries - which had announced the acquisition of Future's retail, wholesale, logistics and warehousing units for Rs 24,713 crore last month - is also bolstering its operations ahead of the festive season. Earlier this month, RIL's retail arm - Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd - had said US private equity firm Silver Lake Partners will buy 1.75 per cent stake for Rs 7,500 crore.

Reliance Retail's network includes supermarkets, consumer electronics chain stores, cash and carry wholesale business, fast-fashion outlets, and online grocery store JioMart - spanning almost 12,000 stores in nearly 7,000 towns. In May, Reliance launched an online grocery delivery service, JioMart and had tied up with WhatsApp to connect customers with local kirana stores. E-commerce companies see a large chunk of their business coming in during the festive sales and they make significant investments ahead of time to ramp up their capacity to be able to handle the spike in orders.

As per a report by RedSeer, festive sales are expected to almost double this year and touch USD 7 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) as compared to USD 3.8 billion in the same period last year. GMV is a term used in online retailing to indicate the gross merchandise value of products sold through the marketplace over a certain period.