Amazon is betting big on the Indian market. In the past five years of operation, the e-commerce world leader has infused almost $5 billion of the committed investment in the Indian business arm and aims to continue doing that.
“We’ll continue to invest in India where we’re seeing great progress with both sellers and also customers. And we like the momentum we’ve seen there,” CFO Brian Olsavsky said during the earnings call.
Earlier last week, in his letter to shareholders, the company’s founder Jeff Bezos highlighted India as a ‘milestone’. He stated that Amazon.in is the fastest growing marketplace in India.
Bezos in the letter had observed the fast adoption of Prime in the country and said Prime added more members in India in its first year than any previous geography in Amazon’s history.
Currently, India has about 10 million Prime subscribers. Prime selection in India now includes more than 40 million local products from third-party sellers, and Prime Video is investing in India original video content in a big way.
Amidst this, the e-commerce giant on Thursday reported that it had more than doubled its profits to $1.6bn in the first three months of 2018.
It had raised profit from Amazon’s cloud computing business, Web Services, and a fast-growing advertising division that is now a multi-billion dollar business.
In the past one year, the e-commerce platform has witnessed a sharp jump in sales numbers from $43.9 billion in 2016 to $54 billion in 2017.
However, the company’s international losses also ballooned to over $3 billion dollars in 2017 on the back of its India business.
In India, Amazon Internet Services, the reseller for AWS, gained $99 million in revenue last year. Another of Amazon’s subsidiaries, Amazon Data Services, the data processing and hosting entity which was set up in India in June 2016, reported revenue of $36 million and a profit of $3.2 million for 2016-17.
