Amazon invests Rs 2,700 Cr in Indian marketplace arm

To strengthen its play against Walmart and Alibaba, Amazon has invested Rs 2,700 crore ($386 million) in Indian unit. The online marketplace would deploy fund towards building warehouses, marketing, and increasing product assortment. With this fund infusion, Amazon has ploughed in about $4 billion in the country.

The investment in the marketplace arm comes after eight months. In November last year, the company pumped in about Rs 2,900 crore ($450 million) in the Indian subsidiary. During last fiscal, it had poured in $512 million in its marketplace business.

Amazon’s top brass Jeff Bezos had promised to invest $5 billion in its Indian business. However, it seems the online retail giant will surpass the aforementioned amount as it has passed the resolution to increase share capital from $2.4 billion to $4.8 billion last year.

Amazon Seller Services, which earns through commissions, advertisements and shipping fees, registered a growth of 41 per cent in FY17 with a revenue of Rs 3,128 crore.

The fund infusion will help Amazon to continue with its aggressive growth chasing strategy. Flipkart and Amazon both have been fighting fiercely to gain more marketshare for over four years. After Flipkart’s acquisition by Walmart, the battle for claiming e-commerce crown in the country is slated to become more expensive.

Besides these two players, Alibaba and SoftBank had pumped in about Rs 2,900 crore ($445 million) in Paytm Mall. Although, the Noida-based company is far from giving any sort of competition to Flipkart and Amazon, it is believed as dark horse.

Last month, Amazon had topped up its Indian payment arm with Rs 230 crore to compete against with Paytm and Flipkart’s PhonePe during festival sales.

Apart from the core business, Amazon recently led an $11 million round in Gurugram-based shuttle service Shuttl. Currently, it’s also in talks with India’s second largest pharmacy chain Medplus for investing.

The development was reported by Mint.