A recent study by Indian industry body ASSOCHAM and PricewaterhouseCoopers forecast India’s e-commerce industry growing from $17 billion to potentially $100 billion within five years.
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Amazon’s Instant Video service is going to be launched in India later this year, according to a report on Monday that says Amazon Prime is also coming to the country.
Quoting two unnamed people that it said were “directly familiar with the company’s decision”, the report added that Amazon is planning to launch its Amazon Instant Video and subscription-based Amazon Prime services later this year. Amazon can afford to bleed for a longer time, thanks to the strong global presence and diversified portfolio of services, as compared to Flipkart which has until now managed to garner almost $3-billion investment from the previous rounds of funding. The e-commerce company has used this to expand its network of warehouses and data centers to better compete against the likes of Flipkart and Snapdeal.
Amazon Instant Video (AIV) is a service that is available in a few countries worldwide. Kripalani is reportedly in talks with various music labels, as well as companies like Yash Raj Films and Eros global for their titles. Riding on the statistics, Jeff Bezos is all set to give a tough competition to the India’s home-grown ecommerce players viz Flipkart, Snapdeal and Paytm. Amazon’s fresh round of investment will put tremendous pressure on Flipkart and other e-commerce companies as they will have to raise a big round of investment from venture capital investors to match up Amazon’s offerings. A Morgan Stanley report in February suggested that the Indian internet market as a whole is expected to raise $137 billion by 2020. The fresh round of investments along with the new verticals is Amazon trump card when it comes to establishing a lead in the Indian market.
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“Overall, the bet on India will pay off well for Amazon – it’s a high-volume, low-margin business in the USA; Amazon India will be similar. So, while we shouldn’t expect Alibaba-like financials from India, Amazon will find that India nicely complements its efforts in the United States”.
