Amazon.com, the global ecommerce giant, is investing another $306 million in its Indian arm Amazon Seller Services Pvt., Ltd., as a continuation of its quick pace of investments in the country. According to filings with the Registrar of Companies (RoC,) Amazon Inc., and its Singapore based division, Amazon Corporate Holdings Pvt., Ltd., made the investment in the Indian arm.
According to a news daily, this record capital will add more firepower to the Indian arm as retail giant accelerates efforts to race past larger domestic rival Flipkart. In 2017-2018, Amazon India has received Rs. 8,150 crores, or about $1.3 billion from its parent company. As per filings with the RoC filings, the latest capital infusion marks the fourth time Amazon has invested in India since Flipkart raised $ 4 billion from SoftBank last year.
In November last year, Amazon also invested Rs. 2,900 crores ($446 million) in its Indian unit, making it the single largest infusion into the country’s operations till date. Simultaneously, Amazon Seller Services also doubled its authorized share capital from Rs. 16,000 crores to Rs. 31,000 crores. Currently, the ecommerce firm claims to have over 250,000 registered sellers on its platform.
In 2015, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also committed to investing $ 5 billion in India towards acquiring new customers and growing market share. So far, the company has pumped in Rs. 19,790 crores, or about $3 billion, into Amazon Seller Services. Meanwhile, Amazon India’s subsidiaries Amazon Wholesale, Amazon Pay, Amazon Transport and Amazon Data Services have received a combined Rs. 2,868 crores since 2016. According to Indian corporate database Capitaline, Amazon is the second largest Indian company in terms of authorized capital, next to Reliance Jio at Rs. 61,000 crores.
The battle between homegrown ecommerce firm Flipkart and Amazon India is only expected to intensify as both the companies turn towards the grocery retail industry. Recently, Amazon India established a beachhead with Amazon Pantry and hyper local delivery service Amazon Now. At the same time, Flipkart relaunched its grocery delivery service supermart and is expected to expand the services to six cities, outlining this as a major focus area.