The e-commerce industry of India will create 12 million new jobs by the year 2030, and before that, by 2025, Amazon alone aims to create 2 million of these new jobs in the industry. Speaking at a retail summit to deliver its keynote address earlier today, Amit Agarwal, senior global vice-president and country head of Amazon India, set the above target for his company and for the e-commerce industry in India. He further stated that the company now plans to digitise and onboard 1 crore (10 million) small and medium businesses on to its e-commerce and digital payment platform, including 1 million offline local stores. He also claimed the Amazon will help local businesses hit $10 billion (approx. Rs 74,113 crore) in exports from India.
Agarwal spoke about Amazon’s recent efforts to enable thousands of small businesses including local stores to go national and global, at the ongoing ET Retail Summit 2021. He also detailed the company’s potential future efforts in this space, setting targets for exports to support the Aatmanirbhar Bharat narrative. Speaking about the recent trends that Amazon India has seen in terms of sellers on its platform, Agarwal said, “Our seller base in India today exceeds 8.5 lakh, of which 3 lakh new businesses joined Amazon within the past 18 months itself – amidst the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. This number also includes nearly 75,000 local stores, spread across 450 cities all over India.”
This influx of local businesses and sellers on the platform, Agarwal says, caters to more Indians using digital services in their everyday lives, which he backs up by stating that almost 85 percent of the platform’s new users today come from non-metro cities – hence offering a wide opportunity for small businesses to cater to niche demands.
Agarwal also claimed that small businesses and local offline stores joining the Amazon platform are not only restricted to cater to local and national consumers. “Chandralekha Creations from Varanasi, an offline apparel business that is now over two decades old, went global with Amazon in 2016. Today, it is a highly rated and recognised Indian fashion brand for buyers in USA, UK, Australia and the Middle-east,” said Agarwal, as an example of Amazon’s potential to contribute to India’s local manufacturing and export narratives.
On this note, Agarwal stated that today, over 70,000 businesses are exporting their products to global markets through Amazon, and all of this has added up to export revenues of over $3 billion (approx. Rs 22,237 crore) today, in over six years. “What’s interesting to note is the clear sign of growth for small business exporting to other countries despite the pandemic – while the first $1 billion mark arrived in three years, the next billion-dollar margin of exports was hit within 18 months, and the third arrived in just 12 months,” Agarwal said.
Agarwal also added that the company has onboarded over 50 lakh (5 million) small businesses on to the Amazon Pay platform so far. However, this number is well behind rival digital payment players – PhonePe set itself a target to onboard 2.5 crore (25 million) small businesses back in 2020, while Paytm disclosed in its recent IPO earlier this year that it has already onboard 2.1 crore (21 million) merchants on its platform. Google, too, is in the fray with its Google Pay platform.
Amazon, however, has a larger ecosystem plan at play – Agarwal touched upon the opening of the first Digital Kendra in Surat, Gujarat, which the company had mentioned at the Amazon Smbhav summit earlier this year. Agarwal also stated that the company has set up its Smbhav Venture Fund to support small businesses and startups in India.
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