How Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN)’s $2 Billion Will Be Invested in India?

After making a late entry into India, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has almost made up for it by making big ticket investment in its business in the country. Perhaps, Amazon doesn’t want to make the same mistakes it made in China. The company launched its India centric website in June, 2013 and just a few days ago announced its plan to invest $2 billion in India. Wall Street Journal spoke with Amazon’s Indian unit, Amazon Seller Services Pvt. Ltd.’s CEO, Amit Agarwal, about Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)’s plans for India and competition that the company is facing from homegrown e-commerce companies.

Agarwal informed that in the short span of 12 months, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has built the largest selection of products in the Indian e-commerce markets- 17 million products in 29 categories. He also added that more than 300,000 of those products qualify for next day guaranteed shipping, which is more than any other player in Indian e-commerce can boast of. Other interesting statistics that he shared were that the number of sellers on Amazon’s platform saw an increase of 90 times in last one year and the traffic at Amazon’s Indian website is growing in double digits.

Regarding competition that is crossing $1 billion in sales before Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Agarwal considers that customers don’t care about who sold how much last year. They are more interested in what they can buy from an e-commerce portal. Amazon also started an initiative of making deliveries through mom and pop stores in India, which Mr. Agarwal sees as a good move for boosting the income of small- and medium-sized business and a way to bring into fold the same business population that has concerns regarding foreign investment and e-commerce affecting them.

On how the $2 billion will be spent, Mr. Agarwal said that Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)  is going to add more small and medium sellers for lowering costs and for that it needs to make investments in technology, warehousing and logistics and also in new products and services. He also added that this $2 billion would be spent over a long term period by making investments today that will solve problems of tomorrow.