Amit Agarwal (File photo)
At a time when Amazon faces regulatory scrutiny in India, including a probe by the
Competition Commission of India
, Amit Agarwal, senior VP, emerging markets, who kick-started the American retail giant’s India operations, says the company is compliant with all regulations and expects fair and transparent policies from govt. “My hope is for a
progressive regulatory regime
that embraces e-commerce as a key enabler of India’s economic growth,” Agarwal told TOI. Excerpts:
There is a perception within govt that Amazon is engaging in predatory pricing, killing kiranas…
We try not to pay attention to the noise out there and try to keep our heads down, focus on adding more selection and making things more affordable for customers. We have a lot of support from govt, which is recognising the work that we are doing. Our approach has been very transparent.
Do regulatory challenges impact growth trajectory?
Our job is to comply with regulations and offer customers a great experience. My hope for a regulatory regime would be that of a progressive one that embraces e-commerce as a key enabler of India’s economic growth. E-commerce can enable job creation, manufacturing and exports. If we have the right progressive policy…the opportunity is consumption can increase, while share of e-commerce within that goes up. Key elements of a good, progressive policy would be lesser regulatory burden on sellers, lower friction for sellers to come online, a fairer, transparent and even-playing field for all companies, to ensure that all can compete fairly to give customers a great experience.
CCI says you and your partners are hampering investigation…
We cannot comment on any ongoing investigation. We have always complied with all regulations, laws of the land. We are co-operating with all investigations and providing all informations.
Are you still burning cash to capture market? Are you closer to profitability?
We have no cash burn strategy. We are investing in logistics, infrastructure and these require hard investments, which we will do for the sake of our sellers so that they can deliver the products.
What are your quick commerce plans? Aren’t you late to market?
We hear from our customers that they would like to have daily, essential products delivered to them quicker. Starting this month, we are piloting a service starting with Bangalore where our customers would be able to get a few thousand products (combination of grocery and non-grocery products) delivered in 15 minutes. The only truth is the rate of change is going up. You will have many more players, many more formats, lot more innovation as India grows and as e-commerce and retail grows.
As you sharpen focus, where will you invest?
While we are constantly enabling more small businesses to come and add to selection, we have been investing in Amazon Pay, which is our mechanism to give customers access to credit. We are building infrastructure, looking for new ideas so that we can ship products to corners of the country faster and at lower cost. 85% of our new customers are coming from lower tier cities. Our latest round of investment was made into AWS because we are building more data centres, cloud capacities for local developers, public and private sector companies. Our strategy for India is not going to change for next 30 years.
