Amazon To Invest $1 Billion To Help Digitize Small Businesses in India

India welcomed Jeff Bezos this week with an antitrust probe. On top of that, thousands of small merchants who typically compete with one another are beginning to gather across the country to hold a protest against the alleged predatory practices by the e-commerce giant. But Amazon founder and chief executive's love for one of the company's most important overseas markets remains untainted. From a report: At a conference in New Delhi on Wednesday, Bezos and Amit Agarwal, the head of Amazon India, announced that the American giant is pumping $1 billion into India operations to help small and medium-sized businesses in the country come online. This is in addition to about $5.5 billion the company has invested in the country. Bezos said the company is also eyeing making exports of locally produced goods from India -- in line with New Delhi's Make in India program that encourages companies to manufacture locally in the nation -- to be of $10 billion in size on Amazon platform by 2025.

Its just buisness.

[jellomizer]

You will often see a lot of duality in companies. They can be Strong Competitors, Facing threatening legal action, Protests and bad press. While at the same time they are your best business partner, good community citizen, still often preferred and products/services that are enjoyed.

Businesses are not a person. But made up of people, many with different goals and objectives.

Re:

[stabiesoft]

For large corps with diverse ownership, I'd agree. Amazon is Bezos basically. He owns the controlling share and runs it like it is his, because it really is. The other shareholders are just along for the ride. See also Oracle and a number of other tightly owned companies.

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[Anonymous Coward]

no, no it's not, it's at best market manipulation, at worst it's free market corruption and or monopolistic practices, these are all moves to avoid regulation, taxation and ethical behavior. If these corporations were persons, they'd all be in jail.

  people are being taken to the cleaners while they cheer and cooperate, pretty stupid people

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[fluffernutter]

You're saying Amazon is doing this out of a motivation to do good?? Wow.

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[cusco]

Reading comprehension not your strong point?

Amazon "is doing this" out of a motivation to create a larger and more robust supply chain in India. Over half of goods sold on Amazon are from third party vendors, they've found it to be a very good and very flexible business model. They provide the expensive back end that small companies can't afford to build and the horde of third party vendors provide them with a flexibility and quick response to market changes that a large company can't handle.

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[priyank_bolia]

If love Americans ignorance. Amazon don't care for sellers or customers, there only goal is to reach complete monopoly. In India, they have multiple sub companies like Cloudtail, that directly buys from sellers high selling items, than slowly cut those sellers only who made amazon in India. If cloudtail wants to also sell your products, you have no other option other than to sell at loss or at cost price and handover all inventory to it and wrap up. Is this your definition of "they are your best business pa

Sure. And you get out of eastern Europe too.

[BAReFO0t]

And stop backing literal actual Nazis (like Swoboda) and fascism, breaking international law (Warsaw pact) and besieging Russia.

Let's do it together, Murica. On 3... 2... 1...

With whose money?

[Quakeulf]

When are they going to audit the fed?

Basic requirements

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Unless you can hide the transactions from the commercial tax officer, it wont get started.

You also need provide for goods to be marked as "seconds/rejects" from the factory, with an easily removable labels affixed on the product. Then the understanding is, the retailer will remove the label, sell it as the real McCoy. The difference between MSRP of firsts and seconds will be returned to the manufacturer in bundles of cash, after paying off the commercial tax officer and the retailer taking his cut.

Bezos

"Help"

[BAReFO0t]

The only one this is going to help, is Amazon. And black-hats.

By driving businesses into a lock-in dependency on Amazon servers that are "somewhere".

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[cusco]

Absolutely, after all, why would small and medium sized businesses ever want to be online? It's not like anyone ever made a living selling stuff through Amazon or anything.

$10B of my money

[sdinfoserv]

So my increased Prime fees, under paid workers, zero income tax (Amazon paid -$0- income tax) ends up being pumped into India to profit Bezos. When workers are underpaid, they need public assistance to survive. When companies pay no income tax, the burden shifts to citizens (predominately middle class, since the rich have basically exempted themselves). Bezos and Amazon need to give back to America, the country that created the environment for them to prosper. Help out the "sacrifice zones" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] , pay taxes to rebuild infrastructure, jobs and people.

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[cusco]

Average Amazon employee makes $102,000/year. Fulfillment Center contractors make considerably less, but still more than they would at a comparable Walmart of Target FC, get benefits and get free training towards a job better than warehouse work (nursing is apparently popular), and make up less than 1/5 of the Amazon workforce. They're employees of the companies that contract to do the work, not Amazon, if their employer underpays their work that's not Amazon's fault. Thousands of the better ones have bec

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[sdinfoserv]

"average" is skewed by the high earners. If there's a company with 10 employees and 1 (the owner) makes $1m/year and everyone else makes $5/hr (10400/year) that's an average salary of $109K per year. That "average" means nothing to the people making $10k per year. In my example, the owner is making 96 times the workers salary - in the real world it's 300 x the workers salary- that's how egregious the pay disparity has become.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/1... [cnbc.com]
All the profit, all the efficiency from

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[cusco]

Yes, I know how numbers work. I also know that Glass Door's estimates are generally pretty close to reality, and as a mid-level FTE at Amazon I can confirm that it's not far off the mark.

Download a...business.

[Ostracus]

Amazon To Invest $1 Billion To Help Digitize Small Businesses in India

But...but...you wouldn't download a store?

Hey Jeff

[RitchCraft]

There are plenty of small businesses in need of help right in your own back yard, the same businesses you helped to put into that situation. Watch out India, he's coming for you too.

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[cusco]

The vast majority of sellers on Amazon **ARE** small businesses, most of which wouldn't have nearly the sales they do without the exposure they get through the Amazon.com web site.
https://www.inc.com/tracy-leig... [inc.com]

Number of Small Businesses Currently Selling on Amazon: According to the ecommerce giant, this number comes in at just over 1 million.

Percentage of Online Sales Making Up Small Business Totals: According to Small Business Trends sixty percent of small businesses selling in online marketplaces receive more than half of their online sales from sites like Amazon. . .

Over two-thirds (68%) of small business owners who sell a product online say that Amazon has positively impacted their sales.

Yes, I work there, but no, not in the retail area at all.

More Indian Security Advisers then?

[nukenerd]

Seems that plenty of small to medium businesses in India don't need any help to get on line. In fact they are already experts - they can spot viruses on my PC, even from where they are on the other side of the world, because I am often getting phone calls from their security experts warning me that I've been infected with malware. But three cheers for Amazon for sponsoring their activities! Where would we be without them?