Our focus is to reach the next 100 million users through innovation: Manish Tiwary

We have surpassed the expectations in many ways. In its first ten years, Amazon has democratised e-commerce, making it a daily phenomenon for everyone to participate from any part of the country to buy anything they needed. 10 years ago, Amazon.in started as a humble start-up with 100 sellers offering mainly books. Today, we have more than 1.2 million sellers, we employ directly 1 lakh people and enable employment for another 1.1 million, we have enabled exports worth $5 billion which we want to grow to $20 billion, and we have helped over 4 million small businesses to get digitized.

Amazon’s fulfilment centres have grown from 0.22 million cubic feet of storage space to 43 million cubic feet of storage space in 2023 for seller inventory, across 15 States in India. But 10 years feels like the first step in our commitment to India, its still day zero for Amazon in India. E-commerce in India is at a very nascent stage, with about 5 per cent of total retail , there’s so much more to be done.

The biggest learning we have had is that this is a country of entrepreneurs. If you want to succeed here, partnerships is critical. The biggest investment for us is the logistics and one of the challenges is the last-mile delivery. Traditionally, we would have had our own delivery associates or we have partner companies that go and delivers. In India, every area has a small store and store owners know everyone in that area, when they are home, they would know the security guards. But these stores do not have sales throughout the day.

We partnered with such neighbourhood stores and today, millions of packets are delivered by them. This is very unique to India, very cost-effective and reliable. Our approach has been different and we have innovated on features like digital kendras , payment on delivery and returns with no questions asked. On the question of the languages, the company introduced Amazon.in in Hindi in 2018 and subsequently in 6 more regional languages. Customers shopping on Amazon.in in regional languages have doubled y-o-y.

We have an internal roadmap on profitability. But we want to follow a model that is responsible and sustainable. We don’t have external stakeholders who want to drive growth for reasons like valuation. Our stakeholders are patient. The journey so far, has been as per our plan. We feel good about where we have reached.

If you look at the global map and someone asks where is the biggest opportunity I would say that India is the biggest opportunity across most sectors. We have grown well, but e-commerce is still very nascent. Marry that with the macroeconomic tailwinds in India’s favour and it becomes super exciting. India has millions of local stores and MSMEs, tens of thousands of start-ups and Amazon remains focused on bringing a vast majority of them online to create national and global brands.

When you are a nascent industry, competition is good to drive innovation. E-commerce is still day zero and there’s a long way to go. We would always focus on our customers even as we remain watchful and learn from others.

We have so many physical stores including small and large brands that sell on our platform. I do think omni is a good strategy. Over 2.7 lakh offline retailers and neighbourhood stores across India are selling on Amazon.in.

I am very focused on reaching the next 100 million customers. I want to reach the 14-15 million stores in this country. We need to innovate to reach these targets. We believe that there are immense opportunities in areas like digital payments, B2B, categories like grocery, fashion, beauty, and possibilities that AI & ML can enable for it to serve our customers and sellers better product discovery, shopping experience and accurate deliveries. There is a lot of innovation ahead and the pace of innovation will be faster than what we have seen so far.