Amazon has reiterated its pledge to invest $1 billion to digitise 10 million traders and micro, medium and small enterprises (MSMEs) in India.
The US-based ecommerce behemoth said the investment will enable $10 billion in cumulative exports from the country by 2025, a goal announced by CEO Jeff Bezos during his visit to India earlier this month.
“…we’ll keep identifying areas… and tool sets features over in India that we can bring back to other regions to help benefit other sellers and the other websites more broadly,” Dave Fildes, director of investor relations, told analysts after the company’s fourth quarter results on Thursday.
The investment is one part of Amazon’s plan for India over the next five years, which includes deploying 10,000 electric vehicles and creating direct and indirect employment for 1 million people.
“That team over there (in India has) done a great job of coming up with some interesting and new services and features that I think are specific to that region,” Fildes added, highlighting its India plan to investors.
Read: How worried should Amazon’s Jeff Bezos be about India?
Fourth Quarter Surprise
Amazon beat analysts’ estimates by a massive margin, making $3.3 billion in profit during the quarter, at an earnings per share of $6.47, higher than the $4.04 that Wall Street had forecast. Sales grew 21% to $87.4 billion.
Analysts pegged some of that growth to Amazon’s single-day Prime Deliveries which drove people to shop more with the online retail giant, while the company’s cloud computing division AWS also posted strong revenue at $9.95 billion.
The results sent share prices 12% higher in after-hours trading, with market value soaring above $1 trillion.
Leave a Reply