Amazon has made fresh investments of a little over Rs 2,500 crore into its e-commerce marketplace and data centre businesses in India, documents filed with the Registrar of Companies showed. The investment follows a Rs1,715 crore infusion into Amazon’s payments and wholesale arms last month.
Amazon Seller Services, the company’s marketplace unit, received a cash infusion of Rs 2,208 crore, and Amazon Data Services India, which offers services such as web hosting and data storage, received Rs 355 crore, according to the documents. Business intelligence platform Paper.vc first reported the new document filing.
The investment comes after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ trip to India in which he said that the company would invest $1 billion into the country to digitise small sellers and drive $10 billion worth of exports from the country by 2025. The latest infusion is similar to what Amazon has been making in its marketplace unit for a few years now.
The first investment in 2020, which was closed on January 31, comes after Amazon dropped its investment in Amazon Seller Services to Rs 6,200 crore last year, from the Rs 9,450 crore in 2018. While there’s no clear roadmap of how much money Amazon will pump into the unit this year, the company is planning to ramp up investments here.
Last month ET reported that the company had approved the building of two large warehouses for fresh produce and groceries at Bengaluru and Hyderabad in order to grow its grocery delivery business in the two cities. It’s also planning to scale up use of EVs to reduce its carbon footprint, which is expected to increase costs in the short term.
But the company is expected to continue investing heavily in its marketplace unit in India due to hefty losses the company still makes. In the year that ended March 2019, Amazon Seller Services reported a reduction in losses, but that number still stood at Rs 5,685 crore. The unit had reported a revenue of Rs 10,802 crore during the same period.
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