Bezos arrives as CCI pulls up e-tailers on deep discounting
NEW DELHI: Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos arrived in India on Tuesday, according to a post on his Twitter account, as thousands of small traders across 300 cities planned protests, claiming the firm is distorting local retail market.
Bezos, dressed in an Indian attire, paid his regards at a memorial dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi, a video posted on Bezos’ Twitter account showed.
The billionaire e-commerce magnate, who is on a three-day visit, will attend a company event in New Delhi and is also likely to meet senior government officials, people familiar with the matter have said.
India’s antitrust chief Ashok Kumar Gupta told Reuters on Tuesday that big e-commerce companies in India should not offer deep discounts which can potentially hurt and small-scale brick and mortar retailers in India.
Hundreds and thousands of small brick-and-mortar retailers, led by the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), have planned a countrywide protest against the company.
CAIT has also accused Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart of violating India’s foreign investment rules. The companies have denied the allegations.
Openness about discounting policies and how companies use customers’ data is essential, said
Gupta.
“If you are absolutely clean, come out, put it (details) on your website. So that everybody knows and there is nothing opaque,” he told Reuters.
“Otherwise there will be complaints, we will inquire - why do you want to subject yourself to this type of investigation if you are open about it.”
Meanwhile, in a separate development, Amazon has infused an additional ₹1,355 crore into its digital payments venture Amazon Pay India Pvt. Ltd, company filings showed.
The infusion was made by the company’s Singapore and Mauritius registered parent entity, according to a filing with the registrar of companies (ROC) sourced from business information platform Tofler. This takes the total funding in Amazon Pay India to ₹4,355 crore since its inception in 2016. Previously in June 2019, Amazon Pay India had received ₹450 crore from its parent entity.
The funding comes at a time when the online payments space has turned highly competitive with internet giants such as Google Pay and Paypal doubling down in India.
Facing heat from global brands, domestic entities such as Paytm, Phonepe, and Mobikwik have already started exploring other avenues such as online insurance and mutual funds to grow their revenues.
Digital payments market in India is expected to more than double to $135.2 billion by 2023 from around $64.8 billion as of 2019, according to an Assochampwc India study released in June.
The study also pointed out that India’s share of the worldwide transaction value of digital payments is also set to increase from 1.56% to 2.02% in the next four years.