Ahead of festive season, Amazon Seller Services gets another fund infusion from Singapore parent

Ahead of the festive season and company’s biggest annual sale — Great India Festival, Amazon Seller Services — the online marketplace arm of Jeff Bezos’ Amazon in India has received an infusion of Rs 1,125 crore from its Singapore-based parent company. The marketplace has secured capital from Amazon Corporate Holdings Private Limited based in Singapore and Amazon.com Inc Limited, Mauritius even as the significant share of the funds (Rs 1,124.5 crore) came from Amazon Singapore, according to financial data accessed by business intelligence platform Tofler. This is the third round of investment into the India marketplace in 2020 by the parent company. Earlier in February, Amazon had put more than Rs 2,500 crore into Amazon Seller Services and Amazon Data Services followed by Rs 2,310 crore invested into the marketplace in July.

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“This is the third infusion for 2020. Normally, there is at least a four-month gap between infusions, but the latest infusion has come much faster, given that they raised $307 Mn in the first week of July…With the Diwali season around the corner and the retail battle heating up with Reliance’s entry, it is likely that they may make another infusion very soon,” business signals platform Paper.vc said in a note. The company had received $1.26 Bn (around Rs 9,000 crore) and $826 million (approximately Rs 5,900 crore) in FDI in 2018 and 2019 respectively.

The investment comes days after Amazon and Samara Capital had together put Rs 275 crore into Witzig Advisory Services that owns MORE branded retail store chain. In January, Amazon had also partnered with Future Retail to allow latter access to its e-commerce marketplace and also to leverage Kishore Biyani company’s strength in offline retail to deepen its presence in India. At a company event in January, Bezos had announced an investment of $1 billion to digitise India’s 10 million small and medium businesses and export $10 billion worth of goods under Make in India programme by 2025.

The company on Monday had said that its flagship delivery programme I have Space has more than 28,000 Kirana stores in nearly 350 cities to help meet consumer demand this festive season. Amazon also said that that it has added “tens of thousands” of delivery partners to its network and nearly 200 delivery stations, including those operated by Delivery Service Partners. The fund infusion and boosting of its supply chain comes amid the heat the company has been facing along with Walmart’s Flipkart from trader community over alleged malpractices in the business such as deep discounting, preferential treatment to sellers, violation of FDI policy and more.