London Amazon has its
sights set on India, the next “trillion-dollar market.” The size of opportunity
in India is so large it will be measured in trillions, not billions.
Bezos is willing to invest billions in the firm’s Indian operations to win
the market. Which is currently being lead by Flipkart, a local startup worth
$15 billion (10 billion).
In the blistering heat one recent afternoon, a crowd of people gathered down a narrow side street in Govandi, one of Asia’s poorest and most sprawling slums, on the eastern edge of Mumbai. Here, goats and cows jostle for space with nearly a million people amid the fetid, trash-strewn paths and crumbling buildings. Many have no toilet at home, and thousands make their living by scavenging in the nearby municipal dump. But on this particular day, the crowd of men jammed into a storefront in the side street had arrived to try their hand at something entirely new in their lives: online shopping. At the door, a man handed passersby leaflets explaining that the store owner’s laptop connected to hundreds of thousands of items that could be delivered to his establishment within a few days. “I bought a mobile phone,” says Ansari Jameel, 24, amazed at the swift transaction, as he emerged from the store, adding that he had scraped together the money from his job packing vegetables in a local street market. “The prices are good, and I find a lot of things I cannot find other places, like clothes, shoes, and watches.”
Jameel does not know it, but he has just become part of a crucial experiment f or one of the giants of the tech world: Amazon.com. His surprise discovery of Internet commerce is like found treasure to Amazon—and in CEO Jeff Bezos’s estimation, a key part of his strategy for future growth.
The opportunity will be measured in trillions, not billions—trillions of dollars, that is, not rupees.
one factor makes India vastly more accessible to global tech companies than that other mega-nation, China: The language of business here is English.
One reason for India’s huge potential is that it starts from such a small base. Barely one-quarter of India’s population has access to the Internet at home, whether on a smartphone or computer, and only a small fraction of those have ever shopped online. For e-commerce, that means explosive room for growth.
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