Amazon Seller Services Pvt. Ltd., the Indian seller marketplace arm of Amazon, has raised around ₹1460 crore from the parent company as part of a new corporate round. This has taken place amid an intensifying battle with Walmart-owned Flipkart in India’s booming online retail market.
Singapore-based Amazon Corporate Holdings Pvt. Ltd. invested around ₹1459.93 crore as part of the current round, with Mauritius-based Amazon.com Inc Ltd. investing another ₹6.74 lakh in the Indian unit, showed regulatory filings with the corporate affairs ministry accessed by business intelligence platform Tofler.
Amazon Corporate Holdings were allotted 145.9 crore shares and Amazon.com Inc another 67,452 shares at a nominal value of ₹10 per share.
The new fund infusion in Amazon’s seller marketplace arm comes days after Amazon Pay, the digital payments unit of Amazon India, raised ₹1000 crore from Amazon Corporate Holdings and Amazon.com Inc, earlier this month.
Previously, Amazon Pay also raised ₹450 crore ahead of the Diwali season sales from its US parent to compete with Flipkart during the month-long festive season sales. Those funds were also raised by Amazon Corporate Holdings and Amazon.com Inc.
As a part of its month-long festive season sale, Amazon India said that almost 79% of new customers were from non-metro cities such as Ernakulam, Guntur, Krishna and Godavari.
Kiranas and local businesses that joined the Local Shops programme, launched in April 2020, registered nearly two-fold growth during festive sales. Categories such as large appliances, kitchen essentials, home entertainment and furniture continued to be top selling products for the Local Shops programme, the company said in a statement earlier this month.
The US-based e-commerce major has on-boarded more than 300,000 of the total 850,000 sellers listed on Amazon India since January 2020. The company has also helped Indian MSMEs export $1 billion in shipments in the last 12 months, under its ‘Global Selling’ programme, it said earlier this year.
