Amazon's Amit Agarwal to head emerging markets, Manish Tiwari to lead India consumer biz

Amit Agarwal, Amazon India’s country head, will now also lead the e-commerce giant's business in emerging markets, the company said on March 1.

Manish Tiwari, vice-president of the consumer business, will be the country manager for consumer business in India.  Tiwari joined Amazon in 2016 and used to head the Unilever business in the Gulf region earlier.

“Amit Agarwal will be taking on an expanded role leading Amazon’s presence in the Emerging Markets in addition to his current role as the India head,” an Amazon India spokesperson said.

The development and growth of the emerging markets were key to Amazon’s future success, and the new team would be uniquely qualified to move fast in identifying and solving for common customer needs, the spokesperson said.

“We are excited this change meaningfully enhances our ability to serve and delight new and existing customers, and enable our selling partners to grow their business in India and across our emerging markets,” the company said.

The development comes at a time when Amazon is caught in a legal battle with Reliance Industries over the acquisition of Kishore Biyani’s Future Group.

The legal battle between Amazon and Future began back in 2020 when Amazon invoked arbitration after Future Retail announced an asset sale deal with RIL’s wholly-owned subsidiary Reliance Retail.

On February 1, the Supreme Court set aside a Delhi High Court, asked that the case concerning enforcement of the emergency award to be heard afresh by the high court.

Reliance Industries has stepped in to rescue Future Retail Limited (FRL), taking over the operations of its stores and offering jobs to its employees.

Reliance Retail has started taking over operations of Future Retail stores such as Big Bazaar and replaced them with its brand stores, reportedly.

Future Group has been finding it difficult to finance its working capital needs. In a stock exchange filing on February 26, Future Retail said it plans to scale down its offline operations to reduce its losses in the coming months and instead focus on expanding its online and home delivery business.

“The company has been finding it difficult to finance the working capital needs. Increasing losses at store level is a grave concern and is a vicious cycle where larger operations are leading to higher losses,” it added.

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