Amazon India ramps up investments to expand operations network for festive season demand: Abhinav Singh, VP

Amazon

Amazon India is making significant investments and scaling up its operations network as it prepares to serve millions of customers throughout India during the Great Indian Festival sale and the rest of the festive season, a senior company executive has said.

To meet the heightened demand for festival goods, the number of sellers has increased from 14 lakh to 16 lakh in the past few months. It has also onboarded over 110,000 seasonal job opportunities, including direct and indirect jobs, across cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Lucknow and Chennai.

“Over the last 12 years, we have digitised over 1.6 million sellers on Amazon.in, building a network which helped facilitate the export of over $13 billion. We've created over 1.3 million direct and indirect jobs,” Abhinav Singh, VP of Operations, Amazon India, told Moneycontrol.

He said Amazon has ensured that it can meet the increased customer demand for this festival season by expanding the capacity of its network.

Amazon offers same-day delivery of over 10 lakh products, one-day delivery across over 40 lakh products, free with no minimum cart value, said Singh, who joined Amazon as part of the India operations founding team in 2012.

It has added three new fulfilment centres to its network, which consists of over 43 million cubic feet of storage space, sort centres in 19 states, and about 2,000 delivery stations.

The firm expects its flagship sale event, the Amazon Great Indian Festival (AGIF), to be the biggest this year. AGIF 2024 starts on September 27 and Prime members have 24 hours of early access.

Amazon's rival Flipkart witnessed a record 1.4 billion customers visiting its platform during its flagship festival sales event ‘The Big Billion Days’ (TBBD) 2023.

The company is also augmenting its freight network with additional freighters just for this festival season.

For the festive sales, Amazon India will launch more than 25,000 new products, including 5,000 new launches from established brands.

“We are faster in terms of delivery to customers than we have ever been. We will make a million different SKUs/products available to customers on the same day, and over 4 million products are available to you the next day,” he said.

The executive also said that the growing demand for convenience and speed is leading to the rapid expansion of quick commerce in India, which has reinforced Amazon’s focus on building a strong logistics network. The comments come at a time when competition is growing in the quick commerce space, which has surged to a $5 billion market in India in just three years. There is also talk of the American e-commerce launching its quick commerce offering in India, likely in the first quarter of next year.

“We have a vast network of faster-than-same-day delivery, available to Prime customers for free, without any basket building. So, our perspective will always be backward from the customer and we want to ensure we can offer the fastest possible speed and the vastest possible selection,” he said. “The rapid growth of quick commerce is exciting.”