MUMBAI: The world’s largest online retailer is facing off in India against a new name in e-commerce that was founded by former Amazon employees.
Amazon.com Inc. said it will invest $2 billion to expand its Indian business, a day after local rival Flipkart raised $1 billion to fund its own expansion.
Launched last year, Amazon’s India division has been making a big push into the country’s small but fast-growing online retail market. It has been running front-page advertisements in newspapers and touting one-day delivery.
Gearing up to fight the online giant, Indian e-commerce company, Flipkart, raised $1 billion in new capital on Tuesday. Both companies claim they are the largest online retailer in India, though neither releases its sales numbers
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos touted India’s potential in a statement announcing the $2 billion investment.
“At current scale and growth rates, India is on track to be our fastest country ever to a billion dollars in gross sales,” Bezos said. “We’ve never seen anything like it.”
Online retailing accounted for $2.3 billion of India’s $400 billion retail market in 2013, but Crisil Research estimated in a February report that sales are growing at more than 50 percent annually and are on track to reach $8.3 billion by 2016.
Amazon is limited by Indian law to providing products through third-party merchants. Despite that, Amazon India has expanded to 17 million products, it said.
Flipkart, founded in 2007, has at times been called the Amazon of India. It was founded by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, who worked at Amazon before returning home to India to start their online business.
Among the investors in Flipkart’s recent $1 billion fundraising round are Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, GIC, along with existing investors Accel Partners, DST Blobal and Morgan Stanley Investment Management, the company said.
The company said the funds will be used to invest in expansion, especially in mobile technology.
The funding will help the business develop into a “technology powerhouse,” Flipkart said in an earlier statement.
Flipkart says it has 22 million registered users and handles 5 million shipments per month. Flipkart also recently acquired Indian online fashion retailer Myntra to strengthen market share.
India’s Finance Minister recently announced plans to allow foreign investment in e-commerce, paving the way for Indian companies to gain more support from abroad.
Amazon to invest $2bn to expand in India
Amazon to invest $2bn to expand in India
Saudi Arabia set to attract $500bn in private investment, Al-Falih tells conference
RIYADH: Sustainability, technology, and financial models were among the core topics discussed by financial leaders during the first day of the Momentum 2025 Development Finance Conference in Riyadh.
The three-day event features more than 100 speakers and over 20 exhibitors, with the central theme revolving around how development financial institutions can propel economic growth.
Speaking during a panel titled “The Sustainable Investment Opportunity,” Saudi Investment Minister Khalid Al-Falih elaborated on the significant investment progress made in the Kingdom.
“We estimate in the midterm of 2030 or maybe a couple of years more or so, about $1 trillion of infrastructure investment,” he said, adding: “We estimate, as a minimum, 40 percent of this infrastructure is going to be financed by the private sector, so we’re talking in the next few years $400 (billion) to $500 billion.”
The minister drew a correlation between the scale of investment needs and rising global energy demand, especially as artificial intelligence continues to evolve within data processing and digital infrastructure in global spheres.
“The world demand of energy is continuing to grow and is going to grow faster with the advent of the AI processing requirements (…) so our target of the electricity sector is 50 percent from renewables, and 50 percent from gas,” he added.
Al-Falih underscored the importance of AI as a key sector within Saudi Arabia’s development and investment strategy. He made note of the scale of capital expected to go into the sector in coming years, saying: “We have set a very aggressive, but we believe an achievable target, for AI, and we estimate in the short term about $30 billion immediately of investments.”
This emphasis on long-term investment and sustainability targets was echoed across panels at Momentum 2025, during which discussions on essential partnerships between public and private sectors were highlighted.
The shared ambition of translating the Kingdom’s goals into tangible outcomes was particularly essential within the banking sector, as it plays a central role in facilitating both projects and partnerships.
During the “Champions of Sectoral Transformation: Development Funds and Their Ecosystems” panel, Saudi National Bank CEO Tareq Al-Sadhan shed light on the importance of partnerships facilitated via financial institutions.
He explained how they help manage risk while supporting the Kingdom’s ambitions.
“We have different models that we are working on with development funds. We co-financed in certain projects where we see the risk is higher in terms of going alone as a bank to support a certain project,” the CEO said.
Al-Sadhan referred to the role of development funds as an enabler for banks to expand their participation and support for projects without assuming major risk.
“The role of the development fund definitely is to give more comfort to the banking sector to also extend the support … we don’t compete with each other; we always complement each other” he added.
