Amazon Bets Big on India's Busiest Shopping Season

The web retailer is spending $5 billion, aiming to dominate e-commerce in India.

Amazon to Spend $5 Billion to Dominate India E-Commerce

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By Saritha Rai

October 2, 2016 at 9:00 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

When Jeff Bezos donned a bandhgala jacket two years ago and posed for photographs in India, he wasn't just promoting Amazon.com Inc.'s year-old business in the country. The web retailer's chief executive officer was also putting his reputation on the line to break into the emerging e-commerce market.

Now, with 80 million products for sale, 120,000-plus merchants and more than two dozen warehouses, Bezos's protégé Amit Agarwal is aiming to make Amazon the country's top online store by sales ahead of the Diwali shopping season. Known as the "festival of lights," the run-up to the celebration is India's biggest retail event, when consumers buy everything from clothes and electronics to jewelry and cars. Indians will spend as much as $1.7 billion online during Diwali this year, according to RedSeer Consulting.