Amazon, facing unfavorable regulatory environment in India, struggles to expand | Hacker News Reader

Amazon, facing unfavorable regulatory environment in India, struggles to expand

techcrunch.com

13 pointsjmsflknr5 comments

On the top India feels like a lot of smart wrt regulation, with all of them sometimes HNs dream set. But having been there, inside the software communities and working on govt projects, its all show on top. There is a lot of corruption and a lot of “I need power” game going on. I have no source to cite, but I wouldn’t be surprised if mega corps like Reliance and Adani have a motives and lobby that make this happen. Both of them own significant amount of properties that directly compete with Amazon.

That is no different than any other large market with established players. Amazon in India is a relatively new entrant compared to established players that have multiple decades of India experience having faced different regulatory regimes across different parties that have been in power (Reliance, Aditya Birla Group, Tatas etc.,).

But India is also a highly fragmented hyperlocal market. There are a lot of startups in this space addressing logistics, fulfillment, mobility etc., There are multiple startups that seem to have cracked fresh groceries / fresh meat/seafood delivery (less than 30 minutes delivery in many cases). So, while these upstarts are ambitious and want to grow, they are also satisfied to play in a small geographic area (which is difficult for Amazon to follow). Therefore, by sheer numbers, Amazon has a lot of competition.

One place where they seemed to have made a difference is in their approach to Amazon Prime Video in India where they seem to have greater success relative to their pale cousin Netflix. They seem to have done this by promoting the local talent and partnership with local talent.

The small business owners in India are a huge voting block and therefore wield significant local political power. That has been an issue that Amazon had to contend with due to the diverse political spectrum across the various states in India (again, not very different from what an Amazon/Walmart may face in any given region in say the US).

The government is also committed to building the Open Network for Digital Commerce which is a very early initiative to disaggregate e-Commerce and is hoping to repeat the success of adoption of the UPI payment network that revolutionized diigital payments in India. If it succeeds, it would upend the marketplace model of companies like Amazon/Flipkart etc., That is a bigger threat and one to watch for.

https://pib.gov.in/Pressreleaseshare.aspx?PRID=1814143

https://github.com/ONDC-Official/ONDC-Protocol-Specs

https://developers.becknprotocol.io/docs/introduction/video-...

India has some interesting regulations. Reada like a laundry list of regulations we would all dream up in the comments of an anti-trust story.

Very smart for India to protect its market.

I strongly believe AWS and Amazon's retail revenues need to be split somehow. It is, on top of all the usual monopoly problems, very misleading to investors.

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