Almost everybody with a TV I know has a Fire TV stick. Most of my friends have at least one Echo device. A couple have even gone all in and put an Echo in every room.
Prime video is extremely popular, they produce a lot of Indian content and license a lot of regional stuff too. They even telecast a live cricket series recently.
They've even raised prices for Prime subscription, which indicates that they're confident people will pay more for what they're offering. Hardly the signs of "scaling back".
Personally, I feel the article is not well informed. For example it makes the assertion that Amazon is lagging Flipkart. It is absolutely not. Flipkart is a joke. Flipkart sells a lot of exclusive mobile phones on razor thin margins (maybe even net loss), and since phones are relatively high value items the GMV turns out to be higher than Amazon's. Amazon doesn't offer deep discounts on phones, which is fine IMO. GMV is not everything.
Similarly, TFA references Amazon’s "shutdown of multiple services".
1. Amazon Distribution - this was a very small scale operation, maybe the pilot just didn't work out. This was operating in 3 districts in the country (we have 766 districts).
2. Food delivery - this is a tough nut to crack in India, and Amazon was incredibly late to the game. Even established players (Zomato, Swiggy) are always struggling. People simply aren't ready to pay a substantial portion of the bill for delivery in India. This may well turn out to be a wise decision in the long-term. There might be a long struggle and no big profits in this game.
3. Online learning platform - I have no idea why Amazon thought this was an appropriate market for them. They were very late in this too. The competition is cut-throat, and it is a really unique market. I don't think they would have been able to make a space for themselves here.
On the other hand, Amazon launched its second AWS region in India and pledged to invest $4.4 billion in its cloud operations in the country by 2030. Hardly a "scaling back".[1]
[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/27/amazon-shutting-down-whole...