Minister’s remarks come a day after Bezos announced $1 billion investment
Amazon is not doing India a favour by investing a billion dollars, said Piyush Goyal, Minister of Commerce and Industry, a day after the e-commerce giant’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos announced the incremental investment in the country.
Speaking at the Raisina Dialogue 2020, an annual event organised by the Observer Research Foundation, Goyal said on Thursday, “they may have put in a billion dollars but then if they make a loss of a billion dollars every year, then they jolly well have to finance those billion dollars. So it’s not as if they’re doing a great favour to India when they invest a billion dollars.”
Bezos, considered the richest man in the world with a net worth of $117 billion, is in India for the first edition of his firm’s micro, small and medium enterprises focused event — Amazon Smbhav. In New Delhi, he announced the investment of $1 billion, in addition to the $5 billion Amazon has invested over the past five years.
The latest round of investment will go towards digitising 10 million MSME businesses in India, and help such firms export $10 billion worth of “Make in India” goods by 2025 through its platform. However, Goyal was clearly not pleased with the announcement. Talking about the losses incurred by Amazon’s marketplace, he added that if the company was bringing in money “largely to finance its losses”, which amount to $1-1.5 billion a year at a turnover of $10 billion, then it raises the question of how the losses occurred.
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