Amazon India to scale up private label business to close gap with Flipkart

Amazon India is planning to scale up its private label business this year to close the gap with its direct competitor Flipkart, a home-grown e-commerce portal that worked aggressively to add private labels over the last year.

The company would look to aggressively expand its private label this year, with potential new category launches, said Amazon India vice president Manish Tiwary in an interview with LiveMint. He, however, did not specify categories in which the company plans to launch new private brands.

Amazon India may follow Flipkart’s strategy and launch a separate private label brand for certain large and smaller appliances, according to a news report in LiveMint.

The company’s spokesperson declined to comment and said, “We do not comment on speculation around what we may or may not do in the future. However, we are a customer-centric company and our goal is to provide the widest selection to the maximum number of customers. We will therefore continue to evaluate any need gaps in selection that may be served by launching specific products in that category to help achieve this goal of widest selection.”

Private labels are the products manufactured by third-party manufacturers for the brand. Recently, Flipkart ventured into private labels for smartphone business. The home-grown e-commerce portal launched the Billion Plus smartphone under the Billion brand, which the company is marketing as Flipkart’s smartphone brand. Soon after, Amazon also followed and launched 10.Or (Tenor) smartphone brand.