Helped 2.5 mn MSMEs in India go online, enabled exports worth $3 bn: Amazon

Amazon India on Thursday said it has digitised 2.5 million MSMEs, enabled cumulative exports worth $3 billion and helped create nearly one million jobs in the country

Amazon India on Thursday said it has digitised 2.5 million MSMEs, enabled cumulative exports worth USD 3 billion and helped create nearly one million jobs in the country.

Last year, Amazon had announced an investment of USD 1 billion to digitally enable 10 million micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), enable e-commerce exports worth USD 10 billion and create one million additional jobs in India by 2025.

"Since the last Sambhav announcement (in January 2020), more than 2.5 lakh new sellers have come online and joined Amazon, the rate at which sellers have come online has gone by 50 per cent post COVID-19, Amit Agarwal, Global Senior Vice President and Country Head of Amazon India, told PTI.

Nearly a third of these sellers are coming and signing up in local Indian languages like Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and Marathi, he stated.

He added that its Local Shops programme which brings neighbourhood kirana stores online - has grown 10 times over the last six months to exceed more than 50,000 offline retailers.

With 2.5 million MSMEs cumulative and an annual run rate of hundreds of thousands of them coming online with the rate only going up, we are very confident of our ability to continue driving momentum in this area to digitise 10 million SMEs by 2025, Agarwal said.

He noted that Amazon's exports program Global Selling -- took three years to clock the first billion in cumulative exports, while the second billion came in 18 months and the third one has taken just 12 months. More than 70,000 sellers are now part of the programme.

Also, Amazon had created about 7,00,000 jobs until last year and just in the last one year during COVID-19, it has created an incremental 3,00,000 jobs for a total of one million jobs, he added.

I think these are very important milestones for e-commerce in India, not just for Amazon in how we are able to bring digitisation, have meaningful scale and impact, not only for the economic recovery of the country E-commerce will be an important social economic leveler that creates sustained jobs in the country, he said.