Amazon India has fallen behind in the e-commerce race to Flipkart and now to Meesho as well, in tier-2 and tier-3 markets. It is the last large player to enter the quick-commerce race in India. Everything that made Amazon largely successful in the U.S. has not fully cut it for them in India, even though they understood India is a very different market and the approach they took in the U.S. might not work well for them here early on

Yet, they have missed out on capitalising on a lot of opportunities because they were slow to react to changing consumer behaviour.

And this losing advantage in some of their verticals makes you think, what are the other businesses where Amazon has a right to win. Is it AWS, streaming or something else? Or will they push forward to make up for the lost opportunities by pouring more money and change their fate.

What does the future hold for Amazon India? And how will the company, famed for its execution, turn things around in India? 

Of course, there have been other regulatory pressures as well, which have halted them from realising their full potential in India and forced them to think outside the business model in which they usually function.

In this episode of Two by Two, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan bring back one of our first guests, Srikanth Rajagopalan, CEO of Perfios Account Aggregation Services and a former ‘Amazonian’, to discuss whether Amazon has lost the e-commerce race in India. Professor Vishal Karungulam, who teaches a breadth of subjects at the Indian School of Business, including software product management, digital innovation, and disruptive technologies, is our second guest.

And they try to uncover over the hour-and-a-half-long discussion where the next big opportunity lies for Amazon India.

Welcome to episode 23 of Two by Two.

This is just 10 minutes from the conversation. But there’s a lot more that we got into in the discussion, including Amazon, the enterprise company, and how Prime and streaming might be moats it might want to rely on.

If you’d like to listen to the full episode, you can head over to The Ken and become a Premium subscriber to catch up on everything else we discussed. Your Premium subscription will also get you access to our long-form stories, newsletters, visual stories and other podcasts that we produce. Or, if you just want to sample full episodes of Two by Two for now, you can do just that by becoming a Premium subscriber on Apple Podcasts at a really great monthly price.

Further reading:

Amazon is not yet in quick commerce. But it’s already different from the pack

Amazon got rid of its largest seller only to replace it with other ‘preferred sellers’

Amazon’s Leadership Principles (recommended by Srikanth)
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This episode of Two by Two was produced by Hari Krishna. Rajiv CN did the mixing and mastering for this episode.

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