Amazon says it has digitized 2.5 million MSMEs, created over 1 million jobs in India

Amazon India on Thursday shared a report card of its progress in India. The company essentially provided an update on the progress that it has made on its commitments made at Smbhav Summit last year.

Amazon India today announced that it has digitised 2.5 million medium and small enterprises (MSMEs) in India. The MSMEs that the company has worked with includes artisans and weavers, delivery and logistics service partners among others. The company today said that since January 2020 nearly 250,000 new sellers have joined Amazon’s platform in India.

The company also said that more than 75,000 sellers have registered on the Amazon India marketplace in regional Indian languages, which includes support for Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Kannada. Amazon said that its ‘Local Shops on Amazon’ program that was launched in April 2020 has grown 10 times since its launch and as of now it includes products from over 50,000 offline retailers and neighbourhood stores from across the country.

The company also announced that it has created over 300,000 million direct and indirect jobs in India across industries including information technology, skill development, content creation, retail, logistics, and manufacturing, which includes job roles in its corporate offices in diverse areas including Machine Learning (ML) and software development, direct and indirect jobs across its fulfilment centres, logistic centres, sales offices, data centres among others in the past year. The company said that all in all, it has helped create over one million direct and indirect jobs in the country since 2013.

Sharing details about its Global Selling program, Amazon India said that in the past year, over 70,000 exporters who are a part of the company’s Amazon Global Selling have cumulatively crossed $3 billion in exports.

“As we continue to work with small and medium businesses in our ecosystem, we remain committed to bringing new tools, technology and innovation that will unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of Indian businesses, boost exports from the country, help create jobs at scale and contribute to the vision of an Aatmanirbhar Bharat. As the world around us is more digital than ever with the internet and technology becoming an integral part of our lives, we see a massive opportunity to empower millions of SMBs across the country and remain committed for Amazon to be a catalyst for such accelerated progress,” Amit Agarwal, Global Senior Vice President and Country Head of Amazon India, said.

The announcement follows the announcement made by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos last year wherein he had announced that his company would be investing $1 billion in digitising small and medium businesses (SMBs) on its platform in India.

The Amazon boss while kicking off his India tour with the company’s Smbhav conference had said that his company will help SMBs export products worth $10 billion by 2025.

“Over the next five years, Amazon will invest an incremental $1 billion to digitise micro and small businesses in cities, towns, and villages across India, helping them reach more customers than ever before. This initiative will use Amazon's global footprint to create $10 billion in India exports by 2025," Bezos had said at the time.