Amazon unscathed by FDI curbs

Chennai: The recent FDI regulations on the e-commerce sector had a minimal impact on Amazon’s business in the March quarter. The regulations had come into the force from February 2019.

‘In India last quarter was an uncertain period with the FDI ruling. We made some changes to our structure to stay in compliance with all regulations. There were a few days of downtime for some of our selection. But for the full quarter the impact was minimal. And we are in compliance and very, very happy with the progress of the business in India,” said Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky during an analyst call after the announcement of the quarterly results.

The clarification on the FDI regulations had forced the e-commerce players, especially the large ones like Amazon and Flipkart, to make several structural changes. Amazon had to partly divest shares in its seller entities–Cloudtail and Appario. The regulations also raised questions on exclusive tie-ups with brands. Industry watchers had expected a short-term disruption in the e-commerce ecosystem that could affect customer experience and sales and lead to more cash burn.

However, the global entity has found that the disruption has not affected the quarterly growth much.

“As far as international business is concerned, in Q3 and Q4 we made some noise, timing with the Diwali holidays in India. We feel pretty good about the Q1 (January-March) growth there, even despite some downtime in India,” Olsavsky said.