Manish Tiwary, Country Manager, India Consumer Business Amazon India said: “We have cumulatively created over 11.6 lakh jobs, enabled nearly $5 billion in exports, and digitized over 40 lakh MSMEs in India. As we continue to work with MSMEs across the country, we remain committed to bringing new tools, technology, and innovation that will unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of Indian businesses, boost exports from the country and help create jobs at scale.
Explaining about creating over 11.6 lakh direct and indirect jobs, Amazon stated that its efforts towards digitization of MSMEs, and boosting exports from the country are helping create tens of thousands of livelihood opportunities in the ecosystem.
Amazon has helped create over 135K direct and indirect jobs across industries in the last one year. These jobs are across industries such as IT, E-commerce, Logistics, Manufacturing, Content Creation, Skill Development, and more as well as other indirect jobs that Amazon has helped create in the seller community.
Rationalising Amazon Global Selling on track to cross $5 billion in cumulative e-commerce exports, Amazon said it focused on creating a robust infrastructure to help Indian businesses address customers in 200+ countries and territories, create global brands from India and grow exports strongly through its Global Selling program.
Amazon Global Selling program is recording a rapid momentum and as of now, there are more than one lakh (100K) exporters on the program who are on track to cross $5 billion in cumulative exports. Amazon Global Selling took three years to enable the first billion dollars in cumulative exports and only 17 months to enable the last two billion dollars.
Further, Amazon digitally-enabled more than 4 million MSMEs including sellers, artisans & weavers, delivery & logistics service partners, etc. The Company’s digitization efforts are empowering small businesses including local retail stores, artisans, and grassroot entrepreneurs to reach their customers and broaden their reach even further. Last year, in June, Amazon opened its first Digital Kendra in Surat to bring the benefits of digitization closer to small businesses. The Kendra has already served over 4000 small businesses from Surat and nearby areas in their digitization journey.
At the first edition of its annual event Amazon Smbhav in January 2020, the Jeff Bezos backed company had pledged to digitize 1 crore (10 million) MSMEs, enable $10 billion in cumulative exports and create 20 lakh (2 million) jobs in India by 2025.
It said in a statement, "Amazon is well on track to fulfill these pledges, while in fact doubling its export pledge from India, to now enable $20 billion in cumulative exports from India by 2025."
Later, last year, at Amazon Smbhav 2021, the company announced the $250 MM Amazon Smbhav Venture Fund to invest in startups and entrepreneurs who are focused on technology innovations. The fund is focused on supporting entrepreneurs and startups that are doing innovative work in the area of SMB digitization. As part of the fund, Amazon has already invested in ‘MyGlamm’, ‘M1xchange’, and ‘Small Case’.
The company remains committed to leveraging its people & tech resources to invest in focus areas for the Fund, including multiple new and emerging areas that are seeing a high degree of innovation & entrepreneurial energy, it said in the statement.
"We strongly believe that technology and mobile internet will continue to positively impact India’s economic growth, and we see Amazon playing a larger role in the country’s digital transformation and a modern, thriving digital economy," Tiwary added.
