World's largest e-commerce player Amazon has invested an additional Rs 2,600 crore in its India operations ahead of the US retail giant Walmart taking over the country's e-tail major Flipkart.
"The Amazon board has accorded consent to allot 260 crore shares of Rs 10 face value aggregating Rs 2,600 crore to the shareholders on rights basis in the ratio of their shareholding," said Amazon Services Ltd in a filing with the Registrar of Companies (RoC).
According to the Chennai-based business intelligence platform Paper.vc, which sourced the regulatory documents, the Seattle-based Amazon infused the additional capital into the Singapore-based Amazon Corporate Holdings Ltd and Amazon.com incs Ltd, which operate Amazon India e-tail business.
"Though the Board accorded consent on April 26, the regulatory filing was made with the RoC on Tuesday by Amazon Company Secretary Ankur Sharma," Paper.vc Vivek Durai told IANS on Wednesday.
Amazon Seller Services helps Indian sellers to hawk their diverse products online across India and worldwide.
Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos had earlier committed to invest a whopping $5 billion in India to cash-in on the rapid growth in e-commerce.
Interestingly, this comes at a time when Amazon’s biggest Indian rival Flipkart is set to sell a majority stake to Amazon’s global rival Walmart for nearly $12 billion along with selling a minority stake to Google’s parent Alphabet.
Bloomberg reported last week that Flipkart’s board approved to sell around 75% stake to Walmart. As part of the deal, SoftBank would sell all of its stake in Flipkart at a valuation of roughly $20 billion. However, investors such as Tencent, Microsoft and Tiger Global are not likely to exit completely.
According to a FactodDaily report, the deal will be a cash-and-stock buyout for around $14.6 billion.
Growing at about 30 per cent cumulative average growth rate (CAGR), the e-commerce business is projected to be about $200 billion of the gross merchandise value in a decade.