The Changing Nature of Amazon’s $10 billion India Bet

Amazon’s history in India goes back nearly two decades. And it did not start with the e-commerce operations that it is synonymous with today. 

In the early 2000s, the Seattle-based online retail giant was just starting to recover from the dotcom crash, and was building out what would ultimately become Amazon Web Services (AWS). It started setting up a base in India, hiring a team of software developers as an offshore centre to support its global operations. 

Called Amazon Development Center (India), it was one of the first entities registered by the Jeff Bezos-owned company in the country back in June 2004. And Amit Agarwal—who came back to lead the e-commerce operations of the company in 2011—was originally in charge of scaling this centre back in 2004-05. 

This unit now provides outsourced services—from customer support to technical aspects to even HR/finance support—to Amazon’s business across Europe and the US, as well as India. 

Since setting up this unit for outsourcing operations, Amazon has hired tens of thousands of employees in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Chennai. Of course, it also launched e-commerce operations in India, starting with Junglee in 2012, and eventually launching Amazon.in the following year.