CNBC-TV18 Exclusive: We comply with the law of the land in letter and spirit, says Amazon India

Amazon India's core business is showing the right financial characteristics and revenue is covering the variable costs. That’s the word coming in from Amit Agarwal of Amazon India in an exclusive interview with CNBC-TV18’s Shereen Bhan.

Agarwal spoke about Amazon's seven-year journey in India so far.  “We launched in 2013. Three things that we have always believed... Globally customers care about selection, value, and convenience. So our approach in India over the last seven years has been nothing different."

The e-retail giant's India head explained his bet on SMEs. "Amazon has been been very focused on enabling the SMEs digitally. With more than tens of millions of SMEs present in India, it is a huge opportunity to unlock,” he added.

Agarwal also explained Amazon India's focus on technology. “The second bit we have been focused on is how do we use technology to remove defects from the system. Technology sort of makes value generation easier for SMEs because their costs go down, their defects go down and they can sell more and that value can be passed to customers and in the end, create more and more infrastructure so that we can deliver faster, reliably and offer more convenience to our customers,” he said.

The last seven years have seen Amazon India grow exponentially. From just a few million, the website now boasts of more than 200 million products for sale.

"There were about a hundred sellers on our website in 2013. Today we have more than 600,000 selling partners and ecosystem partners who are part of the Amazon family. In some sense, we serve  100 percent of India’s pin codes. When we launched we used to deliver in about 10 cities and we used to get emails asking when are you going to launch in my city,” he further mentioned.

Speaking about Amazon Prime's success, Agarwal noted, “It is our unique loyalty program that brings digital benefits and physical benefits together. You can add free unlimited videos, add free music and unlimited one-day delivery. Today we have Prime members in 97 percent of India’s pin code, which is practically every corner of the country and Prime has doubled in the last 18 months. So all-in-all it has been just humbling to see this journey happen.”

Agarwal also made light of regulatory headwinds and challenges. He said, “To me, the regulation part is the simplest of all the problems, amongst all the problems that you deal with in some ways, because the principle is very simple. We have a very high bar of compliance. We will comply with the law of the land in letter and spirit."