Only a few months into his new job as CEO of Amazon.com Inc.’s India business, Manish Tiwary had to make a tough choice: how aggressively should the US e-commerce giant compete for media rights to the Indian Premier League?
Getting the rights to stream the cricket tournament digitally would be a big win for Amazon and could bring in hundreds of millions of new customers. But Tiwary and his colleagues will have to go up against big companies with lots of money, like Reliance Industries Ltd. Amazon stopped the auction before it even started. Tiwary and other top executives in Seattle decided that those billions of dollars would be better spent on Amazon’s online shopping business.
“The final decision was based on cost numbers,” Tiwary said in one of his first interviews as country head. The interview took place on the 27th floor of Amazon’s India offices in the Yeshwanthpur neighbourhood in the northern part of Bangalore.
It’s a sign that the 52-year-old former Unilever Plc executive, who started his new job in February, will have to make some hard choices. The nearly 1.4 billion-person country may be Amazon’s most interesting long-term prospect, but it’s also one of the hardest because it has strong local competition, a stubborn government, and consumers who care a lot about prices.
Amazon started to focus on India when its founder, Jeff Bezos, went there often and became friends with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The company has spent more than $6.5 billion, hired 110,000 people, and built 60 warehouses in India to grow its business there.
Tiwary thinks that the next stage of growth will come from expanding outside of India’s big cities to Bharat, where people are less wealthy and don’t speak English. He thinks that this campaign will get the next 100 million people to shop.
