Digbijay Mishra | TNNBengaluru: Amazon has infused Rs 450 crore in its payments unit, Amazon Pay(India), taking the total investment to over Rs 1,000 crore in the first half of 2019.
While Amazon continues to focus on its e-wallet Amazon Pay, the e-tailer recently enabled peer-to-peer payments via Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
The latest capital infusion was approved earlier this month where Amazon Singapore put Rs 449 crore, while the rest came from Amazon Mauritius, according to regulatory documents sourced from Tofler — a business intelligence platform. In total, Amazon has now invested Rs 3,221 crore in its payments entity since its launch in 2016.
Amazon is also expanding its payments business outside the Amazon’s marketplace by on-boarding major merchants like food delivery platform Swiggy, movie ticketing player BookMyShow and online travel agent Cleartrip among others. For Amazon Pay, which is focusing on broader UPI adoption, it is looking to expand presence in the offline channel by getting new merchants to accept payments via Amazon Pay.
Outside the US, India is one of the most important markets for Amazon, which explains the continuous investments here. It has already pumped in Rs 27,290 crore in the flagship unit Amazon Seller Services — which runs its India marketplace. Amazon’s increased focus on payments in India has set the stage for intense competition against incumbents Alibaba and SoftBank-backed Paytm, Flipkart’s PhonePe and Google Pay besides potential entrants, Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio.
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