With $1 billion in a year, team India is just fabulous: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

September 29, 2014

Amazons Bezos

Bangalore, Sep 29: India has surpassed the highest expectations for Amazon, the company's founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said, promising to keep the money tap open for a business that he announced has sold goods worth more than $1 billion (Rs 6,000 crore) in just over a year of operations.

"We had very high expectations and this team has blown past our highest expectations... It's going extraordinarily well," said Bezos, 50, who is making his second visit to India and his first after Amazon launched its India retail business in June 2013. "The results are very good. Now that's why we are doubling down our investments... If there is an opportunity to invest more, we will. We are not capital-constrained, we are ideas-constrained he said.

In July, Bezos committed to invest $2 billion in India, just a day after India's biggest online retailer Flipkart announced $1 billion in funding, setting the stage for a battle for top honours in a market that retail advisory Technopak expects to be worth $32 billion (Rs 1.9 lakh crore) by 2020.

With an estimated net worth of $30 billion, Bezos is one of the world's richest men and India is crucial to his plans for Amazon, given the country's size and potential, and especially since it has failed to make much headway in China.

Unfazed by Alibaba

His company launched relatively late in this country. Amazon's share price has fallen by around 20% on the Nasdaq this year, and China's Alibaba is flush with cash after its IPO and ready to challenge Bezos around the world, including India. But Bezos, who swears by the credo of long-term thinking, is unfazed.

"Judging just based on results, I would say we have come exactly at the right time," Bezos said in response to a question about whether he has left India until too late, and let out a full-throated guffaw, one of several that punctuated the 40-minute interview.

Amazon's main rivals in India are Bangalore-based Flipkart and Snapdeal, the Delhi-based company that counts eBay, Azim Premji and Ratan Tata as investors. Together, they have sold goods worth more than $4 billion, with Flipkart alone estimated to have crossed $2 billion. Alibaba, too, is keen on India, and the Chinese company has the money, experience and ambition to succeed here.

Does Alibaba's $25-billion IPO earlier this month put Bezos under added pressure? "If so, I haven't felt it," he said, bellowing once again with laughter and reiterating his focus on good business results over the long term.

Asked what was his message for Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal of Flipkart (both former employees of Amazon India) especially after it appeared to have tauntingly welcomed him with giant billboards across Bangalore, including one outside the Sheraton hotel where he is staying, announcing its upcoming 'Big Billion Day' sale, Bezos refused to be drawn to speak about competition.

"I have this long-standing practice about not talking about other companies. We have a somewhat unusual or rather unique approach of mostly ignoring our competitors," he said.

With revenue of nearly $75 billion in 2013 and a market value of $150 billion, Amazon is best-known as an online retailer. But it also runs a fastgrowing cloud computing business called Amazon Web Services and makes Kindle tablets and Fire smartphones. Bezos, in his personal capacity, bought The Washington Post newspaper last year. In India, Amazon started its technology operation first and employs a total of about 12,000 staff at offices in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and Delhi.

Dressed casually in beige trousers and a light blue shirt, Bezos was unstinting in his praise for country head Amit Agarwal, whose team has made sure that India is the fastest country to reach $1 billion in gross sales for Amazon. "He is going to blush because I am going to say so many good things," Bezos at the start of the interview said about his former technical advisor at Seattle headquarters.

Some of the innovations by the India operation are being exported to the rest of the world, Bezos said, pointing to its 'Easy Ship' service of delivering goods for sellers who don't stock their products with Amazon.

"I am super excited," he said. Traditionally, Amazon has grown organically but it is open to acquisitions in India, Bezos said, as he spoke of the Indian operation along with AWS, Kindle and fashion as the company's new frontiers. "Mostly we grow organically and that's true in India. But if there are opportunities to do acquisitions, we'll always consider."

Asked whether India's marketplace-based e-retailing model was a bother - Amazon operates an inventory-based model at home - Bezos said his company had no issues whatsoever, dispelling a perception that the Indian system was an irritant and he would lobby with the government during this visit to change it. "Our marketplace model is working phenomenally well... I always tell my team that whatever the rules are, we are the ones who would have to adapt to the local rules," he said.

Some five years ago, Bezos made a quiet two-week visit to India, allocating the first half of his trip for business and rest for leisure. The father of four took his nine-year-old son to the main tourist attractions, including the Taj Mahal in Agra and Varanasi, a city now represented in the Lok Sabha by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"I find India and the people not just energetic but personally energising," he said.

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Agencies
June 27,2020

Mumbai, Jun 27: The Bombay High Court observed that COVID-19 patients from poor and indigent sections cannot be expected to produce documentary proof to avail subsidised or free treatment while getting admitted to hospitals.

The court on Friday was hearing a plea filed by seven residents of a slum rehabilitation building in Bandra, who had been charged ₹ 12.5 lakh by K J Somaiya Hospital for COVID-19 treatment between April 11 and April 28.

The bench of Justices Ramesh Dhanuka and Madhav Jamdar directed the hospital to deposit ₹10 lakh in the court.

The petitioners had borrowed money and managed to pay ₹10 lakh out of ₹12.5 lakh that the hospital had demanded, after threatening to halt their discharge if they failed to clear the bill, counsel Vivek Shukla informed the court.

According to the plea, the petitioners were also overcharged for PPE kits and unused services.

On June 13, the court had directed the state charity commissioner to probe if the hospital had reserved 20% beds for poor and indigent patients and provided free or subsidised treatment to them.

Last week, the joint charity commissioner had informed the court that although the hospital had reserved such beds, it had treated only three poor or indigent persons since the lockdown.

It was unfathomable that the hospital that claimed to have reserved 90 beds for poor and indigent patients had treated only three such persons during the pandemic, advocate Shukla said.

He further argued that COVID-19 patients, who are in distress, cannot be expected to produce income certificate and such documents as proof.

However, senior advocate Janak Dwarkadas, who represented the hospital, said the petitioners did not belong to economically weak or indigent categories and had not produced documents to prove the same.

A person who is suffering from a disease like COVID-19 cannot be expected to produce certificates from a tehsildar or social welfare officer before seeking admission in the hospital, the bench noted and asked the hospital to deposit ₹10 lakh in court within two weeks.

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Agencies
July 4,2020

The Mars Colour Camera (MCC) onboard ISRO's Mars Orbiter Mission has captured the image of Phobos, the closest and biggest moon of Mars.

The image was taken on July 1 when MOM was about 7,200 km from Mars and 4,200 km from Phobos.

"Spatial resolution of the image is 210 m.

This is a composite image generated from 6 MCC frames and has been color corrected," ISRO said in an update along with the image.

Phobos is largely believed to be made up of carbonaceous chondrites.

According to ISRO, "the violent phase that Phobos has encountered is seen in the large section gouged out from a past collision (Stickney crater) and bouncing ejecta."

"Stickney, the largest crater on Phobos along with the other craters (Shklovsky, Roche & Grildrig) are also seen in this image," it said.

The mission also known as Mangalyaan was initially meant to last six months, but subsequently ISRO had said it had enough fuel for it to last "many years."

The country had on September 24, 2014 successfully placed the Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft in orbit around the red planet, in its very first attempt, thus breaking into an elite club.

ISRO had launched the spacecraft on its nine-month- long odyssey on a homegrown PSLV rocket from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh on November 5, 2013.

It had escaped the earth's gravitational field on December 1, 2013.

The Rs 450-crore MOM mission aims at studying the Martian surface and mineral composition as well as scan its atmosphere for methane (an indicator of life on Mars).

The Mars Orbiter has five scientific instruments - Lyman Alpha Photometer (LAP), Methane Sensor for Mars (MSM), Mars Exospheric Neutral Composition Analyser (MENCA), Mars Colour Camera (MCC) and Thermal Infrared Imaging Spectrometer

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Agencies
May 14,2020

Social media platform WhatsApp assured the Supreme Court on Wednesday that it will not roll out its payment services without complying with all payment regulations and norms in the country.

A bench headed by Chief Justice S.A. Bobde and comprising Justices Indu Malhotra and Hrishikesh Roy took up the matter through video conferencing. Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, representing the social media platform, said "WhatsApp Inc makes a statement on behalf of his client that they will not go ahead with the payments' scheme without complying with all the regulations in force."

The statement was made during the hearing of a petition seeking a ban on payment through WhatsApp, as it does not conform to the data localization norms. The top court took the assurance made by WhatsApp on record.

WhatsApp made the statement during the hearing of a plea seeking a ban on its payment service, for not being in line with data localization norms.

In 2018, WhatsApp was granted a beta licence to launch its payment service, but a dedicated and separate app is yet to be launched. A petition was moved in the apex court that WhatsApp's existing model for its payments service should be declared inconsistent with the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) Scheme, as a separate dedicated app has not been offered by the company.

The petitioner NGO, Good Governance Chambers, argued that the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) must change its model on the lines of the UPI payment scheme, and its operations may be suspended until these conditions are met.

The apex court today asked the Centre, Facebook and WhatsApp to file their replies within three weeks and it will take up the matter thereafter. The court noted that the government may process the applications filed by WhatsApp in accordance with the law and there is no stay on the same. Facebook was represented by senior advocate Arvind Datar.

The petitioner argued that lapses have been found in relation to WhatsApp's claims of having a secure and safe technological interface for securing sensitive user data.

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