India is effectively muzzling the two leading US players. and it's tilting the balance in favor of offline commerce, away from digital startups that are India's best bet for rebuilding the economy.
The list of what e-commerce platforms aren’t allowed to do in India has been growing for some time, but the latest prohibition on flash sales has simply gone too far. If the rules get implemented, the entire business model of Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc. could come unstuck before their investments in a market of 1.4 billion people can grow to a rewarding size.
While a lofty public purpose can always be tacked on as an afterthought to the most draconian of regulations, in this case, the fig leaf is thinner than usual. It’s hard to see how “significantly reduced prices, high discounts or any other such promotions or attractive offers” for a period of time “limit customer choice, increase prices and prevent a level playing field.”
The real driving spirit behind the consumer affairs ministry’s new draft guidelines, currently open for public comment, may lie elsewhere. In the garb of checking manipulative behavior by online marketplaces, India is effectively muzzling the two leading U.S. players. It’s also tilting the balance in favor of offline commerce, and away from digital startups that are India’s best bet for rebuilding the pandemic-ravaged economy.
Amazon and Walmart are dominant but in a tiny corner. Overall e-commerce is only 4% of India’s $800 billion retail markets. Yet they’re supposedly exerting such a baleful influence on the natural flow of goods that they must be reined in by, in effect, instructing Amazon not to sell its Made in India Fire TV Sticks — a media streaming device — on its local e-commerce website. Ditto for Walmart. Its physical wholesale operation in the country may not be able to hawk a shirt on Flipkart, the online marketplace it acquired for $16 billion in 2018. And this is when the American retailer is trying hard to blend in. It plans to triple exports from India to $10 billion by 2027 and will float Flipkart in the local equity market.
The Flipkart purchase was Walmart’s most expensive, and perhaps the smoothest moment in its long and turbulent quest to establish a toehold in the country. Soon after the deal, Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest businessman, announced his own ambitious e-commerce plan for linking small independent stores with customers of his then-nascent 4G telecom service. That network now has 420 million-plus subscribers. Ambani is also India’s largest operator of physical stores.
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