Amazon Wholesale saw Rs 7,069cr FY17 revenue

MUMBAI: Amazon Wholesale, which acts as a distribution platform for the e-commerce major, clocked Rs 7,069 crore in revenue for the financial year ending March 31, 2017. The full-year revenue numbers are exceptionally higher compared to a mere Rs 2.6 crore that the unit had racked up in the previous year. Amazon Wholesale, registered a Rs 11-crore profit, as reported with the Registrar of Companies, and sourced by TOI from the financial data platform Tofler.

Expand

The Amazon unit, which was till a couple of years ago largely inactive in India, has stepped on the gas after the Indian government issued a regulation in March 2016, saying that an online retailer cannot generate more than 25% of its

overall gross sales from one particular vendor. Since then, Amazon Wholesale has become a significant distributor of smartphones and other products for vendors who sell on the Amazon marketplace.

Flipkart, too, runs a similar distribution platform for merchants under Flipkart India, which is a Singapore entity. Flipkart had pumped Rs 4,500 crore into this unit earlier this year. Amazon has since the past two years reduced its dependence on its largest seller Cloudtail, its joint venture with Infosys founder N R Narayana Murthy’s family office Catamaran Ventures. Along with pushing its distribution arm, it had also struck another JV with the Patni family to launch Appario Retail.

Started in 2013, the wholesale retail vertical, which also runs AmazonBusiness here, has so far managed to get about Rs 700 crore in multiple tranches from its parent.