Friday, Amazon will stop delivering food in India, a $20 billion food delivery market in India by the end of the year.
With effect from December 29th, Amazon in India will no longer be offering its food delivery service, Amazon Food. On May 2020, it began selling its food products in certain areas of Bengaluru. The company then expanded the service citywide by forming partnerships with more eateries, but it never made a concerted effort to publicize or market the service.
Customers have told us for a while that they want to be able to order ready-to-eat meals on Amazon in addition to shopping for groceries and other household items. This is especially important now, the business noted at the time of Food’s release, because it allows people to “remain home safe.”
In three years, Sanford C. Bernstein predicts India’s meal delivery sector to be worth $20 billion. Zomato, which is traded on public markets, has a little market advantage over Swiggy, which is funded by the likes of SoftBank, Prosus Ventures, and Invesco.
We don’t make these kinds of decisions lightly,” Amazon stated on Friday. To ensure a smooth transition for our present customers and partners, we will be ending these projects gradually, while also providing assistance to affected staff. Amazon’s main priority is “to continue to offer our ever-expanding customer base the finest online shopping experience possible, with the widest assortment of products available at the best prices and most convenient ordering options.
This is just one component of Amazon’s larger reorganization in that country. They made the announcement earlier this week that their Academy ed tech service will be ending operations in the country next year.
Amazon sees a great deal of potential in the Indian market, so much so that the company has invested more than $6.5 billion in its Indian operations. However, a recent assessment by Sanford C. Bernstein shows that the company is lagging behind Walmart’s Flipkart and having difficulty expanding into smaller Indian cities and towns.
Analysts estimated that Amazon India’s GMV in 2021 will be between $18 billion and $20 billion, putting it behind Flipkart’s GMV of $23 billion.
