Amazon names Samir Kumar as India consumer business head

Amazon has appointed Samir Kumar as the head of its consumer business in India, replacing Manish Tiwary who resigned after nearly nine years at the helm. Kumar, an Amazon veteran with over seven years of experience, leads the company’s scale and structure efforts in the country. 

Besides his new responsibility in India, he will head the consumer business of the Amazon in West Asia, South Africa, and Turkey. Kumar had joined Amazon in 1999 and actively participated when the company opened up its India operation-Amazon.in-in 2013. Since then, the India website was just a book-selling website and operated from a small warehouse space in Mumbai with 100 sellers. Since then, Amazon’s area in India expanded to 43 million cu ft storage that collaborated with over 1.2 million sellers. 

With Samir Kumar’s deep experience across Ems the company is more positive about its plans to serve customers and grow business in India. When the transition is complete, Saurabh Srivastava, Harsh Goyal, Amit Nanda and Aastha Jain, currently part of the leadership team at Amazon.in, will report to Kumar. 

Kumar has the challenge of rather stiff competition especially at the hands of Flipkart, which is owned by Walmart, Reliance’s JioMart, and Tata, all of which are elbowing their way into a piece of India’s rapidly exploding e-commerce market, estimated to rise to $350 billion by 2030. His top focus will be directed toward expanding vernacular language and voice-based shop-enablement for the next 500 million users in smaller towns and cities across India. 

Even while investing close to $6.5 billion in its Indian operation, Amazon is still marred by issues like legal tussles with local retailers and investigations from the Competition Commission of India. The same also details pledges toward digitizing 10 million micro, small, and medium enterprises and creating 2 million jobs in India by 2025, for which claims have also emerged.