Amazon quits food delivery in India

Amazon is quitting online food delivery in India as part of a restructuring of its presence.

What’s happening

Amazon has announced it will close its Amazon Food delivery business at the end of December, less than three years after it entered the market at a time when the pandemic was gathering pace. 

Market leader Zomato, meanwhile, is benefiting from making its app available in a number of regional languages. It continues to spread across the country with users in more than 1,000 cities. 

Mint reported that Zomato is now delivering an additional 150,000 orders a month thanks to regional language versions, with Hindi and Tamil contributing 54% and 11% of these orders respectively.

Orders in Gujarati, Kannada, Bengali, Malayalam, Punjabi, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu are also growing.

Why it matters

Amazon has invested heavily in India in recent years but its financial clout is no guarantee of success – witness recent reports that it is losing up to $10bn a year on Alexa, its voice assistant technology.

The food delivery market is estimated to be worth $20bn within three years. But for all of Amazon's innovation and deep pockets, it is local players Zomato and Swiggy that are leading the way.

Even in its core e-commerce business, Amazon is reported to be lagging behind Flipkart, an India start-up now owned by US retailer Walmart. 

All of which highlights the need for a deep understanding of the Indian market if a brand is to have sustained success there.

Sourced from Mint, TechCrunch