Amazon will wind down parts of its Indian operations, showing that even the crucial growth market with 1.4 billion consumers isn’t immune to Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy’s cost-reduction campaign.
The company said it is exiting meal deliveries as well as a service providing bulk doorstep deliveries of packaged consumer goods to small businesses. The exits will involve layoffs of just several hundred out of a workforce of thousands, leaving Amazon relying on its core offerings such as online retail in the country, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Related: Apple, Google, Netflix, Amazon India Execs To Go Before Indian Panel
Jassy is reducing expenses and jobs around the world amid slowing growth in several areas of Amazon’s business. In India, the pullback underscores Amazon’s struggles in one of the world’s fastest growing e-commerce markets, where it’s facing regulatory heat and competition from homegrown conglomerates Reliance Industries and Tata Group as well as Walmart’s Flipkart.
After plowing billions of dollars in everything from grocery delivery to payments in India during the past decade, the company has failed to achieve the sort of dominance it enjoys in markets such as the US.
