After losing China, Jeff Bezos really wants to win in India

Having forfeited China to Alibaba and JD.com, Jeff Bezos is determined to win in India, a market of 1.3 billion people who at long last are discovering the pleasures of shopping.

Amazon.com Inc.’s chief has committed $5.5 billion to India and selected Amit Agarwal to spend it wisely. A trusted lieutenant who grew up in Mumbai and admires his boss and Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan with near-equal fervor, Agarwal, 44, is furiously adapting Amazon to local conditions.

The company has set up a credit operation for Indians without bank accounts, built a streamlined mobile app so it doesn’t crash the cheaper phones typically used by small-town Indians and loaded up the online store with tens of thousands of eclectic products—from the butter chicken instant curry paste favored in Punjab in the north to the traditional churan herbal digestives used for centuries in central India.

So far it’s proving a tough slog. Almost five years after opening for business there, Amazon is spending billions fighting a ground war with local rivals like Bangalore-based Flipkart Online Services Pvt that know the terrain. 

India is not so much one nation as a bunch of little Indias, whose people, culture and language are nowhere near as homogeneous as America’s. Selling stuff online in the big cities is comparatively easy; not so the hinterland where people tend to be less tech-savvy, smartphones are just catching on, and web connections are slower.