Amazon plans $5 billion exports from India-based sellers in 2024: Report

Amazon Inc plans to export about $5 billion of small-ticket items from India this year, up from nearly $3 billion in 2023, supplying markets such as the United States and Britain, a company official said, Reuters reported. 

The move by one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies underscores India’s growing role in the global supply chain and reflects a broader trend among multinational corporations to diversify sourcing away from China, it added. 

Amazon is on track to help tens of thousands of Indian businesses to surpass a cumulative $13 billion in e-commerce exports by the end of 2024, a company statement said.

Another e-commerce giant, Walmart, is also increasingly importing more goods to the US from India and reducing its reliance upon China. The world’s largest retailer shipped one quarter of its US imports from India between January and August 2023 compared with just 2 percent in 2018. 

There has been a tectonic shift in the global manufacturing landscape with multinational corporations like Apple and others seeking to ‘de-risk’ from China following the COVID-related disruptions and escalating US-China tensions.  

Many of these companies have embraced a ‘China plus one’ strategy to reduce their exposure in the country by downsizing their presence in the country.  

The need for this was felt strongly during Covid when the supply chain was severely impacted as China had gone into complete lockdown for months. Besides this, geopolitical tensions and policy uncertainties have also prompted firms to move out of China.   

In September this year, the Boston Consulting Group, a global management consulting company, said more than 90 percent of the North American manufacturers it surveyed had relocated some production from China in the past five years — and a similar percentage plan to make such moves in the next five years. 

And these firms are moving their operations to India, Mexico, and Southeast Asia. “Mexico, Southeast Asia, and India are quickly emerging as future export manufacturing powerhouses,” the firm said. “All three offer competitive cost structures, deep pools of labor, and growing scale and capabilities across diverse industries. India has the additional benefit of possessing a potentially enormous domestic market.”