‘All our biz in India doing well, will support 3.8 mn jobs by 2030: Amazon's Amit Agarwal

“All of Amazon's businesses in India are doing well”, said Amit Agarwal, Senior Vice President for Emerging Markets. He also said that Amazon is looking to support 3.8 million jobs in the country by 2030. In a podcast with Business Today, Agarwal added that Amazon is leaning into artificial intelligence (AI), which he called the biggest disruption of our lifetime. 

“We have Prime Video, MX Player, which is our entertainment business in India. We have Amazon Devices, the Fire TV Stick, Alexa Echo, which is a device business in India. So we do have many different businesses that are all thriving and scaling well in the country,” he said. 

Agarwal’s statements came hours after the tech giant announced a $35 billion investment plan in India by 2030. He said Amazon has invested $40 billion, becoming “the largest foreign investor in India, the largest enabler of exports in India, and one of the largest creators of jobs in the country”. 

“Now, as we look forward to the next five years, and as I said, we have multiple businesses that are thriving and doing well. We estimate that we are going to invest an additional $35 billion until 2030, which would allow us to take a bigger pledge across those three dimensions that I talked about. And essentially, what we estimate is that based on the momentum that we are seeing in exports, we are aiming to enable $80 billion in cumulative exports by 2030. We believe that we have the ability to support 3.8 million jobs by 2030, which is an incremental 1 million jobs,” he mentioned.

“And on the digitization front, we are leaning into AI, which is probably the biggest disruption of our lifetime. And we want to empower 4 million government school kids with AI literacy and training,” he added.

Agarwal also talked about the promises made by Amazon during the Sambhav conference in 2020 when Jeff Bezos declared the 21st century would be “India’s century.” In the next 5 years, Amazon aims to help Indian sellers ship goods worth $80 billion overseas through its platform over the coming years.