Jeff Bezos More Focused On Amazon Winning In India Than Turning Around In China: Report

Amazon.com has been in China a lot longer than it's been in India. But America’s largest online retailer has a much better shot at winning in the Asian subcontinent’s nascent online shopping market than the one dominated by Alibaba Group, Recode said in a post Tuesday.

After recently starting to list products on Alibaba’s Tmall online marketplace to get the traction it was not getting on its own online shop in China, Amazon could scale back investments there and focus more on India, Recode said, citing a person familiar with Amazon’s practices. And Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos was thinking along these lines, according to the person, whom Recode didn’t name. “They are more focused on succeeding in India than trying to turn around China,” the person told the online tech news and reviews site.

India’s online shopping market is estimated to hit $8.5 billion in 2016 from about $2 billion in 2013, the year following Amazon’s launch of its online marketplace Junglee.com in India, competing with local rivals Flipkart and Jasper Infotech’s Snapdeal. The Boston Consulting Group and the Retailers Association of India project sales from online shopping to rise to between $28 billion and $33 billion by 2020.

While the Indian startups are backed by a clutch of multinational investors -- including New York hedge fund and private equity firm Tiger Global Management and Japan’s SoftBank -- Bezos has committed to investing $2 billion in his Indian operations. Amazon is finalizing a deal to lease 1.3 million square feet of office space from privately held builder Bagmane Developers in Bangalore, India’s Times newspaper reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. “We don’t comment on anything we may or may not do in the future,” Amazon said in an email response to a query on the newspaper report.