Seattle: E-commerce giant Amazon Inc. reported quicker deliveries during India’s ongoing festival season sale, aiming to provide same-day or next-day deliveries for more customers.
In a roundtable on Tuesday, Akhil Saxena, Amazon’s VP of APAC, MENA, LATAM, Customer Fulfilment and Worldwide Customer Service, said, “As per initial data, it has been the fastest festive season in terms of speed with 65% higher packages getting sub-same-day and same-day delivery in the top 10 cities this year compared to 2022.”
Amazon kicked off its “Great Indian Festival 2023” on 8 October.
“One of the big things that we are focused on this year was how do we deliver to our customers faster. We are looking at Diwali sales that are still going on and it’s the fastest Diwali that we ever had for our customers. Like in terms of shipments coming to their homes and in terms of how we have been able to deliver from the time we take the order. So this is the fastest Diwali we have done,” Saxena told reporters.
Leveraging its expansive delivery network and collaborations, including those with India Post and Indian Railways, Amazon has worked to expedite its delivery times, he said.
The company’s involvement with Indian Railways, initiated in 2019, has contributed significantly to this effort. In 2022, Amazon revealed a tenfold increase in its railway lanes, with 325 inter-city transportation lanes now part of its operational network in India. This has been crucial in achieving one-day and two-day delivery targets.
Nearly 100 trains carry Amazon shipments daily in India.
Earlier this year, Amazon said it was engaging with Indian Railways’ Dedicated Freight Corridor Corp. of India (DFC) to enable its sellers to deliver faster to their customers across India. The e-commerce platform debuted operations along with DFC on the 659 km long Rewari-Palanpur (Haryana-Gujarat) route.
The company also introduced Amazon Air in India earlier this year, utilizing two Boeing 737-800 aircrafts to serve nine cities.
Enhancing delivery speed has been a priority, with Amazon’s fulfilment centres in India now spanning nearly 43 million cubic feet, a significant rise from 0.2 million in 2013. Additionally, the company maintains 2.3 million square feet of sorting centres across 19 states.
This development follows Amazon’s announcement earlier this year of an additional $15 billion investment in India by 2030, raising its cumulative Indian investment to $26 billion. In a separate move, Amazon Web Services pledged $12.7 billion for cloud infrastructure in India by the same year.
“India is a very large market for us, we already invested about $11 billion over the last 10 years or so,” he added. “We will make the right investments wherever it is important,” Saxena said without sharing more details. Speed, he said, is increasingly becoming critical to Indian customers.
Source By: livemint
