Zee Media Bureau
New Delhi: Two big names in the IT industry are gearing up to fight a battle in the e-retail domain.
Wipro's Azim Premji and Infosys's Narayana Murthy have their investments in Myntra, Snapdeal and Amazon respectively.
Myntra was recently acquired by Flipkart.
Earlier this year Azim Premji's investment arm- Premji trust had pumped in USD 50 million and USD 100 million into Myntra and Snapdeal respectively.
Meanwhile tech czar Narayana Murthy's family office- Catamaran Ventures has also formulated a joint venture company with Amazon.com. The deal comes at a time when big online retailers are scouting for strategic investors in order to help small and medium businesses enter the online retail domain.
According to report by consulting firm Technopak, although Indian online retail (e-tailing) market is still a small contributor to retail, accounting for only 0.4 percent of the overall market, it is on a rapid growth trajectory.
The USD 2.3 billion e-tailing market in 2014 is expected to reach 3 percent of Indian retail (USD 32 billion by 2020).
Technopak said that investors have reaffirmed their faith in this sector by continuing to invest large amount of capital as a result of which an entirely new sector has emerged.
"Indian e-commerce (of which e-tailing is a part) has attracted a total funding of USD 1.6 billion across over 140 deals since 2012," the report said. As of May 2014, the sector witnessed 20 deals worth USD 637 million compared to 60 deals worth USD 592 million in the entire 2013. In 2012 the sector saw investors pouring in USD 371 million for a total of 73 deals.
At a time when Flipkart and Amazon is planning to pump in USD 1 billion and USD 2 billion respectively into the Indian market, the Indian online retail industry is set to witness a three way race between Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon.
The increasing number of smartphone users in India is making the online retail sector accessible to more and more people across the country which will tremendously boost the industry in the long run.
