Amazon Ceo Andy Jassy Visits India Company Announces Qcomm Expansion To 300 Cities

The visit comes as Amazon sharpens its focus on quick commerce in the country. The company said it is expanding its 10-minute delivery service, Amazon Now, to 300 cities. In April, Amazon had said it planned to roll out the service to 100 cities and build a network of 1,000 stores to support the expansion.“We are seeing a great response from customers, especially Prime members who triple their shopping frequency once they start using Amazon Now. We have further accelerated our expansion and will offer ultra-fast deliveries to customers in over 300 cities of India,” said Samir Kumar, country manager, Amazon India.Currently, Amazon Now has about 500 dark stores across 15 metro and non-metro cities, including Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Amritsar, and Kochi.Jassy had said during the March quarter earnings call that Amazon Now’s orders are growing 25% month on month and that Prime members triple their shopping frequency once they start using the service.The latest development comes months after Amazon India announced in February that it will invest Rs 2,800 crore (about $300 million) to strengthen its infrastructure and operations across the country, with a particular focus on quick commerce. This investment was a part of Amazon’s previously announced commitment to invest $35 billion in India by 2030.According to the company, Amazon Now orders have doubled every quarter since launch.In an earlier conversation with ET, Kumar said that Amazon aims to emerge as the market leader in the quick commerce category. “We were slow out of the gate, but we were not sitting idle. We were figuring out what we should do and how we should serve our customers in this format,” he said. “Once we decided to get there, we got there quickly. But we took our time to build it the right way.”Amazon's quick commerce expansion comes at a time when rival Flipkart is also stepping up its efforts for Minutes. On Wednesday, Flipkart Minutes announced that it has expanded to 1,000 fulfilment centres across 130 cities in less than two years since launch. The Walmart-owned company is now adding about 100 stores per month, or three to four per day, senior executives said.Last week, Amazon Now also announced that it is launching 100 large fulfillment centres across cities such as Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi-NCR, Hyderabad and Mumbai as it expands beyond groceries to offer its users electronics, fans, humidifiers and other everyday items.In a December interview with ET, Amazon’s senior vice president Amit Agarwal had said that the company’s dark store expansion was indexed to the size of its Prime loyalty programme, with subscribers shopping three times more frequently within 90 days of a new dark store launching in their area.