Less than a week after investing Rs 1,350 crore in its India operations, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that a further $3 billion (about Rs 20,000 crore) will be invested in its India unit, reports Reuters. He also mentioned that Amazon would set up a Web Services Cloud Region in India this year, and a software engineering and development center in Hyderabad. Note that the company had also pumped in funds worth Rs 1,980 crore (or $290 million) into its India unit in February this year. With this Amazon's total investment commitment in India goes up to $5 billion; the $3 billion announced now, plus the $2 billion investment announced back in July 2014, which the company has already completed in phases over the past two years. Pressure on Flipkart and Snapdeal Amazon’s additional investment plans will put pressure on Flipkart and Snapdeal to raise more funds: In July last year, Flipkart had raised $700 million at a valuation of $15.2 billion, and had previously raised $700 million in December 2014. The ecommerce major had raised $1.91 billion in 2014 alone. Prior to Flipkart’s $1 billion round of funding in July 2014, it had raised $751 million in total. So far, Flipkart has raised $3.12 billion in 12 rounds of funding from 16 investors, including Tiger Global, DST Global, Accel Partners, Singapore GIC and T Rowe Price. Note that in March this year, it was reported that HDFC Bank had extended a line of credit of over Rs 450 crore to Flipkart. According to the ROC filings, Flipkart signed the…
