Daybreak - Inside Samir Kumar’s plan to bring order to Amazon India’s chaos

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

It's been a tough couple years for E-commerce in India. And no one has quite borne the brunt of it like Amazon. Between tough competition from the likes of Meesho and Flipkart, not to mention the legion of quick commerce platforms that have completely changed the way we shop, and profitability pressures – Amazon is stuck between a rock and a hard place. But now it is trying to turn back the clock. Leading that endeavour is Samir Kumar, who took over and the new country manager in October 2024. Since then he’s been exploring new ways of working. Kumar has picked Prime as the chosen path to profitability. After all, Prime users spend nearly twice as much as their non Prime peers and contribute more than half of Amazon’ India’s business. The second emphasis is on speed: something the previous leadership thought wasn’t worth their time, per at least three managers. A couple of months ago, the company finally launched its quick-commerce service, Amazon Now, in select cities. But the timing could've been better. Tune in. 

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production.

Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get alert, as soon as we release our first studio recording, episode, please follow intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. It has been a tough couple years for e-commerce in India and no one has quite borne the brunt of it like Amazon has. Between tough competition from the likes of Micho and Flipkart on one hand to the legion of quick commerce platforms that have completely changed the way we shop.

Amazon is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Now, it's trying to turn back the clock. Leading that endeavor is Samir Kumar. He took over as the new country manager in October 2024, and since then, he has been exploring new ways of working. For starters, he's reviving what many call the company's input-driven culture, where they value processes such as, pricing discipline and inventory planning.

Now, that's a clear break from how his predecessor, Manish Tiwari, ran the ship. Tiwari was more of an output-driven guy. He was more concerned with things like gross merchandise sales and units delivered. But now, Kumar's laser-focused on one thing and one thing only, profitability. At a town hall earlier this year, Kumar essentially told his staff that the company, despite its many ventures, hadn't really cracked the code for success just yet. Now, that was a bold statement,

but he may be on to something. You see, Amazon's food delivery, payments and grocery services have all stumbled, leaving the app crowded with offerings that neither stand out nor dominate. The only exception, of course, is Prime, which combines shopping perks with a streaming bundle. Now, that's Amazon's single biggest differentiator

in India's e-commerce market. For instance, Prime Day 2025, the retailer's biggest sales event that recently concluded, saw a 70% surge in new sign-ups from Tier 2 and 3 cities. The orders peaked at over 18,000 per minute. So, naturally, it makes sense that Kumar has picked Prime as the chosen path to profitability. After all, Prime users spend nearly twice as much as their non-prime peers and contribute more than half of Amazon India's business. The second emphasis is on speed, something the previous leadership thought wasn't worth their time.

A couple months ago, the company finally launched its quick commerce service Amazon Now in Select Cities. But the timing could have been better. Hello and welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host Rahil Philippos and I Don't Chase the News Cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleagues Nikita Sharma and I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Kumar has been at Amazon for 25 years. So some may call him a lifer.

He started off as a systems engineer when Amazon was valued at less than a billion dollars. So like two Amazon executives told us, Kumar's leadership is defined by a sense of clarity that his predecessors like Amit Agarwal and Manish Tiwari lacked. A category manager said

before he came along, it felt like they didn't have a sense of what they were going after. For instance, Amazon was steadfast in its belief that QuickCommerce wouldn't be able to sustain itself in India. But now, with Kumar's elevation, employees are being pushed to be more aggressive. Another category manager explained how, in terms of profitability, if something doesn't make sense in the current Amazon ecosystem, they move to Amazon now, the Quick Commerce platform. For instance, if they would take 60 rupees to ship a year, they're now taking calls to sell them on the now-mark. marketplace instead. Now, this approach seemed to have worked. In FY24, Amazon seller services,

the Indian marketplace entity of the US e-commerce giant, posted a 14% rise in operating revenue at 25,406 crore rupees from the previous year. Its net loss is also narrowed by about 28% to nearly 3500 crore rupees. Under Kumar, there's more emphasis on figuring out why certain businesses are not working and on trying to get them up. For instance, the company is also trying to reshape its supply chain side and see what improvements it can make there. But a company spokesperson told us that at its core, Amazon's strategy remains constant and it's based on things that don't change over time. Sure, the company has been laid to quick commerce and it may only be testing out the services in select pincodes in Bangal or Mumbai and Delhi, but to prioritize

is speed and convenience for customers. The platform has opened 30 service and five fulfillment centers and is waiving off delivery fees. Amazon now's expansion to other pin codes is slow because, according to a third category manager, the company wants to expand sustainably and utilize its fulfillment centers rather than open some hundred dark stores. One executive told us that Samir has a very strong cost culture within Amazon.

He's been able to drive unit economics better. which is why he's overseeing the company's resettlement to a new corporate office. Amazon India's Bangalore office is moving from the World Trade Center building near Yashvanpur to Satwa Horizon near Yailahanka. For those of you who don't live in Bangal, that is very close to the airport. At the same time, he's also making it mandatory for employees to work five days from the office. Now, some are calling this a silent layoff. They're expecting attrition to be high.

At the same time, the company is also spending $233 million to strengthen its operations in the country. Stay tuned. India is a massive market for Amazon. After all, Indians account for over 452 million monthly visits on Amazon next to only to the ones from the US, Japan and Germany. Prime Video, meanwhile, is estimated to have 65 million active users in the country. But now, very quickly, the market is becoming stagnant for Prime. Now, typically that would be adding as many consumers as you possibly can. But that's not what this company believes.

The spokesperson told us that Prime Membership continues to have strong growth globally as well as in India. And what's fueling that is a combination of relevant pricing tiers, extensive delivery benefits, and highly localized entertainment content. A category manager told us that while the company refuses to disclose country-specific figures for Prime membership, half of the overall customers who shop on Amazon fall in this group. He added that the goal is to slightly improve this to about 53 to 54%. Now, Prime brings more customers and with it, it brings customer loyalty. That's a metric that continues to be very close to any business in e-commerce.

After all, no one has combined streaming content and online shopping before. One thing that's worked for Amazon and everyone else is that the market has finally matured, and is now willing to pay. Which explains why just this May, Amazon announced that it would begin showing limited advertisements during movies and TV shows. The challenge is that Indian consumers are a bit difficult to convert into paid users. But not everybody believes that. For instance, analytics firm Datum Intelligence's Renu Bisch, who is an e-commerce analyst,

told us that even if not the entire mass market, there is a chunk of customers today who are ready to pay extra for zero ads. YouTube is a classic example, as is Gio Hot Star. Reno expects adoption rates to be all right for Amazon. In fact, she thinks it may even work in its favor. But let's take a step back for a minute and take a look at what Amazon has planned for the hardlines categories.

That includes things like furniture, sports equipment, and home appliances, the things Amazon is known for. In 2025, Amazon has allocated the biggest budgets to the home and kitchens category and other sections. The aim is to make the marketplace more efficient, allowing both quick commerce and one to two-day deliveries to coexist. Category managers are also telling vendors and sellers to regionalize the selection of items they have. And that means the selection for a particular region would only be shown to people nearby.

But here's another bigger agenda to take on the likes of Misho. To do that, Amazon has decided to do away with a referral fee. That's the commission that sellers pay to Amazon for each product sold. So we're talking about 12 million products across 135 plus categories, all priced below 300 rupees. Sellers on Amazon Bazaar, which is the site for cheap fashion and home products, continue to enjoy zero referral fees on all products under 600 rupees. It also lowered its weight handling fees.

Now, this is unlike when Tiwari was at the helm. Programs like Bazaar, Fresh and other smaller initiatives were never prioritized in terms of the team size or budgets then. In 2023, Amazon's chief executive, Andy Jassi, said the company, which had already invested $11 billion in India cumulatively at the time, wanted to increase the total investment to $26 billion by 2030. Now, this was at a time when the electronic retail market in India is witnessing only a 10 to 12% growth compared to 20% in the previous years.

Even before Tiwadi's term, the company had a document culture. You were required to go through multiple rounds of review before the concept was approved or before you hit the market. This stems from how Amazon has always operated globally. And yet, there was a period of time when Tiwari was still at the helm of things when there was a lot of experimentation happening. At the peak of the pandemic, for instance, they were trying their hand in the food and ed tech spaces. But now, Amazon is back to square one. With Kumar, there is hope that his aggressiveness will energize the team. But would that be enough to keep Amazon competitive against the likes of Flipkart Reliance Blinket and Zepto?

Flipkart is the largest e-commerce player in the country, commanding a 48% market share compared to Amazon's 31%. And then you have Blinket and Zepto, which are growing at breakneck speed. In the June quarter, Blinket's gross order value is expected to have grown more than 25% from the preceding quarter. Amazon, meanwhile, only seems to be playing catch-up. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription unlocks daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and podcast extras. Head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website.

Today's episode was hosted by Rahil Filippo's and edited by Rajiv Sien.