Manish Tiwary, country manager for Amazon India, has stepped down to pursue other opportunities, ending an eight-year association with the global ecommerce major.
Tiwary joined Amazon India in 2016 and spent four years as vice president before being elevated to country manager in 2020. He led the consumer and seller services vertical for four years. Before joining Amazon, he served as the managing director of Unilever’s Gulf business.
Tiwary will remain with the company until October, the firm said in a statement on Tuesday, and Amit Agarwal, vice president of India and emerging markets, will work closely with the team once he leaves.
The company said, “India is an important priority for Amazon. We are excited by the momentum and business results we have already achieved, and we are even more optimistic about the significant opportunities ahead to innovate on behalf of our customers and digitally transform lives and livelihoods.”
Amazon’s India arm continues to face stiff competition from Walmart-owned Flipkart and tier 2-focused Meesho in India’s growing e-commerce market. The market is currently valued at $70 billion and is forecast to grow to $325 billion by 2030, driven by increasing internet penetration and smartphone users.
India has turned out to be a key market for Amazon India, prompting greater investment over the past few years. In February, the firm’s US entity invested about $100 million in Amazon Seller Services. Tiwary said last year that the tech giant had digitised more than two million small businesses in India in 2022 alone, and was on course to meet its target of digitising 10 million of them by 2025.
In July we reported that a controversial levy India imposed four years ago on digital services rendered to Indian businesses by offshore technology firms, which caused a tiff between New Delhi and Washington, has been scrapped.
The Finance Bill 2024 presented by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman proposed to scrap from 1 August the 2% equalisation levy on a wide array of services rendered by offshore tech firms including cloud services and e-commerce services.
The move brings huge relief to global e-commerce players, especially American ones, as many businesses were facing tax disputes on account of this levy, experts said.
India had in 2020 expanded the scope of its equalisation levy – first introduced in 2016 on offshore firms hosting advertisements targeted at Indian consumers – to include other e-commerce services by off-shore entities.
