India’s top seller Cloudtail’s parent company and Amazon have decided to end their joint venture from May 2022 onwards. They announced this end to their joint venture in a statement released hours after the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the American E-commerce giant Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart will be undergoing antitrust investigations in the south Asian markets.
Billionaire N.R Narayana Murthy owned Catamaran which is the parent company that houses Cloudtail had launched this joint venture with Amazon in 2014. Following the regulatory changes in the country, the company restructured in 2019.
The competition commission of India, famously called the watchdog of India had ordered an investigation into the e-Commerce firms last year for promoting certain sellers, primarily those in who they had a stake.
According to a statement released on Monday, Cloudtail which is registered as Prione Business Services claims that they have enabled over 300,000 sellers while helping entrepreneurs take their businesses online. They claim to have provided 4 million merchants with digital payment capabilities. According to the statement, they have helped small businesses and merchants reach millions of customers in the Indian subcontinent.
Cloudtail is one of the largest e-commerce sellers on Amazon in India. Famous Indian newspaper the Economic Times reported that cloudtail will cease operations by the year 2022. Cloudtail wasn’t the only seller that the e-commerce giant had a stake in. Appario retail, which was a joint venture between Amazon and Patni Group has also been under discussion to continue their venture or not.
M.D. Ranganath, President of Catamaran said in a statement “As our JV with Amazon reaches the end of its tenure, I reflect on this successful partnership that introduced the power of digitization and empowered hundreds of thousands of SMBs across big and small towns,”
Due to previously formed laws and regulations, Amazon and other various e-commerce firms have not been able to hold inventory and have had issues selling directly to consumers. In an attempt to circle around these roadblocks, firms like amazon had created partnerships with third party merchants and sellers which operated as inventory holding firms.
Amit Agarwal, Global Senior VP and Country Head at Amazon India said in a statement “Amazon and Catamaran entered into a JV in the early days of e-commerce in India with a shared vision of transforming hundreds of thousands of small businesses in a fast-changing digital world, by providing online capabilities enabling them to access customers both in India and globally,”
The two firms haven’t yet said anything as to why they have decided to end their venture.
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