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This is what Amazon, Google and Facebook had to say about India in their earnings callshttps://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/this-is-what-amazon-google-and-facebook-had-to-say-about-india-in-their-earnings-calls/slidelist/77276228.cms2020-07-31T10:30:03+05:30

This is what Amazon, Google and Facebook had to say about India in their earnings calls

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Sanchita DashJul 31, 2020, 10:30 IST

This is what Amazon, Google and Facebook had to say about India in their earnings calls — BI India/Wikimedia/BCCL
Amazon, Google and Facebook all beat market estimates even during the COVID-19 hit quarter.
Interestingly, the mention of India as ‘the largest’ investment area came up in the earnings call of these companies.
Amazon also said that it is hiring in India.
The big global tech companies have just reported their earnings for the April-June quarter and all of them have beat market estimates even during the COVID-19 hit quarter.

But interestingly, the mention of India as ‘the largest’ investment area during the earnings call of Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) has once again proven the companies’ interest in the country.

In 2020 alone, all three companies have reiterated their interest in India with big cheques – Jeff Bezos during his visit to India in January 2020 promised a $1 billion investment. Facebook pumped in $5.7 billion in Reliance Jio, while Google announced a $10 billion India-specific fund out of which $4.5 billion has already gone into Jio’s pockets.

Here’s what the companies said during the earnings call

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India is the biggest bet for Amazon

India is the biggest bet for Amazon — BCCL
Amazon’s international business reported a surprising profit, after five quarters of continuous losses. So, the e-commerce giant’s international investments bets have finally taken off. Brian T. Olsavsky, Amazon’s Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, while talking about the company’s new investment areas mentioned India is the biggest one.
“You also see our investments in new countries. Obviously, India is the biggest one, but also to a lesser extent, the Middle East, Brazil, Turkey and Australia are recent additions. So, there’s always an element of expansion going on there. Advertising is growing. So that’s a good source of profitability,” said Olsavsky.

Amazon is hiring in India

Amazon is hiring in India — Amazon
During the earnings call, Amazon once again put the spotlight on its India seller business and digitizing trade for small and medium businesses in India. Dave Fildes, director of investor relations, said “We’re really focused on digitizing the Indian sellers, a lot of micro, small and medium-size businesses there. And we launched new features there to help support the digitization efforts with some of those brands. And just a lot of — great work being done by that team. They have some goals around getting more sellers onboard and hiring many more people as well. So, a lot of focus there.”

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Facebook’s Jio-WhatsApp partnership will be a model for other countries

Facebook’s Jio-WhatsApp partnership will be a model for other countries — Wikimedia Commons
Mark Zuckerberg during the earnings call spoke about Facebook’s $5.7 billion investment in Jio. “A lot of people use WhatsApp, especially in India, there’s a huge opportunity to enable small businesses and individuals in India to buy and sell things through WhatsApp. We want to enable that. That starts with enabling payments. A big part of the partnership that we have with Jio will be to wire up and get thousands of small businesses across India on-boarded onto WhatsApp, to do commerce there. And we’re really excited about the opportunity there,” said Zuckerberg.
The Facebook CEO went on to say that once they prove the model with Jio in India, they’re planning on expanding it to other countries as well.

India is the fastest growing business opportunity for Facebook

India is the fastest growing business opportunity for Facebook — Unsplash
Zuckerberg said there’s no doubt that India is a huge opportunity for Facebook. “It is the largest country by the size of our community that we’re serving already. And it should be one of the fastest growing business opportunities as well to help businesses grow there, and we’re very excited about that,” he said.

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Google’s interest in India

Google’s interest in India — Google for India/Screenshot
Google CEO Sundar Pichai spoke about the $10 billion Google for India Digitization Fund for Indian internet users. “Through this effort, we'll invest approximately $10 billion over the next 5 to 7 years to accelerate and participate in India's burgeoning digital economy. We'll enable information in local languages and apply technology and AI to important areas like health, education and agriculture. Jio platforms is the first partnership agreement in the fund and will work with them to help millions of users in India become owners of smartphones,” he said.

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