Let me start by telling you a story about an Indian brand named Naturevibe Botanicals – Founded by Rishabh Chokhani from Mumbai, as part of his own pursuit of a healthier lifestyle, today Naturevibe is one of the fastest growing Indian brands in the organic foods category on many of Amazon’s global marketplaces. They joined Amazon Global Selling about 3 years ago and have grown over 9X since launch. With their manufacturing and packaging set up in Raigarh district of Maharashtra, Naturevibe today works with 800+ farmers across India for organic produce ranging across traditional Indian Herbs, Spices and Ayurveda products like Turmeric, Ginger, Ashwagandha amongst others. About 85% of Naturvibes’s 150 member team is from nearby villages who are benefiting from the growth of the company’s business and are witnessing greater permanency in their livelihoods.
It is success stories like these that give me great confidence in our ability as a nation to realise the vision of an Aatmanirbhar Bharat. At Amazon, we are proud of the work we are doing in digitally empowering such enterprises where the beneficiary of success is not just the business, but an entire community. These MSMEs are the backbone of our economy, and by digitally enabling them to succeed, we can contribute towards job creation and boosting exports that will in turn power the inclusive economic growth for India.
We launched our Exports program – Amazon Global Selling in 2015 to help Indian exporters reach worldwide customers. Amazon Global Selling lowers the entry barrier for motivated Indian manufacturers, MSMEs as well as brands to kick-start and expand their business globally from anywhere in India. With this program, homegrown businesses get instant access to hundreds of millions of global customers, benefiting from Amazon’s distribution capabilities and marketing efforts to scale rapidly. So it’s no surprise that Rishabh’s story resonates across a majority of the 60,000+ Indian MSMEs who use Amazon Global Selling to take their local innovation and expertise to the world. Many of these sellers are first generation entrepreneurs and come smaller towns like Roorkee, Faridabad, Siliguri, Cuttack, Dharamshala, and Bilaspur .
I am excited to share that Amazon Global Selling is witnessing a momentous growth. It took three years for the program to hit exports of $1B and now it has grown 100% to hit the next $1B in less than 18 months. With this, Indian MSMEs and brands using Amazon Global Selling to export worldwide, have crossed $2 billion in cumulative sales. The real success of the program however, reflects in the fact that Indian businesses are embracing technology at scale to compete in global markets.
In the last 3-4 months, as the world has been grappling with lockdowns and disruptions in supply chain, we saw thousands of India businesses serve customers globally. The program has helped sustain their exports business and in turn supported hundreds of families dependent on them.
Exports will play a critical role in revival of Indian economy and I am happy that Amazon Global Selling is enabling hundreds of millions of Amazon customers worldwide discover and enjoy crores of Made in India products from Bed Linens, Home Decor, STEM toys, Wellness products to Leather products and even daily consumption products like soaps, shampoos and more. It is truly helping local to go global – this is more important than ever for our small businesses and for the nation as it recovers from these unprecedented and challenging times.
Our work with various state Governments and industry bodies on creating more awareness about e-commerce exports on ground, end-to-end digitization of processes for MSMEs to get started off as exporters, and building effective yet low cost logistics solutions is progressing well. We have an opportunity to catalyze this further with a deeper alignment of key Government initiatives of Skill India, Digital India and Make in India with e-commerce exports.
We will continue to empower Indian MSMEs to realize their potential and make exports easy for Indian businesses. We remain committed to our pledge of digitizing 10 million MSMEs, enabling 1 million incremental jobs and driving $10 billion in e-commerce exports from India by 2025.
We are super excited by what lies ahead, and have no doubt that it is still Day 1!
