Bigger India
Amazon, Walmart’s India Battle Driven By Food And Hope
Neither Amazon nor Walmart can control directly owned brick-and-mortar stores in India as foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail is capped at 49 percent.
Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc., the world’s two largest retailers, are invading each other’s turf in India to build a formidable base for their next faceoff: grocery.
Amazon bought a 49 percent stake in the parent of a services company that acquired More—a chain of supermarket stores—at an enterprise value of around $580 million, the largest investment in India’s brick-and-mortar retail in four years. Walmart picked 77 percent stake for $16-billion in Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce company, in its biggest-ever acquisition.