Amazon infuses Rs 450 Cr in Amazon Pay

Amazon has infused Rs 450 crore into its payments unit in India, Amazon Pay, according to regulatory documents.

The fresh infusion comes just ahead of the festive season where the US ecommerce giant will compete head-on against Walmart-owned Flipkart and others.

Amazon Pay (India) has allotted 45 crore equity shares, aggregating to Rs 450 crore to Amazon Corporate Holdings Pvt Ltd and Amazon.com.inc Ltd, regulatory documents filed with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs and sourced by business intelligence platform Tofler, showed. Amazon did not respond to emailed queries.

As per the filing, Amazon Corporate Holdings Pvt Ltd was allotted 449,955,036 equity shares, while Amazon.com.inc Limited was given 44,964 equity shares. The shares were allotted on September 17, 2021.

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In another development, Amazon said it has registered five million merchants through its payments unit Amazon Pay and that it remains focussed on helping more SMBs in the country to embrace digital payments.

These merchants — many of whom earlier transacted only in cash — are now accepting payments from their customers using Amazon Pay's QR Code.

"Since 2019, we have registered five million merchants through Amazon Pay and gotten 40 million customers through our service to use UPI. We're obviously not alone, and the more companies like Amazon and our competitors all help, the flywheel spins faster," Amazon Senior Vice President Russell Grandinetti said during the Amazon Smbhav event.

He added organisations and governments across the world are not only inspired by Aadhaar, the India Stack, and UPI, but they are also looking at emulating these models.

As part of the government's Digital India vision, a set of tools have been created under India Stack to help the government agencies, businesses, startups, and developers in developing solutions to solve challenges like financial inclusion, delivery of services, etc.

(Disclaimer: Additional background information has been added to this PTI copy for context)