E-commerce is the new honey-pot attracting billions of dollars of foreign private investment, which, for this year alone, has been estimated at $2.36 billion. Japan’s richest man, Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of telecom and media giant SoftBank Corp. who is not new to India, boosted this figure further with an investment of $840 million ('3,800 crore) in e-commerce firms Snapdeal and taxi-booking service Olacabs.
But more than the $10 billion that Mr Son expects to invest in the next five years is his optimism that the next Jack Ma, the owner of Alibaba, the world’s hottest e-commerce firm which is also listed in the United States, will be from India.
This should be an exciting challenge for this nascent industry as Mr Son knows what he is talking about. It was his investment in China’s Alibaba, now valued at $80 billion, that made him the richest man in Japan. But he has a proviso: provided India manages to create the digital superhighway envisaged by Prime Minister Narendra Modi whom he met in Delhi.
E-commerce firms are aware of the need for logistics and other infrastructure requirements to catapult the industry to a higher growth orbit in India. One hopes the vibrant industry shares Mr Son’s passion to see India grow under what he calls Mr Modi’s passion to make India a success.
E-commerce is a mere 0.05 per cent of India’s consumption story, according to Snapdeal, so the sky is the limit.
