Newsletter
Shares of Swiggy and Eternal slipped after Amazon announced plans to build India's largest "delivery-in-minutes" network through Amazon Now, expanding the service to more than 300 cities across the country.
What is Amazon Now: it is Amazon's answer to Blinkit, Instamart and Zepto.
The ultra-fast delivery service already serves more than 50 million customers across 15+ cities and offers everything from groceries and beauty products to kitchen essentials and daily-use items.
Amazon is now aggressively expanding the network, a move that investors fear could eat into the market share of existing leaders such as Blinkit and Instamart.
The bigger picture: India's quick-commerce war is entering a new phase. Consumers are increasingly ordering electronics, beauty products, fashion accessories, home essentials and groceries on-demand.
To capture this demand, companies are spending heavily on warehouses, fulfilment centres, delivery fleets and supply-chain infrastructure.
Amazon, Blinkit, Swiggy, Zepto and Flipkart are all racing to build scale and lock in customers.
Amazon's ambition is particularly aggressive. The company says it wants to build India's largest delivery-in-minutes network, capable of delivering tens of thousands of products within minutes or hours, more than 1 million products the same day, and over 4 million products by the next day.
For consumers, that means faster deliveries and more choice.
For rivals, it means the competition just got a lot tougher.
