Amazon’s Digital Strategy - India

Recently there is lot of noise about Amazon’s arrival (not yet arrived but…) in India. Lot of bloggers are talking about success or failure of Amazon in India. But before talking about success or failure let us put some facts in black and white.

1. Bandwidth availability in India is pathetic

2. Most of the internet access is via mobile devices and most of the mobile devices are feature phone.

3. Kindle need tweak to support Indian fonts.

4. Major publishers have Indian edition of books which are printed on inferior paper and generally 20- 40% cheaper than US & Europe rate

5. Multi brand retail by International companies in India has challenge till new guidelines come by

6. Piracy in rampant

7. Price sensitivity of Indian market

8. Regulatory flip flop

9. Availability of stripped down tablets

10. Huge market for quality goods (not costly)

Now the question is how to factor all these variables in winning strategy:

1. Make Kindle, Indian font happy

2. Tolerance to piracy (look at Microsoft)

3. Little bit more advertisements are OK but reduce price for Kindle and content

4. Make kindle app available to stripped down tablets and Indian smart phones (may be pre-installed).

5. Instead of full download of book, some sort of small chunk download (not streaming)

6. Explore physical delivery of digital media (may be via flash drive)

7. Introduce India specific prices for Kindle and content

8. Allow US/Europe kindle to India switch (take care of huge travelling Indians – thanks to IT service industry)

9. Reduced pricing to students ( look at how British introduced tea to Indian customers)

10. Make content available at servers of Telco to reduce latency

11. Work with Telcos/ISPs to work with Kindle friendly tariff plans

12. Keep politicians and bureaucrats in good humor