Amazon in-house vendor Cloudtail posts four-fold growth in FY16 revenue

Cloudtail India Pvt. Ltd, which is part-controlled by Amazon.com Inc. and is believed to be the single-largest vendor on its Indian e-commerce marketplace Amazon.in, registered a four-fold jump in revenue for 2015-16.

Revenue for the year ended 31 March 2016 increased to Rs 4,591.2 crore from Rs 1,145.4 crore the year before, three media reports said citing Cloudtail's filings with the Registrar of Companies.

Net loss shrank to Rs 30 crore from Rs 32 crore while total expenses jumped to Rs 4,621 crore from Rs 1,176 crore.

The expenses included Rs 420 crore in platform selling fees and promotion expenses of Rs 6.3 crore, one report said.

Cloudtail, which started operations in the middle of 2014-5 (2015-16 is its first full year of business), is owned by another private firm Prione Business Services Pvt Ltd. Prione, in turn, is a 51:49 joint venture between Infosys co-founder and former chief NR Narayana Murthy's personal investment arm Catamaran and Amazon.

Amazon and arch rival Flipkart are working on reducing their dependence on in-house vendors Cloudtail and WS Retail Services Pvt Ltd, respectively, to comply with foreign direct investments guidelines that state e-commerce firms can sell only 25% of their goods from a single vendor or group of firms.

E-commerce firms are mandated to comply with the norms by 31 March 2017. While Amazon has significantly reduced selling mobile devices through Cloudtail on the platform over the past few months, Flipkart is pushing a new set of vendors to sell more consumer electronics to scale down WS Retail's contribution to its overall sales.

WS Retail, which used to be the only vendor on Flipkart.com before it turned into a marketplace, had registered a three-fold increase in revenue to Rs 10,163 crore in 2014-15.

WS Retail was legally separated from Flipkart's founders and its venture capital investors two years ago. It is now owned by former IT professional and angel investor Rajiv Kuchhal and some employees of Flipkart.

Tags: Cloudtail India Pvt Ltd, Amazon.com Inc, WS Retail Services Pvt Ltd, Flipkart, e-commerce, marketplace