Amazon Takes Price War To Sellers, Life Insurers Talk Merger, And Other News From India

Price Wars: After the government banned e-commerce companies from funding discounts or “influencing prices” as they called it, Amazon has taken the battle to the sellers. Amazon has cut the commission sellers must pay it by up to 7 percent on popular items such as mobile devices, movie and educational content. Amazon’s move comes three days before rival Flipkart’s new seller policy, in which it has raised commissions, comes into effect. What we’re seeing is a clear impact of the funding crunch, where Flipkart and Snapdeal are under pressure to turn around, while Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has just handed his India team a $3 billion bounty.

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Another price war is underway, this time it’s the government fighting food price increases. Alarmed by the latest numbers (consumer price inflation is at a 21 month high driven by food prices), the government has adopted a multi pronged approach to keep prices from rising by unnatural means i.e. hoarders, cartels and farmers preferring to export produce rather than selling overseas. Here’s a snapshot

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Merger Talks: HDFC Life and insurer Max Life are reportedly in talks for a merger that will create India’s biggest private life insurer. Together their market value will be worth 500 billion rupees, beating current market leader ICICI Prudential. Government owned LIC is eons ahead at 25 trillion rupees.

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Uber and the Tata group have tied up. Tata will help Uber drivers buy cars it makes, using money lent by its finance companies, insured by its insurers and helped by its business support unit. Tata’s VC fund incidentally invested in Uber last year.

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Modi’s Rapid Directive to taxmen: Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants his taxmen to double the taxpayer base to 100 million. He gave them a five point charter, called RAPID: Revenue, Accountability, Probity, Information and Digitisation. At the same time, he urged them to not harass taxpayers without reason. And also this:

“If someone Googles 'how to pay taxes in India', there will be seven crore results. If the question of 'how not to pay taxes in India' is put to Google, there will be 12 crore results.” Modi to taxmen.

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Online spats are not just limited to e-commerce companies. Wallets aren’t far behind. Take Freecharge and Mobikwik for instance. After a Nielson report named Freecharge as India’s No 2 mobile wallet, Mobikwik published a blogpost questioning Nielson’s methods. Freecharge retaliated with a blogpost of its own supporting Nielson. It didn’t stop there. Further barbs were traded and the details are here. Market leader PayTM was nowhere in the picture, it was the No 2 spot that they were fighting over.

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Cover Image: A star tortoise in a Chennai zoo lost its front leg in a fight with a mongoose and is now walking around with a prosthetic wheel. A heartwarming vision to end the week.

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