Amazon's Fresh $1B Investment in India Not a Big Favor, Says Indian Trade Minister (techcrunch.com) 24
India's trade minister isn't impressed with Amazon's new $1 billion investment in the country. From a report: A day after Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos announced that his company is pumping in an additional $1 billion into its India operations, making the total local investment to date $6.5 billion, the nation's trade minister Piyush Goyal said Amazon's investment was not a big favor to the country. "They may have put in a billion dollars, but then, if they make a loss of a billion dollars every year then they jolly well have to finance that billion dollars," Goyal said in a conference on Thursday organized by think tank Observer Research Foundation. "So it's not as if they are doing a great favor to India when they invest a billion dollars." The remark from the Indian minister comes days after the nation's antitrust watchdog announced a probe into Amazon India and Walmart-owned Flipkart's alleged predatory practices. Goyal reiterated that foreign e-commerce players would have to abide by the local law if they want to continue to operate in the nation. He said the watchdog's allegations were "an area of concern for every Indian."
Sounds like the trade minister (Score:2, Troll)
Is one of the few influential government employees who isn't getting a "taste".
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Goyal reiterated that foreign e-commerce players would have to abide by the local law if they want to continue to operate in the nation
Yep, sounds like Goyal isn't getting his kick back, which is standard Indian practice.
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So, the lose the money to who? (Score:5, Insightful)
And, while losing money, they move massive amounts of cash into the country to sustain operations during their growth period.
Those bastards!!!!
In 20 years they dominate all aspects of retail (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of us are capable of thinking more than 5-10 years down the road, especially those of us with kids....
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By your logic, communities should not accept any business investment for fear that the business could actually produce something usable by that very same community........*sigh*.....
As a side-note, you might want to spend some time actually thinking versus just parroting Bernie Sanders poor excuses of economics.
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Slippery Slope Fallacy...
A slippery slope argument, in logic, critical thinking, political rhetoric, and caselaw, is a logical fallacy in which a party asserts that a relatively small first step leads to a chain of related events culminating in some significant effect.
Unless you are a time-traveler returned from the future, you have no way of knowing that these events you are predicting are likely to occur. You are just bullshitting without providing any evidence.
I basically am a time traveller (Score:2)
And slippery slope arguments can be good if the slope is real [wikipedia.org]
Re:So, the lose the money to who? (Score:5, Insightful)
If anyone who lives in American Rust Belt Communities. After the company leaves the area the communities have an over sized infrastructure to maintain that their tax base no longer is able to support.
Also when these companies leave their environmental impact is still present.
When ever a big company enters a Community with JOBS and INVESTMENT. It often means after the company leaves the Once Adequate Community becomes a Desolate one. With perhaps a generation with Prosperity.
Communities that can handle these big companies are big cities where there is such a strong economy after they leave there is still a lot of activity to manage. For these small and poor communities, they actually need a lot of smaller businesses and stores which can allow for a slower growth, but no single point of failure.
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What does this even mean? (Score:1)
"They may have put in a billion dollars, but then, if they make a loss of a billion dollars every year then they jolly well have to finance that billion dollars,"
Yeah, so ? What am I missing ?
India thinks Amazon is planing to lose money (Score:3)
A frog will jump out of water once it's boiling, but if you seal the frog in the pot that can't happen. Once Amazon is entrenched it's gonna be really, really hard to be rid of them.
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That's fair, but it's not what that quote or sentence is saying as far as I can tell.
If they said what you were saying, for example, that would seem foresighted and intelligent.
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in order to put their competitors out of business, and then jack up prices once they're the only game in town. India is correct. The time scales Amazon are working on to do this are 15-20 years, so it's hard to see it happening.
This isn't my main point but as an aside, there is little historical evidence of this fear coming to pass. If a company with a near monopoly raises prices, competitors immediately pop up to undersell them, assuming there are no legal barriers to entry. So practically speaking, even companies with monopolies can't raise prices. Even standard antitrust boogeymen like Standard Oil kept prices low.
A frog will jump out of water once it's boiling, but if you seal the frog in the pot that can't happen. Once Amazon is entrenched it's gonna be really, really hard to be rid of them.
(Ummm, I think you misremember the story. It says if you gradually raise the heat, the frog will never try to jump
You need to go read up on Robber Barrons (Score:2)
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company stores and the last 20 years of business consolidation. From there read up on the break up of AT&T. What you're describing just isn't what happens.
What part of "Sears used to dominate, got crushed by Walmart/Target/Costco, who are now running scared from Amazon" isn't what happened?
What part of "GM/Ford/Chrysler used to own the US car market, got their clocks cleaned by Toyota/Honda/Hyundai/Kia, who are now looking over their shoulder at Tesla" is inaccurate?
What part of "Business meetings used to be f2f, got replaced by WebEx (owned by Cisco), and now are getting clobbered by Zoom"?
What part of "AT&T/Verizon/Sprint/Whoever used to charge 50 cents
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That's Walmart's standard business practice, not Amazon's.
Damn commies! (Score:1)
Washington Post (Score:2)
If they don't want it, others will. (Score:1)
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Sounds like New York City, which threw away $5,000,000,000/year in salaries as well as huge company-paid infrastructure upgrades and a couple dozen modern new buildings when they rejected HQ2.