In order to boost exports from India’s MSME sector, e-commerce company Amazon India on Thursday announced signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT), Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Under the MoU, Amazon and DGFT will co-organise capacity-building sessions, training and workshops in a phased manner for MSMEs across 75 districts identified under the Districts as Export Hubs initiative outlined in the latest Foreign Trade Policy to export and grow via e-commerce.
The ‘Districts as Export Hubs’ initiative aims to transform each district into an export hub by connecting local producers with global supply chains, and leveraging their unique identities.
Amazon said it will also enable access to a host of third-party service providers that MSMEs can engage with to avail services like imaging, digital cataloging of their products, and tax advisory, among others. Overall, the intent is to help MSMEs export their made in India products to Amazon customers in more than 200 countries under its Amazon Global Selling programme.
“To promote e-commerce exports from the districts, DGFT is collaborating with the various e-commerce platforms to hold training and capacity-building sessions in the districts. In the first such collaboration with different e-commerce platforms, DGFT is collaborating with Amazon as a step towards our goal of enabling $200-300 billion in e-commerce exports from India by 2030,” said Santosh Sarangi, Additional Secretary and Director General, DGFT.
Amazon Global Selling is Amazon’s flagship e-commerce export programme launched in India in 2015. It helps lower the entry barrier for Indian MSMEs and entrepreneurs to start or expand their export business using e-commerce. Currently, according to the company, there are more than 1.25 lakh exporters on the programme offering millions of made in India products and are on track to surpass $8 billion in cumulative exports by the end of 2023.
Bhupen Wakankar, Director Global Trade, Amazon India said, “Our focus remains on making exports simpler and more accessible to businesses of all sizes as we work toward our goal of enabling $20 billion in cumulative e-commerce exports from India by 2025.”
Importantly, the share of export of MSME-specified products in all India exports has been declining year-on-year even as the country’s overall exports including merchandise and services grew by an estimated 13.84 per cent in the financial year 2022-23.
Citing data from the Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics (DGCIS), Bhanu Pratap Singh Verma, Minister of State in the MSME Ministry in a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha earlier this year noted that the share of MSME-specified goods in overall exports stood at 43.6 per cent in FY23. This was down from 45.03 per cent share in FY22, 49.35 per cent in FY21 and 49.77 per cent in FY20. However, the value of MSME exports increased to $190 billion in FY22 from $143.9 billion in FY21 and $154.8 billion in FY20.