Babu’s resignation follows a restructuring in the company after the exit of its former India head Manish Tiwary recently.
Babu has over the years emerged as one of the key executives at Amazon India, dabbling in various roles that oversaw top revenue-grossing categories. He has been associated with Amazon for more than a decade, including his stint at Cloudtail, which was key to the success of Amazon’s India operations.
“He has resigned and is moving on,” a person said. A spokesperson for Amazon did not comment on Babu’s departure.
In December last year, Babu was given the additional role of taking over some of the responsibilities of senior executive Noor Patel, who had moved to Amazon US. In July this year, he was made head of consumer electronics, which includes smartphones–one of the biggest sales generators for the ecommerce firm.
Company veteran Samir Kumar has replaced Tiwary as India head at a time the local arm of the US etailer is trying to catch up on the core ecommerce business and enter the red-hot quick commerce sector. Other senior executives like Gaurav Arora and Suresh John have also left the company.
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Tiwary’s departure–the most critical one–came at a time when industry executives and analysts indicated that Amazon India has further lost its grip on certain key markets and top categories in terms of market share gap with arch-rival Flipkart. The company is expected to launch its own quick commerce offering–codenamed Tez– by January, as reported by ET on November 25.
Saurabh Srivastava, Harsh Goyal, Amit Nanda, Aastha Jain and Kishore Thota are among the senior executives in India currently reporting to Kumar and Amit Agarwal–SVP for emerging markets at Amazon. Nishanth Sardana is another prominent executive at Amazon India closely working on the quick commerce offering.
Amazon Seller Services, the Indian marketplace entity, posted a 14% rise in operating revenue in the last financial year at Rs 25,406 crore. The company also narrowed its net loss by 28% during the year to Rs 3,469 crore.
While revenue growth outpaced the 3% rise in FY23, it lagged growth rates seen during the pandemic period. Revenue grew by 32% and 49% in FY22 and FY21 respectively.
Amazon Seller Services generates most of its revenue from third-party seller services, subscriptions including Amazon Prime, and other marketplace-related services such as advertising and marketing support to affiliates. It also earns royalty revenue from licensing digital content to related parties.
Amazon Seller Services received a fund infusion of Rs 830 crore in FY24 from its parent company. An additional Rs 1,660 crore was infused in April FY25.
Meanwhile, Amazon India’s other three units—logistics, payments, and wholesale—posted moderate revenue growth rates of about 7-11% in FY24, along with a slight reduction in losses.
