Prione Business Services, the joint venture between Amazon and Catamaran, has been running successfully for the past seven years and is coming up for renewal on May 19, 2022. The two partners have announced they have mutually decided to not continue their joint venture beyond the end of its current term. The JV has enabled over 300,000 sellers and entrepreneurs to go online and enabled four million merchants with digital payment capabilities, providing these SMBs and merchants access to millions of customers across the country.
When Prione was formed in 2014, e-commerce was still in a nascent stage in India. The small and medium businesses (SMBs) in India were new to digital and needed support, training and tools to go online. The JV’s vision was to enable Indian SMBs to succeed in e-commerce and benefit from the digital opportunity. In the last seven years, the JV has made tremendous strides in this direction, leveraging Catamaran’s India insights and Amazon’s technology expertise. With feet-on-street teams in 30 cities across India, the JV enabled hundreds of thousands of sellers to sell online and provide a wide selection of products for Indian customers. The JV also supported the growth of programs like Karigar and Saheli. Prione has played an important role in transforming Indian e-commerce, and paving the way for the global scale up of emerging Indian brands.
M.D. Ranganath, President, Catamaran said, “We are happy that Prione has leveraged global best practices for e-commerce in India, created jobs, and provided millions of Indian customers access to a wide selection of products from across the country by leveraging technology. As our JV with Amazon reaches the end of its tenure, I reflect on this successful partnership that introduced the power of digitization and empowered hundreds of thousands of SMBs across big and small towns. We would like to thank Amazon for the partnership that leaves behind a strong legacy of shaping e-commerce in India.”
Amit Agarwal, Global Senior VP and Country Head, Amazon India said, “Amazon and Catamaran entered into a JV in the early days of e-commerce in India with a shared vision of transforming hundreds of thousands of small businesses in a fast-changing digital world, by providing online capabilities enabling them to access customers both in India and globally. We are humbled by how the JV exceeded its vision, helping online commerce evolve through the unrelenting efforts of hundreds of its employees, positively impacting over 4.3 million small businesses, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, and contributing to India’s digital economy. We were privileged to have had a partner we could learn from and lean on. I would like to thank the Catamaran team for this long and fruitful partnership that helped set the direction for e-commerce in India.”
