Inside Jeff Bezos’s $5 Billion Bet That Amazon Can Win India
- Festival of Diwali is India’s biggest shopping season
- Amazon and rival Flipkart have competing sales this week
Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg
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It’s mere weeks to the festival of Diwali, the season of lavish, reckless consumption, and in a cavernous warehouse minutes from the Hyderabad airport, hundreds of workers are furiously sorting mountains of everyday items.
There are sunglasses and shaving creams, sewing machines, vegetable slicers and microwave ovens, all lined up by Amazon.com Inc. to sate the shopping frenzy that’s India’s Black Friday and Christmas combined. The windowless 400,000 square foot facility is fitted with 500 kilometers of cables and 16,000 fire sprinklers. Sellers pour in with their wares precariously balanced on two-wheelers, or in autorickshaws and pickup trucks.