E-commerce giant Amazon’s acquisition of the publishing business of Westland Ltd, has created a buzz in the publishing world, raising speculation on Amazon eyeing other smaller niche publishing houses in India. While the industry has to wait and see whether this is a one-off acquisition or whether Amazon will now start a string of acquisitions similar to the ones we’ve seen large publishers like Penguin do in the past. But this one buy has brought into Amazon’s ambitious umbrella well-known Indian authors, among them Amish Tripathi, Ashwin Sanghi, Preeti Shenoy, Devdutt Pattanaik, Christopher C Doyle, Anand Neelakantan, and Ravi Subramanian.

 

The Tata Trent owned publishing house, which was founded in 2007 with the amalgamation of two companies, EastWest Books and Westland Books, had grown to become one of the leading publishers in India. The move is not a surprising one by any measure, as Amazon’s intentions of getting into publishing had been made clear when it had acquired a 26% stake in Westland from Trent Ltd, Tata Group’s retail firm, in February 2016 for a reported ₹9.5 crore. Although spokespersons from neither Amazon nor Westland have confirmed it, but reports suggest that the deal cost Amazon a substantial ₹40 crore, including the sum they paid earlier in February

 

Trent also owned the Landmark chain of bookstores which Amazon acquired in 2008. With a 100% buy out, Westland is undoubtedly going to benefit from the deal as now it will have scale, money, publishing bandwidth and the backing of Amazonian muscle power, which is always a scarce commodity for an average Indian publisher.

 

Westland’s CEO Gautam Padmanabhan said in a release sent out by Amazon, ‘This is a great day for our authors and their readers across the globe. Amazon’s roots are in books and we are excited to be part of that team in the next phase of our journey.’ Amit Agarwal, Vice President and Country Manager at Amazon India added, ‘Since investing in Westland earlier this year, we have built a great relationship with the company and its authors. Our acquisition of Westland continues our commitment to India—enabling Amazon to bring Westland’s highly talented authors and their books to even more customers in India and around the world.’

 

Although Amazon failed in China, its entry into India in 2014 has been a Godsend for the US company which was running heavy losses worldwide. In March 2015 Amazon India’s losses itself were reported at Rs 1,724 crore. In 2015, the company’s net profit was reported to be $92 million, for the same period 2016, it is reported to have jumped to $857 million, primarily from its India earnings. With declared objectives of expanding in West Asia and Africa, Amazon in India is on a role, with Amit Agarwal, a techie VP, promoted to Jeff Bezo’s core business team. Amazon movies have also acquired a number of Indian investments like Netflix.