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Ambani vs Bezos: A $3.4 bn battle for a pole position in Indian market

 By seeking to stall Ambani’s purchase of Future, Bezos may be signaling that he would rather remain a rival

Jeff Bezos

A vanilla commercial dispute is setting the stage for a clash between the world’s No. 1 and No. 6 richest men. But the legal wrangling is a sideshow. What Jeff Bezos and Mukesh Ambani are really fighting over is pole position in the only billion-plus-people consumer market available to both of them: India. The ostensible battleground is a $3.4 billion deal Indian tycoon Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd. stitched up in August to acquire assets of debt-laden local retailer Future Group. Bezos’s Amazon.com Inc. is trying to block the transaction.

That, in itself, is a bit of a dampener. Expectations were building for the two billionaires to work together. In September, Bloomberg News reported that Ambani had given Amazon an option to buy as much as 40% of Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd., seeking to repeat the success he had earlier this year in bringing in Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc. as partners to his digital platform. By seeking to stall Ambani’s purchase of Future, Bezos may be signaling that he would rather remain a rival. Or, that he’s buying time to sweeten the offer currently on the table.

Two Billionaires Fight Over a Billion Consumers

The actual quarrel is only interesting when you read between the lines of the claims and counterclaims.Amazon bought a 49% stake last year in a private firm controlled by Kishore Biyani, a pioneer of modern-format retailing in the country. The investment gave the U.S. e-commerce giant the right to acquire Biyani’s shares in the publicly traded Future Retail Ltd. from the third year. Another of Bezos’s conditions was that Biyani wouldn’t sell his assets — about 1,500 stores nationwide — to restricted persons, including Reliance, which operates India’s largest retail chain.


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