Weekly News Wrap: Panic buying seen in Beijing stores; Billionaire takes on India’s retail giants with new e-commerce platform
And investigators raid Amazon, Flipkart’s top sellers for data, and documents.
From Reuters:
A mass COVID-19 testing order in Beijing's biggest district prompted residents in the Chinese capital to stock up on groceries, fearing they could be destined for a lockdown similar to that of Shanghai, which entered the fourth week of bitter isolation.
Authorities in Chaoyang, home to 3.45 million people, have ordered those who live and work there to be tested three times this week as Beijing warned the virus had "stealthily" spread for about a week before being detected.
Knowing how Shanghai residents struggled to source food and other essentials while locked indoors, shoppers in Beijing crowded stores and online platforms to stock up on vegetables, fresh meat, instant noodles, and toilet paper.
A 63-year-old Chaoyang resident surnamed Di bought two bags of vegetables - enough for 8-10 days, he said - just in case his building is added to more than a dozen put under lockdown.
"Shanghai was a lesson," he said, adding that he doesn't believe Beijing will suffer the same fate.
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From Bloomberg:
He co-founded software powerhouse Infosys, became a billionaire, and went on to spearhead a colossal government program to create biometric identification for India’s almost 1.4 billion people.
Now 66, Nandan Nilekani has one more ambitious goal. The high-profile mogul is helping Prime Minister Narendra Modi build an open technology network that seeks to level the playing field for small merchants in the country’s fragmented but fast-growing $1t retail market.
Its stated purpose is to create a freely accessible online system where traders and consumers can buy and sell everything from 23-cent detergent bars to $1,800 airline tickets. But its unspoken objective is to eventually curb the powers of Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart, whose online domination has alarmed small merchants and the millions of local mom-and-pop stores, called Kirana, that form the nation’s retail backbone.
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From Reuters:
Indian investigators have seized data and documents from top sellers on Amazon's and Flipkart's marketplaces on the second day of raids over suspected competition law violations, sources with direct knowledge told Reuters.
The Competition Commission of India (CCI) started early on Thursday raiding two top domestic sellers on Amazon's platform - Cloudtail and Appario - as well as some sellers on Walmart's Flipkart, following allegations the sellers and marketplaces had breached competition law.
The raids relate to an investigation the CCI ordered in January 2020 in which Amazon and Flipkart face allegations of promoting preferred sellers on their websites and giving priority to listings of some sellers.
CCI investigators were collecting emails, documents, and data from computers, after questioning several officials of the seller companies, said two of the sources. The CCI officers "are collecting relevant evidence for the investigation", said the first source, who added that data from mobile phones - such as WhatsApp chats - was also seized.
Read more here.
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