Last month, the Monetary Policy Committee of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) reduced the policy rate by 25 basis points, against the backdrop of a slowdown in global as well as domestic growth. In its monetary policy statement, the central bank mentions that the recent slowdown in the March 2019 quarter is predominantly a consequence of decelerating consumption and export growth in the previous quarter. So, the question needs to be asked: What has been affecting consumer demand? To understand consumer behaviour better, we have to go back to the basic microeconomic theory.

Publication: Financial Express

Date: August 2, 2019

The Centre’s e-commerce platform, government e-marketplace (GeM), was launched in 2016 with an ambitious goal to become the ‘Flipkart’ — then the byword for large-scale e-commerce in India — of government procurement. Three years and Rs 28,710 crore worth of transactions later, it has more than double the number of sellers than Flipkart. According to official statistics, the portal, under the commerce and industry ministry, has 259,000 sellers and service providers combined. GeM is yet to catch up on its basic task of digitising government transactions, estimated at an annual Rs 5.5 trillion.

Publication: Business Standard

Date: August 2, 2019

Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos sold shares worth $1.8 billion in the last three days of July, reducing the value of his stake in the world’s third most valuable company to about $110 billion. The move by Bezos was part of a previously adopted trading plan and was revealed in regulatory filings that also showed that his former wife Mackenzie Bezos is now the online retailer’s second-largest individual shareholder. Her stake, stemming from a divorce settlement of the pair’s previous joint holdings, is currently worth more than $37 billion.

Publication: Business Standard

Date: August 1, 2019

Ecommerce giant Amazon India has signed a deal with GMR Hyderabad Airport City to expand its largest fulfillment centre in Hyderabad to empower small and medium-sized businesses and enable fast delivery in the region. “With the further expansion of our largest fulfillment centre in India, we are excited to create many more hundreds of skilled jobs in the region and empower thousands of local sellers t use the local infrastructure thus helping them save capital and grow,” said Akhil Saxena, Vice President, customer fulfillment –  Asia, Amazon.

Publication: Techcircle

Date: August 1, 2019

Entrepreneurs and start-up teams from across Chennai gathered at the Cafe Coffee Day outlet in Ispahani Centre in Nungambakkam to show their solidarity with Cafe Coffee Day’s late founder V.G. Siddhartha. The entrepreneurs also decided to set up a call centre and create a peer group that would help entrepreneurs in stress. The gathering was organised by R. Balachandar, CEO and co-founder of Wassup Laundry, and Sakthivel Paneerselvam, the founder of the6.in. The entrepreneurs discussed various solutions they can offer to the start-up ecosystem to overcome stress and crisis.

Publication: The Hindu

Date: August 2, 2019