The week in charts: Amazon's India investment, IndiGo disruptions, Fed rate cut
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. This week Amazon pledged to pour billions into India, while fight disruptions at IndiGo led to regulatory interventions and a potential revenue hit. Meanwhile the US Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points, the fall in prices of home-cooked vegetarian meals slowed down, and Delhi experienced slight relief from pollution.
Here's a compilation of this week's news in numbers. Amazon Inc. will invest an additional $35 billion in India over the next five years to expand its businesses, ranging from retail to cloud and streaming.
The company has already poured $40 billion into India since 2010. The investment is likely to help Amazon compete better with Flipkart and JioMart in online retail, PhonePe and Paytm in online payments, Microsoft and Google in cloud services, and Netflix and other video streaming platforms. Amazon is among several foreign companies that have pledged investments in India, mainly in artificial intelligence (AI) and data centres.
Microsoft recently announced its largest-ever Asian investment in India, committing $17.5 billion over four years, while Google announced a $15 billion investment over five years. India witnessed an unprecedented national crisis after widespread flight cancellations and delays by leading airline IndiGo. Regulators swung into action and directed the carrier to cut its operations by 10% to restore stability across networks.
Before the mass disruptions, IndiGo was scheduled to operate around 15,000 flights a week in the current winter schedule, accounting for 56.7% of the total. A 10% cut would roughly mean 200-300 fewer flights by IndiGo each day. IndiGo will also have to hire more pilots to comply with the flight duty
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