Minister Piyush Goyal speaks out against predatory pricing online

By

Isabelle Crossley

Published
Oct 4, 2019

Union Minister Piyush Goyal announced that he plans to keep India’s e-commerce sector a fair operating environment and protect small businesses at the India Economic Forum in New Delhi on October 3.

Speaking at the India Economic Forum on Thursday, Minister Goyal warned large businesses against engaging in predatory pricing online, the Press Trust of India reported. Goyal said that deep discounting could put smaller online retailers out of business and that this is not the “spirit of the law”.

Goyal said that e-commerce "is not expected to become a platform either for predatory pricing or to use muscle power of large capital at low volumes available which allows companies to source cheap, get economies of scale in sourcing and maybe offer discounts which in some sense throw out small retail out of business. We are very clear about it."

A number of traders’ organisations including the Confederation of All India Traders have repeatedly petitioned the government to protect small businesses online. Foreign owned giants Flipkart and Amazon India have also come under fire for allegedly pricing small, Indian businesses out of the market. With the Union Government’s new focus on the Micro, Small, and Medium enterprise sector, MSME online businesses are hoping that the government’s upcoming draft e-commerce policy will afford them higher protections. 

"I'm again and again trying to explain to everybody that the spirit of Indian law is protecting small retail and I think every country in the world would like to protect employment, work and livelihoods of their people," said Goyal.