CCI nod for Amazon buying Cloudtail stake

Chennai: The Competition Commission of India has approved acquisition of Prione Business Service, which runs Cloudtail, the largest seller on Amazon, by Amazon Asia-Pacific Resources. Amazon Asia-Pacific has proposed to acquire a 76 per cent stake in Prione Business.

Amazon Asia-Pacific is an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, the ultimate parent entity of the Amazon group. Though the acquirer does not undertake any business activity in India, Amazon.com has certain indirect subsidiaries either registered in India or having business operations in India, the CCI said.

Prione is an Indian- owned and controlled company and is controlled by Hober Mallow Trust, which owns 76 per cent shares of Prione. Amazon Asia-Pacific owns 23 per cent share and Amazon Eurasia Holdings owns 1 per cent in Prione.

Hober Mallow Trust is a private trust owned by Infosys co-founder N. R. Narayana Murthy and his wife and the investments are held through Catamaran Ventures, according to Catamaran officials.

As per the CCI, Prione offers a variety of services tailored to help small and medium businesses run their online businesses, including digital cataloguing, advertising, training and consulting, digital payments and the like.

Cloudtail India is a wholly owned subsidiary of Prione and engaged in B2C retail business in India, and offers for sale products to customers on www.amazon.in operated by Amazon Seller Services. Cloudtail is also engaged in wholesale (B2B) trading of products through online and offline channels.
Amazon had sold part of its stake in Cloudtail to Catamaran earlier.