Amazon ($AMZN) was able to shift the entire food industry with the announcement that it was buying Whole Foods. Any time there are rumors Jeff Bezos is talking about acquiring a new company, the markets swing. So this week, we found out Amazon has its eyes on Bharti Airtel ($NSE:BHARTIARTL), the Indian telecommunications giant, to reportedly get a bigger footprint in Asia. With the North American digital consumer market already won, why not go after another country?
The reports discuss a $2 billion equity stake, but when confronted about a potential deal, Bharti Airtel had this to say: "[We] routinely work with all digital and OTT players and have deep engagement with them to bring their products, content, and services for our wide customer base. Beyond that, there is no other activity to report.”
But what would Amazon take on if it were to get a piece of Bharti Airtel? Considering our declining data on the company, it seems like Amazon just wants to get a foothold in India.
Bharti Airtel says they employ over 19,000, but that's not the number reflected on LinkedIn. When you include temp workers and contractors, and people who haven't updated their profiles, that number balloons to over 43,000. But after years of growth, November 2019 saw a 14% decline of its employee count, meaning Amazon would be buying a stake in a slowly shrinking company.
And it'll keep shrinking if job listings continue to go down. In a full year, 77% of the job openings vanished for Bharti Airtel.
The @airtelindia Twitter account had half of its followers disappear back in April, which is both bizarre and concerning. Considering Facebook likes have also gone down for the first time ever, we would like to know more about this potential Amazon deal because maybe there might be some room for the two companies to help each other out.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales, and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue, and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.