PRESIDENCY UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

PROJECT REPORT 
STRATERGIC MANAGEMENT 
 
A STUDY ON CSR POLICY OF AMAZON
SUBMITTED BY: GAGAN.HN
REG NO: 20202MBA0097 
 
SUBMITTED TO:  
Prof. RAMESH. M 
 DECLARATION 
 
I, GAGAN.HN hereby declare that this project titled ‘A STUDY ON CSR
POLICY OF AMAZON’ has been prepared by me under the guidance of Prof,
Ramesh. M, in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the award of Master in
Business Administration. 
 
 
PLACE: BENGALURU
DATE: 15/07/2021 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 
 
First and most, I thank GOD for his almightily support and mercy drop of
blessing upon me to complete my project within the stipulated time. 
 
I am greatly indebted to Prof, Ramesh.M, department of MBA, for giving me
the guidance of the project work. 
 
I profuse my heartful thanks to all employees who gave me all the relevant
information for my project work. 
 
Finally I must extend my thanks to my family and friends and well- wishers for
the encouragement sustained help and prayer which I got from them.
 
 
COMPANY PROFILE:
Amazon India launched its operations in June 2013. The company soon
launched its website Amazon.in which is offering customers a wide variety of
choices in apparel, groceries, household items, books, movies, television shows
and almost everything that a person requires.

On the very first day of its operations, the company received more than 10,000
orders. Amazon India is a subsidiary of US-based e-commerce giant Amazon
Inc. The parent company Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. The
company wanted to explore other countries for sales increment and the growth
of the company.
So it did not limit its operations to the United States, and soon launched its
operations in other countries. Amazon looked upon China as a lucrative option
because of its huge market, well-developed infrastructure, and internet
connectivity.

In a very short span of time, Amazon India has acquired an eminent position in
the Indian e-commerce space and has become a major shopping giant for
millions of customers. Amazon India is currently offering millions of products
on its platform and has millions of registered users.

It currently delivers to most of the serviceable PIN codes in India. It has

connected millions of sellers and buyers in a network, making the shopping a
much easier task for people. It caters to more than 20,000 Indian sellers and has
41 fullfillment centres across 13 states in India.

In India, the popular advertisement of Amazon claiming it to be “APNI

DUKAAN” is turning out to be successful in grabbing millions of customers. It
has become a reliable and convenient source of buying and selling for people.
INDUSTRY- COMPETITOR PROFILE:

It started operations as an online bookseller and expanded its operations to sell

electronics, video games, food, future, movies, grocery, clothing, toys and many
more. Amazon is no more focus on only e-commerce but it also expand its
physical (brick and mortar) presence to increase its customer base and brand
presence.  

Amazon e-commerce segment dominates almost 50% of the U.S e-commerce

market. All this success is made possible due its huge expansion, loyal customer
base and the Amazon prime membership program and lastly the competitive
advantage of change and adoptability.

Amazon competitors:

1. eBay
2. Walmart
3. Home Depot
4. Etsy
5. Best Buy
6. Flipkart
7. Kroger
8. Target
9. Netflix
10.Microsoft Azur

CSR REPORT ANALYSIS:

Amazon CSR programs and initiatives include the following:

1} Amazon Supporting Local Communities

 In 2020, the e-commerce giant created the Amazon Relief Fund, with a
USD25 million initial contribution, focused on supporting its independent
delivery service partners and other stakeholders to deal with the negative
impact of coronavirus developments on the business.
  Amazon’s Device Donation Program facilitates the donation of electronic
devices and gift cards to schools located near Amazon fulfilment centres
throughout the US.
 The company hosts ‘Girls Who Code’ events occasionally to help get
more girls interested in coding
 The e-commerce giant supports local and national non -profits with cash
and product donations.

2} Employee Health and Safety at Amazon

 In 2020 due to the risk of COVID-19 coronavirus, the company
recommended all of global employees to who work in a role that can be
done from home, do so for a certain period of time.

 3} Amazon and Gender Equality and Minorities

 Gender equality and minorities are placed at the core of Amazon CSR
initiatives. There are 10 affinity groups in the company, known as
employee resource groups.
 In 2019 the company launched Business for Social Responsibility’s HER
project which attracted more than 8000 women in its supply chain.

4} Water Consumption by Amazon

 Many of Amazon’s fulfilment centres have the ability to collect and

recycle water. This is achieved via rainwater collection tanks or recharge
wells.
 Whenever possible, the e-commerce giant uses direct evaporative
technology for cooling our data centres, significantly reducing energy and
water consumption.

5}  Waste Reduction and Recycling by Amazon

 The company has started Packaging-Free program in a number of cities.

Customer orders within this program are shipped in their original
packaging without secondary or additional packaging.
 Amazon celebrated 10-year anniversary of Frustration-Free Packaging in
2017. The company claims to have eliminated more than 665,000 tons of
packaging materials – more than 1.18 billion shipping boxes over the last
decade.

6} Carbon Emissions by Amazon

  Amazon’s total carbon footprint for the financial year 2019 totalled to
44,40 million metric tons.
 In 2019 Amazon and Global Optimism announced The Climate Pledge, a
commitment to meet the Paris Agreement 10 years early.
 The e-commerce giant has pledged to deploy its technology and people to
reach zero carbon across the company by 2040.
 As an important step towards the achievement of zero carbon operations,
The tech giant aims to achieve zero carbon for 50% of all shipments by
2030
 The company has ordered 100,000 fully-electric delivery vehicles, the
largest order ever for electric delivery vehicles.
 The largest internet retailer in the world by revenue has invested about
USD 100 million in reforestation projects globally.

 7} Amazon and Sustainable Sourcing

 Amazon is a member of Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), which is the

largest cotton sustainability program in the world.
 In 2019, the e-commerce giant signed the Responsible Sourcing
Network’s public Cotton Pledge to not source cotton from certain
countries until the pervasive use of government-mandated forced labour
is stopped.

8} Amazon Educating and Empowering Workers

 Amazon Career Choice Program pre-pays 95% of tuition for employees

to take courses for in-demand fields, such as airplane mechanic or
nursing, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at
Amazon. Up to date the program has been attended by more than 10000
employees worldwide.
 Amazon Virtual Contact Centre, allows Amazon’s customer service
employees to work from home.
 Amazon program “Pay to Quit” offers USD 5000 to warehouse workers
who quit to encourage employees to take a moment and think about what
they really want.

YOUR NEW CSR STRATERGY

1} Drivers of Corporate Strategy:

Any choice of strategic options must necessarily be in tune with the drivers of
corporate strategy. For the purposes of this article, six drivers of corporate
strategy have been identified. They are the growth imperative or the need to
grow, consistency with the firm’s internal strengths and resources, being geared
towards leveraging and targeting the marketplace strategies, aligning the
strategies with that of its sources of competitive advantage, and taking into
account the longer term as well as the shorter term profitability aspects.

2} Diversify into Cloud based Services:

Perhaps there can be no better strategic option than expanding and diversifying
into the cloud based business. As cloud, computing is set to emerge as the
hottest trend of this decade and along with the other trend of the increasing
usage of Big Data by marketers, Amazon can clearly establish itself in these
segments and attain market leadership positions.

Expand Globally:

In order to grow quickly and actualize economies of scale as well as leverage

synergies, Amazon needs to expand globally. Though in its current business
model, it does indeed cater to a global audience, it must also setup local
portals in the countries in which it wishes to enter. For instance, Amazon
now has dedicated portals in many countries including India and this model
can be followed in other countries as well. Further, it needs to adopt a Global
approach wherein its core global delivery model is adapted to the local
conditions thereby actualizing a merging of the global and local .

1. Next, the specific regions that it can target and expand into are the
Scandinavian countries where the populace in those countries are highly
connected as well as have high incomes. The twin combination of high
 rates of penetration of the internet and the high disposable incomes is a
sure way of garnering more business.
2. Third, it must target both the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and
South Africa) markets as well as the MINTs (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria,
and Turkey) markets as part of its global expansion strategies. As the
former have already arrived on the global stage and the latter are being
touted as the next emerging frontier for western businesses, it makes
sense for Amazon to aggressively target these markets.

CONCLUSION:

Therefore, following the points made in the preceding discussion,

Amazon needs to diversify into areas that are higher margin ones. A
possible strategy would be to ramp up the cloud-based offerings that it
has with its AWS. Of course, as this article suggested earlier, such
diversification must not result in strategic blunders such as its
introduction of Kindle Fire. Therefore, it must diversify for growth and
profitability and at the same time not lose focus over its core
competencies.

Apart from this, Amazon can tap into the increasing sales from mobile
commerce as well as focus more on its Kindle eBooks segment.
Considering the fact that sales from its Kindle division were for the first
time higher than that from its other divisions in the recent few quarters,
this makes for sound business strategy. Complementing this with mobile
commerce would drive its profitability in the future.