What Amazon's Win In Supreme Court Means For Reliance

The two behemoths, owned by two of the world's richest men, Jeff Bezos and Mukesh Ambani, are fighting for a bigger slice of the Indian market.

Mukesh Ambani's planned $3.4 billion purchase of an indebted retailer suffered a blow after Amazon.com Inc. won a court battle to halt the transaction, disrupting the tycoon's ambitions to take on the US e-commerce giant in the $1 trillion local market. On Friday, a two-judge bench of Supreme Court ruled that an emergency order by a Singapore arbitrator last year, which stopped Reliance from proceeding with the deal, is legally binding. Amazon had approached the arbitration court, and the parties will now have to wait for the deliberations of that body before a final decision. The court's verdict is the latest episode in a bitter battle over the cash-starved Future Retail Ltd. -- the nation's second-largest supermarket chain -- which both Jeff Bezos-founded Amazon and Mr Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd. want to control. The two behemoths, owned by two of the world's richest men, are fighting for a bigger slice of the only billion-people plus consumer market that's still open to foreign firms. Reliance dropped as much as 2.6% in Mumbai on the ruling, the biggest intraday decline in two weeks. Future Retail plunged by its daily limit of 10%, the most in more than four months.