Kindle is out of stock in China, and sellers are experiencing “store closures” What is left of Amazon in China?
On January 4, some media broke the news that Kindle was out of stock in a large area and might withdraw from China. The Kindle hardware team was also abolished in November last year. In response, Amazon China responded: “We are committed to serving Chinese consumers. Consumers can purchase Kindle devices through third-party online and offline retailers. Some models are currently sold out in the Chinese market.”
It is understood that the official flagship store of Amazon Kindle on Tmall was closed at the end of October 2021 and has not been restored so far. On Kindle Jingdong In self-operated flagship stores, only one youth version with sales of more than 50,000 pieces and a price of 658 yuan is on sale. The highest sales (more than 200,000 pieces), the classic version priced at 998 yuan, and the Kindle Oasis exclusive version, which sold more than 10,000 and priced at 2,757 yuan, all showed “out of stock.” Kindle is an ink-screen e-book reader released by Amazon in 2007. In 2013, Kindle entered China. Users can purchase e-books on Amazon or download e-books from the Internet to read on Kindle. Kindle once led the e-book trend because of its simple technology and craftsmanship. Millet, Palm Read, and iFlytek entered the game one after another, and similar domestic reader products also appeared. However, the reader is only the carrier of e-books, and what can really widen the gap between the companies in the content ecology behind them, but there is still no one to stand out. As the Kindle is out of stock, Amazon has lost another important business in China. In July 2019, Amazon officially closed its local e-commerce business in China and subsequently closed its distribution center.
At the time, Amazon announced that it would still retail amazon global store opening, overseas purchase business, Kindle, Amazon cloud computing, and other businesses. In terms of Amazon global store opening beginning in May 2021, Amazon Chinese sellers have experienced a large-scale “store closure wave” and account funds have also been frozen. The explanation given by Amazon is that these sellers have “manipulated user reviews”, such as promising to “rebate positive reviews.” Take the cross-border seller “Youkeshu” as an example. Nearly 340 Amazon accounts have been blocked, accounting for about 30% of the monthly average number of sites with sales revenue on the Amazon platform from January to May 2021. Funds frozen It also reached 130 million yuan. In this regard, Dai Yufei, Amazon’s global vice president, said that this move is not aimed at China, and merchants in other countries are involved, and it has not affected the overall business growth of Chinese sellers on Amazon platform. In the past five months (May-September 2021), Amazon closed the sales rights of about 600 Chinese brands, including about 3,000 seller accounts of these brands.
Amazon said that the frozen funds are mainly used to deal with potential customer return and refund requirements. Generally speaking, relevant sellers can retrieve the frozen funds through appeals within 90 days. In terms of overseas purchases, Amazon has not released sales data in China, but we can still compare the data to see the volume of Amazon’s overseas purchases. According to data released by the General Administration of Customs, in 2020, China’s cross-border e-commerce imports, including Amazon’s overseas purchases, will total about 570 billion yuan. In contrast, this year’s Tmall Double 11 sales alone reached 540.3 billion yuan. In the 2021 fiscal year (from the beginning of April 2020 to the end of March 2021), Alibaba’s GMV reached 8.12 trillion, which is 14 times the total imports of cross-border e-commerce. Li Yanchuan, head of Amazon’s overseas purchases in China, once revealed that from 2015 to 2020, Amazon’s Black Five orders have increased by nearly 7 times.
In terms of Amazon cloud computing according to the report released by IDC, the domestic public cloud market share is the first in Alibaba Cloud, followed by Tencent Cloud and Huawei Cloud, and Amazon Cloud Technology is only ranked fifth. In addition, in July and December of last year, AWS also experienced multiple service interruptions and large-scale failures. Not only China, but Amazon has also encountered a crisis on a global scale, and the governments of India, Italy, and the European Union have successively launched antitrust investigations on it. On December 9, the Italian antitrust regulator announced that it had decided to impose a fine of 1.128 billion euros (approximately RMB 8.1 billion) on Amazon due to abuse of its dominant market position. Amazon responded that it firmly opposed the decision of the Italian antitrust agency and would appeal.
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