Amazon: If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Buy ‘Em

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According to Bloomberg, Amazon is about to acquire China’s largest online bookseller, Joyo.

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Amazon is paying $75 million for the company. This is not the first time Amazon has bought its way into a new market; Amazon made similar acquisitions in the UK and Germany.

Amazon could have built a Chinese site from scratch, just as it did with its Japan site, but I understand that the project took them well over a year to pull off, and was a brutal learning process. And timing is critical given the rapid expansion of China’s economy. This acquisition makes good sense.

I’ll leave you with a few juicy quotes from the article:

  • There were 87 million Internet users in China in June, 28 percent more than a year earlier, according to the China Internet Network Information Center, a government-sponsored information center.
  • EBay, the largest Internet auctioneer, has invested more than $180 million in China, purchasing Eachnet, an auction site, as well as opening its first research and development center outside of the U.S.
  • Internet retailers will sell $8.59 billion worth of merchandise in China this year, according to International Data Corp. That’s less than one-tenth of sales in the U.S., the world’s largest market.
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John Yunker

John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.
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