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