Media are buzzing with the latest news on Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) in China, which is turning up the heat in the country's overheated e-commerce space with the
opening of a store on its Chinese site selling electronic books for its Kindle tablet PCs. Since Kindle products are not yet available in China, the site also offers free software that allows consumers to read Kindle-formatted books using other devices, including Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) smartphones and tablet PCs, and similar devices based on Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) popular Android operating system.
Not surprisingly, this launch of the Kindle store has added to rumors that started appearing last month that Amazon was preparing to launch its Kindle tablet PCs in China. Such a move now looks almost inevitable, and I would expect to see such a launch early next year sometime.
This new initiative will provide fresh headaches for struggling e-commerce firm Dangdang (Nasdaq: DANG), which was once a sector leader and first rose to prominence as an online bookseller that led some to call it a Chinese Amazon. Dangdang is already facing growing pressure from a number of other major players that have recently started selling books online, including e-commerce giants
Jingdong Mall and
Suning.com (Shenzhen: 002024).
From a bigger picture perspective, this Kindle move looks like the latest push by Amazon to rapidly build up its presence in China's e-commerce market, as it tries to pose a serious challenge to Jingdong Mall and even sector leader Alibaba. Amazon formally
changed the name of its longtime China site, Joyo.com, to Amazon.cn about a year ago, and also rapidly built up a series of massive new logistic centres to help it deliver its products in a day or less to customers in major cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Those efforts are beginning to bear fruit as the company rapidly becomes a major new force in China's e-commerce scene. From my own street-level view, the presence of Amazon-branded delivery motorcycles, cars and bicycles has become very noticeable over the last half year, as the company also builds up its own massive fleet of vehicles to deliver its products.
