Competition only works when the market is fair. Perhaps Amazon could not make as good of an offering but their marketshare was 15% 10 years ago and China is a large, homogenous, and modernized population like the US which is perfect for Amazon's scale strategy. It's a hard sell to say that a trillion-dollar company does not have the resources and talent to do what the people in the next building can.
> It's a hard sell to say that a trillion-dollar company does not have the resources and talent to do what the people in the next building can.
By that notion no startup will ever win agains the titan. And Apple would not have been the largest market cap company today when they had M$, Blackberry and IBM in its era.
The truth is, even if the full Amazon experience in US were replicated today in China ( Where Amazon had a home ground advantage and had much longer time to refine their infrastructure and strategy ) it will still not be anywhere as good as what Alibaba/ Taobao / JD.com has to offer.
That is on the consumer side of course, in terms of AWS their offering ( knowledge and understanding ) are very much behind.
Amazon failed in execution and strategy in China. And they learned their lesson when they enter India.
Usually I would put a few words on Chinese Companies having the advantage of literally infinite burn rate to increase revenue while competing. These money comes from VC which is funded by the government anyway. But knowing Alibaba its major share holder is Yahoo and Softbank along with a few other outside investors I don't think that is anywhere near true.
Just because Amazon had money or has money doesn't mean it can't get disrupted. Otherwise, we'd all be buying from Sears and using AT&T for video calling.
If this is the company you're talking about, can you describe what you mean by "literally was ended"?
Last year on Single Day alone, Alibaba handled over $30B in orders with 24 hours, and more impressively those are spread over 1,000,000,000 separate deliveries orders. It means it handled the ordering and payment processing of 11,574 orders per second, and then fulfilled and delivered those ONE BILLION orders within the next 48 hours.
Can you even imagine being an Alibaba warehouse worker during that couple days?
Doesn’t take anything away from what Alibaba is doing. It’s a huge spike over their normal business operations. I would be surprised if it didn’t cause a disruption of some sort.
True, but remember "slow" means something quite different in China where same/next day delivery is very often expected in top tier big cities. So 3-5 days delivery is definitely considered slow, and during these crazy period you may see the glacier speed of one week delivery time :)
Having lived in both China and America, I have to say the living standard in Chinese cities has passed America's in many ways and, more importantly, the speed of China building new facilities is at least 10x of the US. Many American believe there's a competition between two countries, but IMO the competition is already won. Chinese no longer see the US as a competitor in many areas - you rarely hear Chinese Internet companies learning something new from their American counterparts today, or people envying America for their way of living. It's the opposite I found worrisome, that America is losing confidence and becomes more insecure day by day.
https://www.bain.com/insights/embracing-chinas-new-retail/ https://www.alizila.com/new-retail/
Pro tip: at least try to submit something unrelated to China every now and then, otherwise people may rightly or wrongly call you a troll.
I see no problem submitting China-related news since I live in the country and Chinese technology is my focus, and HN folks deserve to know more about the development of Chinese technologies. I should submit more often. The fact that people are 'shocked' to hear Chinese company winning western counterparts as shown in the comments under various China posts in HN proves my point.
On the other hand, the consequences for a nation or a business of underestimating China could be catastrophic. It could mean finding your business or nation suddenly cut off by a competitor you didn't plan for. It seems to me that rational self interest alone should bias the west towards overestimating rather than underestimating China.
It almost feels like an anxious insecurity, as if admitting that China might catch up might make it so, when sticking our heads in the sand about the possible threat is way more likely to ensure we are overtaken.
Malls are out apps are in. Its almost scary how fast physical retail is dying.