A few days ago, the Beijing News Shell financial reporter (official account: Ngke TechTalk) about the Amazon Kindle official flagship store closure, out of stock, hardware team was cut exclusive video report on B station, Xiaohongshu and other platforms to attract attention. A few days after fermentation, on January 4, the first working day of 2022, a number of related topics began to appear on Weibo hot search, and when the popularity was the highest, the topic of "kindle or withdrawal from the Chinese market" was the first hot search. The whereabouts of the kindle business in China have become a question hanging in the hearts of many netizens. The Beijing News shell financial reporter searched on the e-commerce platform and found that the official flagship store of Amazon Kindle Tmall was closed at the end of October 2021 and has not yet recovered. On Jingdong's self-operated official flagship store, except for a low-end model, kindle products are out of stock. A number of independent sources within Amazon China revealed to reporters that the company's kindle hardware team was laid off in November last year. "There's no longer a Kindle electronics business in China." A person familiar with the matter said.
Insiders shown in the video report of the Beijing News Shell Financial Reporter broke the news
On the morning of the 4th, Amazon China gave an exclusive response to the shell financial reporter on this matter. In response, Amazon is committed to serving Chinese consumers, who can purchase Kindle devices through third-party online and offline retailers. The response also acknowledges that some models of the kindle e-book reader are currently sold out in the Chinese market. Although this response does not directly answer the question of whether the Kindle team has been dismissed, the statement that consumers buy Kindle devices through third-party channels has undoubtedly confirmed that Amazon will no longer operate its own Kindle electronic device business.
Losing the official channel of the kindle, how far can it go in the Chinese market?
01
From reading artifacts to "instant noodle covers",
Is the kindle cold or is it already cold?
In fact, the occurrence of the above changes has been as little as one month and as much as two months. There have been sporadic discussions on the Internet about issues such as the closure of kindles, but they have not received public attention. This also shows on the side that the role that kindle can play in the daily life of the current mainstream population has been very marginal. After the video report was issued, the relevant topics can arouse widespread attention and discussion on platforms such as Weibo, which is enough to prove that kindle, an e-book reader that accompanies many people's reading time, still has an extraordinary weight in the minds of the Chinese people.
In the only remaining official channel, the kindle Jingdong self-operated flagship store, customer service still said that the lack of goods was caused by the lack of chips by the manufacturer, and "the specific arrival time cannot be determined." However, according to Amazon China's response, the closure of the kindle Jingdong flagship store will only be a matter of time, and those out-of-stock kindle products may never be resold in the store.
In the official flagship store of kindle JD.com, most of the goods have been shown to be out of stock
For loyal kindle users, what can be talked about masturbating is that on third-party channels, consumers can still buy Kindle products, including the National Bank of China. In fact, because the price of kindle in the United States, Japan and other markets will generally be much cheaper than the bank of China products, in addition to not being able to enjoy the warranty, there is almost no difference in use, through a variety of third-party channels to buy the United States Bank, the proportion of users of the Day Bank Kindle has not been low. The sales of the Kindle of the National Bank are also inevitably squeezed by these channels. Amazon's self-operated channel of abandoning hardware this time is probably also a choice to push the boat along the water.
Under the video report of the Beijing News Shell Financial Reporter, more than 1200 comments have been collected in a few days. In these comments, you can also get a glimpse of kindle's "internal and external difficulties" in the Chinese market. Although the advantages of kindle thin and light design, ink screen display effect, long endurance and so on have been widely recognized, but with the emergence of brands such as Aragonite, Xiaomi, iFLYTEK and other brands have entered the ink screen product market, these advantages are no longer the exclusive advantages of kindle. The unique display mechanism of the ink screen also makes it have a big gap with mobile phones, tablets and other products in terms of reaction speed, which limits the popularity of the product.
In the era of mobile Internet, short videos, mobile games and other products and services that compete for users' attention are emerging in an endless stream, and the time and patience of users to read books are facing an unprecedented test. Even if the user has the heart to read, on the hardware, there are hardware such as mobile phones and tablets, as well as software such as WeChat reading. In the face of the various Internet operation methods of domestic software and hardware manufacturers, the improvement of the kindle as an imported product in localization is also considered to be "lackluster". When a kindle becomes a "bubble noodle lid" after being bought home, the fate of the kindle in the Chinese market can be imagined.
02
China was the second largest market for Kindle in the world.
Kindle's china usher has been transferred to AWS cloud services
Behind the cut of kindle hardware is the continuous contraction of Amazon's business in China in recent years.
In 2004, through the acquisition of Excellence.com, which Lei Jun co-founded, Amazon, which is already a global e-commerce giant, began to lay out its business in China. After Amazon entered China, it quickly occupied a place in China's e-commerce market. However, in the following years, its e-commerce business faced a squeeze from the soil and the squeeze of China's local e-commerce, and continued to shrink on the road, and its market share fell from 15.4% to less than 1%.
Two years ago, in 2019, Amazon announced a strategic adjustment, retaining only amazon overseas purchases, Amazon global stores, kindles and Amazon cloud computing and other businesses, including paper books, self-operated and third-party e-commerce businesses were all cut. In the same year, Zhang Wenyi, Amazon's global vice president and amazon china president, also stepped down as president of China and later became the executive director of Amazon AWS Cloud Services Greater China. The name Zhang Wenyi may not be known to many people, but her other identity is the "guide" of the kindle into China.
Wenyi Zhang, a Chinese-American, joined Amazon in May 2013 as Global Vice President and took over as President of Amazon China in April 2016, taking over Amazon's e-commerce business in China and Kindle's business in China. The key qualification that made her the general manager of Amazon China was that she was responsible for introducing the full range of Kindle products into China, making China the second largest kindle consumer market after the United States. It has been reported that Zhang Wenyi led the Kindle team to successfully build a perfect digital publishing ecosystem in China with e-book reading devices and e-bookstores as the core, and Kindle has also established good partnerships with more than 600 publishing houses.
One of the important reasons for Amazon's e-commerce business to struggle in the Chinese market is the lack of traffic support. After Zhang Wenyi took office, kindle, as a sticky user entrance, can bring certain traffic to the e-commerce business, which is highly expected. But it turns out that this is not enough to bring Amazon's e-commerce business in China back to life.
With Zhang Wenyi stepping down as president of Amazon China, the expectation of using Kindle traffic to save the e-commerce business naturally fell short. Amazon's official website in China will increasingly become an overseas shopping platform. At a time when the global epidemic continues to spread and logistics are not smooth, the future of overseas shopping business is also in great uncertainty.
03
The lonely Kindle e-book store:
The next victim?
Today, two of the cores of kindle in China, e-book reading devices and e-bookstores, have lost one. The question that really worries tens of millions of kindle users in China is whether the e-book store will be next?
Where will the more than 700,000 books in the kindle e-book store go?
When Zhang Wenyi took over, amazon's e-book store had only 24,000 books, and today, that number has risen to more than 700,000. The huge and comprehensive e-book resources are also a major confidence for kindles to still be a heavy player in the field of e-reading.
When Amazon China cut the paper book business in 2019, some insiders expressed pessimistic predictions about the development of its e-book business. They pointed out that e-commerce giants selling paper books and selling e-books are "two-legged walking", through the cooperation of paper books, guiding and even "forcing" publishers to cooperate with platforms for e-books, and the income and traffic of e-books will also feed back the paper book business. "Losing the ability to sell paper books for publishers, what does Amazon do to convince publishers to work with them?" An industry insider asked.
The challenge for kindle e-book stores, in addition to the giant and rich book rivals like WeChat Reading, there is another major problem that is ghostly entangled in China's e-reading market, that is, piracy. Under the video report of the Beijing News Shell financial reporter, many users are quite "proud" to point out that after purchasing the Kindle reader, they "did not spend a penny in the Amazon e-book store" . On the Internet, in addition to the pirated book resources produced and shared by individuals, there are also many pirate practitioners who specialize in book cracking and resale. On their websites, WeChat public accounts or other platforms, e-books with an original price of 10 yuan or 20 yuan may only be sold for one yuan or two yuan, and the content of the book is cracked from the genuine book. E-book technology facilitates both publishing and piracy, which, like wildfire, can never be completely eliminated.
The pinch between third-party platforms and piracy has brought great challenges to the survival of the Kindle e-book store. If the number of genuine book sales decreases, the platform needs to increase the unit price of the book to maintain break even, and the price increase of e-books will further drive away users, which is a vicious circle with great lethality. Many users have pointed out that kindle e-bookstore books sell more expensive than other platforms and are "getting more expensive."
If the Kindle e-book store also closes, then China's Kindle users will really face the dilemma of "no books to read". How to be responsible for this part of the user and how to continue the content ecology that has been built has become an important test for Amazon China's management team. In response to the Beijing News Shell financial reporter, Amazon China stressed that the high-quality customer service and warranty services provided by Amazon will not change. As for the question of whether the Kindle e-book store is included in this "customer service", as of press time, Amazon has not responded.