Text | Zhang Yuan Gu Lexiao He Miao
Edit | Chen Chen
On January 4, 2022, Amazon China denied the speculation that "Kindle withdrew from the Chinese market", saying that "we are committed to serving Chinese consumers, and some models are currently sold out in the Chinese market." This has been two years since Amazon officially announced "business contraction".
Kindle's "expansion" in China began in 2013, and in June of that year, Kindle moved into China. Subsequently, the market pattern of e-readers in China changed.
According to Amazon China, by the end of 2016, China had become Amazon's largest market for global Kindle device sales. In the five years from 2013 to 2018, the Kindle e-book reader sold millions of units in China.
Not only equipment sales, in the "monthly service" business, the Chinese market is also the "main output" of the Kindle. According to Amazon China vice president in 2017, in the Kindle Unlimited e-bookbag monthly service, China is the third largest market after the United States and the United Kingdom.
From the perspective of specific monthly subscription fees, in the approximately one year (February 2016 to March 2017) of the Kindle Unlimited e-book subscription service, the monthly subscription fee for Chinese users was 12 yuan. In comparison, U.S. users are $9.99 per month.
So, in the Chinese market, how much does Kindle make? According to the US "Forbes" magazine website reported on January 4, 2022, there was news that the Kindle had been profitable for 6 months after listing in China. But how much profit does the Kindle business itself really make? Amazon's financial report did not explicitly disclose.
In the past 5 years, in the Chinese market, Kindle's "competitors" have appeared. According to the Tianyancha platform, China's current name and business scope include "e-books, e-books", and there are more than 2,800 e-book-related enterprises in business, existence, migration and out. From the perspective of the time of establishment, about 69% of the related enterprises were established within 5 years.
From the perspective of equipment promotion, taking the first half of 2017 as an example, according to Analysys's "Special Analysis of China's E-book Reader Market", in addition to Migu X Kindle, there are 8 newly released e-book readers in the Chinese market.
So, Chinese really fascinated by e-readers? After the interface data counted the data of the China Press and Publication Research Institute's 15-18 National Reading Survey, it was found that from 2016 to 2020, among the adult citizens included in the survey, the proportion of citizens who used e-readers to read increased from 7.8% to 27.2%, an increase of nearly 20 percentage points in 5 years.
But from the perspective of the annual change trend, everyone's love for e-readers is slightly "weak". Since 2018, the annual growth rate of the proportion of adult citizens reading with e-readers has continued to narrow, and as of 2020, it has been declining for 3 consecutive years.