[manigandham]

The China competitors are better because they are actively helped by the government while foreign companies are not, and in this case actively suppressed.

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.

[ksec]

It was not suppressed.

> 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.

[mguerville]

Western companies, US and others alike, are helped by their governments too. Telcos are granted monopolies yet they deliver horrendous infrastructure for instance.

[ETHisso2017]

Can you pinpoint what happened 10 years ago that resulted in Amazon losing share?

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.

[SZJX]

Could you go into more details on how exactly Amazon was "suppressed" in China while the competitors were helped? If not you're talking out of thin air.

[tsukurimashou]

As opposed to US companies that are certainly not helped in any way by the US government

[manigandham]

Sure, but definitely not to that extent, competitors are certainly not suppressed in the same way, and it's irrelevant to the discussion of why Amazon left China.

[lexs]

Bombadier literally was ended by the US government

[manigandham]

Do you mean Bombardier? The aviation company with $16B in revenue and 65k employees? Looks like there was a tariff imposed on one of their models due to a complaint by Boeing but was overturned 4 months later in Jan 2018.

If this is the company you're talking about, can you describe what you mean by "literally was ended"?

[lexs]

Without the Airbus deal for the C-Series Bombardier was basically in bankruptcy exactly because of those tariffs. It felt like quite a targeted attempt to, as you put it, suppress competitors.

[brennebeck]

Maybe so, but that’s quite different from “literally ended.”

[ericfrenkiel]

Well said!