By PENG Xin
After years of decline, Amazon has shut down its Kindle e-book shop in China on June 30, the end of Chinese road for the world’s most popular e-reader.
Those who already own e-books can still download them for another year and everything stored in the Kindle itself will still be available.
Faded star, past its prime
Launched in 2007, the Kindle soon became one of Amazon’s most popular products and for five years was the fastest-growing product on the Amazon platform.
Kindle first came to China in 2013, but by then the stage was pretty crowded with similar devices. Amazon quickly found itself fenced in by domestic copycats. E-commerce giant JD.com, phone maker Xiaomi and others had similar products at lower prices and open-source Android systems.
Around this tinmen last year, Amazon said it would stop supplying retailers in China with devices, promising to close the e-bookstore this year.
Losses mounting everywhere
In recent years, Amazon stopped revealing Kindle’s performance in its financial report.
Chinese readers are often reluctant to pay for e-books. Pirate versions are widely available for free online or are passed from hand-to-hand like regular books.
Amazon made its biggest ever loss in 2022, despite record festive revenues. A US$2.7 billion (20 billion yuan) deficit. Its operating income fell to $2.7 billion over the period, compared to $3.5 billion in 2021.
Intense rivalry, Chinese rules
After the departure of Kindle, Amazon will be left with the rump of previous operations in China.
Cross-border e-commerce, advertising, logistics and cloud services – things that Amazon considers its core business - are the stock-in-trade of many highly competitive domestic businesses in China. Not only that, but a number of factors – Chat GPT, non-existent profits – have forced the entire e-commerce into transition.