ＱＡ:为什么中国市场如此艰难，竞争如此激烈，连亚马逊也无法活下来？

Abrar Shaikh, E-Commerce & Online Marketing Consultant
What does Amazon manufacture? Nothing.
What does Amazon offer? A platform to sell products.
This is only a good setup where people are not frugal or are brand conscious. China already has few of the largest marketplaces, including aliexpress, alibaba, baidu. Than there are the local website that we don’t know about as they are in Chinese. The number of orders per day simply exceeds amazon’s capability. Alibaba and Aliexpress is just one site that get hits from all over the world and is able to sustain the load. Unlike amazon who has a different domain for each region with a different server hosting the site. Amazon simply doesn't have the bandwidth to handle such load without choking. That is why they bowed out of China.

亚马逊能生产什么？没有。
亚马逊能提供什么？一个销售产品的平台。
这只对不节俭的人或有品牌意识的地区是一个很好的设定。但中国市场已经有几个大玩家，包括阿里速卖通、阿里巴巴、百度等。还有更多我们不知道的地方网站，因为它们是中文的。中国每天的订单数量简直超过了亚马逊的处理能力，阿里巴巴和阿里速卖通是仅有的一个受到全球点击并能够承受负载的网站。与亚马逊不同，亚马逊的每个区域都有一个不同的网站，由不同的服务器托管站点。亚马逊根本没有足够的带宽来处理这样的负载，这就是他们退出中国的原因。

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Corey Tournet, works at The Laundry Alternative
Amazon’s business model depends on them making the rules and calling the shots. That works well in the USA, but in China the government has the final say. So quite a few policies would be banned causing them to lose some market share. They are also not going to let some foreign company take over most of the retail sales in the entire country. I wouldn’t say they lost China, but they just realized sooner than other companies it was a game they couldn’t win. If you don’t think they are tough and competitive you don’t really understand their company culture, that is not an issue.

亚马逊的商业模式取决于他们能否制定规则和拥有决定权，这在美国很管用。但在中国，政府有最终决定权。因此，亚马逊的很多的规则都将被禁止，这导致他们会失去一些市场份额。他们也不会让一些外国公司接管全国大部分的零售业务。我不认为他们在中国输了，但他们比其他公司更早意识到这是一场他们赢不了的比赛。如果你认为他们不够强，不具有竞争力，那说明你没有真正理解他们的公司文化。

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O Cynthia
China has a lot of great companies now.
I think they know their market and have nicer softwares.
The Chinese are too competitive.
Tough for Amazon to go in too late, and they dont have the supply chain to be competitive. The brand Amazon dont help there, not even Samsung now.

中国现在有很多大公司。
我想他们更懂他们的市场，也有更好的软性条件。
中国人太有竞争力了。
亚马逊进入太晚了，而且他们在供应链上没有竞争力。此外，亚马逊这个品牌在这方面也帮不上忙，现在就连三星的牌子也好使。

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Andrew Winter, former Armored Reconnaisance Specialist, (Aka Cav. Scout) (1985-1989)
“The China Market” is an exercise in “smoke and mirrors”. In a communist economy there is no such thing as a true “private sector”. In other words, in the China Market there is no real competition. Your success or failure depends entirely on how thoroughly you suck up to the government of China. Yes there is a LOT of money to be had, from sucking up to the Chinese government, but in the end it isn’t really worth the effort.

笑死我了。
在中国市场上没有真正的竞争。你的成败完全取决于你对中国的"奉承"程度。是的，讨好中国需要花很多钱，但最终你会发现不值得花这么多钱。

Patrick Koh
The size is no smoke. 12 billion parcels a year. I once had 100 items in my shopping cart. I think the competition there is quite cut throat as well, with small margins. Private biz 2 x of state SOE now. SOE serves many purposes, one of which is for social stability. I think e-retail is a boom there.

胡扯，中国每年有120亿件包裹。我曾经在购物车里放了100件东西，我认为那里的竞争也相当激烈，利润很低。中国的私营企业的数量现在是国有企业的2倍。设立国有企业是出于很多目的，其中之一就是为了社会稳定。我认为电子商务在那里很繁荣。

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Sam Zhang, lives in China (1997-present)
let us make it easy.
It's a shopping web .
so it's for shopping.
As we know, most goods of the world are from China.
so it makes sense.

让我们轻松一点。
这只是一个购物网站。
所以是用来购物的。
众所周知，世界上大部分商品都来自中国。
所以它退出中国市场是有道理的。

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William Oates, former One Who Drinks and Knows Things
American companies tend to do well internationally in states that were European colonies. Western culture and thinking supports western business in a more natural way. That doesn’t fully explain Amazon’s withdrawal and there are exceptions, but I think it’s true that some Western core assumptions simply don’t apply / don’t work in mainland China.
Repatriating profit from China is complicated and tortuous…
Competitors with home field advantage are going to push hard…
Do you have intellectual property? No, you don’t. Not in China, anyway…

在前欧洲殖民地国家，美国公司往往在国际上表现良好。西方文化和思维以更自然的方式支持着西方的商业。这并不能完全解释亚马逊的退出，因为这里也存在例外，但我认为，一些西方的核心假设（core assumptions）在中国大陆根本不适用/不起作用，因为：
从中国汇回利润既复杂又曲折…
拥有主场优势的竞争对手将使出浑身解数…
你能保有知识产权吗？不，你不能。反正在中国不行…

This doesn’t necessarily apply to Amazon, but it illustrates what I’m talking about: Everywhere Walmart tried to open a brick & mortar in China, a “Wu Mart” went up next door or across the street. The local competition was able to passively benefit from Walmart’s market analysis and its scale and political leverage advantages back home just didn’t mean shit in China.
What’s so tough about the Chinese market? Well, it’s not necessarily any different from an immigrant from Hong Kong trying to open a restaurant in downtown Vidor in the 1960’s.

这不一定适用于亚马逊，但它说明了我所说的：沃尔玛试图在中国开设实体店的任何地方，隔壁或街对面都有一家“物美”。当地的竞争对手能够被动地从沃尔玛的市场分析中获益，而沃尔玛在美国国内的规模和政治杠杆优势在中国并不意味着什么。
中国市场何以如此艰难？嗯，这与 1960 年代香港移民试图在 Vidor 市中心开一家餐厅并没有什么不同。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

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Carolyn Patton, former Retired teacher , economics World History US Hist at Detroit Public Schools (1984-2009)
I was wondering about that move too, but Amazon in sub Sahara Africa has a bigger market an entire continent and less bureaucratic bull to deal with. aAmazon in Central America and South America is close to home in America with the entire population of the Americas to sell to. one country is too small for Jeff Bezos The whole continent of America and Africa awaits.

我也很想知道他们离开的原因，但亚马逊在撒哈拉以南的非洲有一个更大的市场，而且需要处理的官僚主义较少。中美洲和南美洲离美国本土很近，它可以面向整个美洲人口进行销售。对于杰夫·贝佐斯来说，一个国家太小了，整个美洲和非洲大陆都在等待着它。

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Ker Zheng, Marketing & Partnerships @ Azoya
It’s hard because Chinese companies are more willing to lose money for longer periods of time than American companies are. It’s a war of attrition and intense price wars are fairly common in China. American companies would be held hostage by their shareholders and boards if this happened. This is also why Uber left China and conceded to Didi.
I would also argue that Chinese companies customize their interfaces and products for Chinese consumers. The front page of Tmall/Taobao looks drastically different from Amazon’s, which tends to emphasize simple, white background pictures and products rather than brands. As a global platform, it is difficult for Amazon to customize its platform for the Chinese consumer. This goes for many other multinational companies who are struggling in China. They are simply not flexible enough and can’t move as quickly.

这很难，因为中国公司比美国公司更愿意长时间亏损。这是一场消耗战，激烈的价格战在中国相当普遍。如果发生这种情况，美国公司将被其股东和董事会骂死。这也是优步离开中国，让步给滴滴的原因。
我还觉得中国公司为中国消费者定制了自己的界面和产品也是原因之一，天猫/淘宝的首页看起来与亚马逊截然不同，后者往往强调简单的白色背景图片和产品，而不是品牌。作为一个全球平台，亚马逊很难为中国消费者定制自己的平台。许多其他在中国苦苦挣扎的跨国公司也是如此。他们根本不够灵活，无法快速响应。

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Wu Hao
Upvoted by Pavel Fomitchov, Sr. Technical Program Manager at Amazon (2018-present) and Joel Pinto, Software Developer at Amazon (2016-present)
At Davos 2018, Kai-fu Li, the former President of Google China expressed four major barriers that prevented American tech companies to succeed in China:
Kai-fu Lee: Why American Companies Struggle in China
I saw four major problems of American tech companies:

在2018年达沃斯论坛上，谷歌中国前总裁李开复表达了阻碍美国科技公司在中国成功的四大障碍：
李开复：美国公司为何在中国挣扎（链接）
我看到了美国科技公司存在的四大问题：
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

American companies intend to enter China with an existing platform, without offering any flexibility for localization nor autonomy for local teams. They mainly regard their China operation as a marketing project.
Chinese companies have already surpassed the US in product capability. WeChat is technologically superior to Facebook, the Taobao model is more sustainable than eBay and there are new models and products in China, such as Meituan, Toutiao and sharing bikes. Chinese technology is also catching up with the US, such as in computer vision, face recognition and speech recognition. In China, American companies have no obvious technological or product competitiveness.
The heads (general managers or CEOs) of American companies in China are always foreigners who barely know anything about the country. They usually start their jobs in smaller countries, get promoted to general manager of China general and return to headquarters for their next promotion. But their main skill is sales, and they neither know nor care about product technology.
They don’t understand Chinese, don’t speak Chinese and have no long-term commitment to China. And they are mainly responsible for the headquarters index, and their biggest wish is to protect their job. They only report good news and ignore the bad. These people are vulnerable to the fighters who head up domestic Chinese companies.
China’s top talent, from undergraduates to professional managers, used to think that foreign companies were the best jobs. Most now see China’s big companies – such as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent – medium-sized companies – such as Meituan, Didi and Xiaomi – and startups such as VipKid and Face++ – as better options. Without the best talent, the development prospects of foreign companies in China is not optimistic.
From my perspective, these four points are still very true.

美国公司打算通过现有的平台进入中国，但不会为本地化提供任何灵活性，也不会为本地团队提供自主权。他们主要将中国业务视为营销项目。
中国企业在产品能力上已经超越美国。微信在技术上优于Facebook，淘宝的模式比eBay更具可持续性。中国还有新的模式和新的产品，例如美团、今日头条和共享单车等。中国在技术，例如在计算机视觉、人脸识别和语音识别方面也在追赶美国。在中国，美国公司没有明显的技术或产品竞争力。
美国在华公司的负责人（总经理或CEO）总是外国人，他们对这个国家几乎一无所知。他们通常在较小的国家开始工作，然后晋升为中国区总经理，然后返回总部进行下一次晋升。但他们的主要技能是销售，他们既不了解也不关心产品技术。他们不懂中文，也不会说中文，对中国没有长期的了解。他们主要负责总部的指标，他们最大的心愿就是保住自己的工作。他们只报道好消息而忽略坏消息，这些人很容易被领导中国国内公司的竞争者击败。
中国的顶尖人才，从本科生到职业经理人，过去都认为外国公司是最好的工作地。现在大多数人认为中国的大公司如百度、阿里巴巴和腾讯，中型公司如美团、滴滴和小米，以及初创公司如VipKid和Face++，是更好的选择。没有最优秀的人才，外企在华发展前景不容乐观。
在我看来，这四点仍然是非常正确的。

Freddie Wu
One of my colleagues once worked for a famous foreign brand’s Chinese marketing team. She shared with me an anedote a few year ago, and I could forsee the Amazon exit one day back then.
Se was trying to start an online promotional campaign for their brand, which had already been a respected household name in China. So her team approached all the leading online platforms in China, including Amazon and JD.com. At a late stage of the project, they realized that the online presentation of their promotional page need some major revamp
(layout/wording/promotional terms/etc.). So her team sat down with Amazon and JD.com correspondents, trying to implement the required changes before the deadline. The result? JD.com’s team took away with their change request and turned over within 10 hours or so. The Amazon team? They were still trying to get in contact to seek approval from their “upper management” in another continent.
What can they do to win over the market?

我的一位同事曾经为一家著名外国品牌的中国营销团队工作。几年前，她和我分享了一个故事，那时我就预见了亚马逊的退出。
她正试图为他们的品牌发起一场在线促销活动，这个品牌在中国已经家喻户晓。因此，她的团队接触了中国所有领先的在线平台，包括亚马逊和京东。在项目后期，他们意识到他们的在线展示的促销页面需要一些重大的改进（布局/措辞/促销条款等）。因此，她的团队与亚马逊和京东的人坐下来，试图在截止日期前实施所需的更改。结果如何？京东的团队带走了他们的变更请求，并在10小时左右的时间内完成了移交。亚马逊团队？他们仍在努力联系，寻求另一个大陆“高层管理层”的批准。
那他们拿什么来赢得市场？

Roger Shepard
No Western enterprise is capable of meeting the requirement of the demand of the lower middle and middle class Chinese consumer. The challenge is greater than the capability of the Western enterprise.
As I have written here elsewhere, the intra-country business competition between Chinese companies is too tough for any Western enterprise either.
And I repeat, by the time an indigenous Chinese enterprise, born in China, has grown up in the competitive environment in China, and has survived to become a “going concern”, a successful business. It has faced and successfully survived a level of competition that exists nowhere else on this planet.

没有一家西方企业能够满足中国中低阶层消费者的需求，挑战大于西方企业的能力。
正如我在其他地方所写的，中国企业之间的国内商业竞争对任何西方企业来说都太激烈了。
我再说一遍，当一家诞生在中国的本土的中国企业在中国的竞争环境中成长，并幸存下来成为一家“持续经营”的成功企业时，它已经面对并成功地经受住了地球上其他任何地方都不存在的竞争。

Steven McQuinn
I always thought that the attitude of American companies wanting to break into the China market is blatantly colonial. There is the erroneous presumption that the Chinese consumer adores anything American, desires American products as a statement of defiance against a despotic regime, and is a backwards rube. This colonial snobbery persists despite the fact that most American brands source at least their parts from China.

我一直认为美国公司想要进入中国市场的态度是明显的殖民主义。美国人有一种错误的假设，认为中国消费者会崇拜任何美国产品，他们渴望美国产品是对专制政权的蔑视，这是一种自欺欺人。

Suyog Chandak
“American companies intend to enter China with an existing platform, without offering any flexibility for localization nor autonomy for local teams.”
I disagree with this.
Amazon India has adapted well to the Indian ecosystem. Companies have enough brain power to realize a rigid system can not work everywhere.
The simple reason why Silicon Valley Companies fail in China is because it is communist. Unfair practices and corruption run rampant for successful Chinese Companies.

“美国公司打算利用现有的平台进入中国，而不为本地化提供任何灵活性，也不为本地团队提供自主性。”
我不同意这一点。
亚马逊印度已经很好地适应了印度的生态系统，它们公司有足够的人才去认识到一个僵化的系统不可能无处不在。
硅谷公司在中国失败的原因很简单，因为....对于成功的中国公司来说，他们非常擅长xx公平的做法。

Kevin Zhang
As a Chinese i can say something about Amazon. The app/website of Amazon is very difficult when using. The US and China have huge culture difference. Amazon just move their service to China and don’t take some changes that are more suitable to Chinese. As for communist party, why Apple and Microsoft can work well in China. This is just my common user’s experience.

作为一个中国人，我可以说一些关于亚马逊的事情。亚马逊的应用程序/网站在使用时非常困难，美国人和中国人有着巨大的文化差异，亚马逊只是将他们的服务转移到了中国，但没有做出一些更适合中国人的变更。...为什么苹果和微软能在中国运作良好呢？以上只是我的一个普通用户的体验。