Amazon in emerging markets, India, China, Brazil

Noémie Linsenmaier

AMAZON CASE STUDY

1. Did Amazon make sensible choices in its emerging markets entry strategies ? Location/ entry mode/ timing

In its emerging markets, Amazon made sensible choices for example, like in India where Amazon invested big from the start in order to reach some market shares, indeed,the company instaured a competitive market strategy because there was a lot of players in the market such as Flipkart, launched in 2007, Snapdeal, founded in 2010, and Ebay, which entered the Indian market in 2005. Amazon put into practice this competitive strategy by, as an example, being the first to release the next-day delivery followed by the other companies. Amazon did started late in the indian market while a lot of companies were still growing by taking advantage of the rapid growth of India.

The China’s e-commerce market is one the biggest of the world, while Alibaba controlled approximately 80% of the market shares in China in 2013 by launching Tmall and Taobao, Amazon entered the market in 2004 by acquiring the company Joyo and the company starts to run the business under the domain of Joyo. Their strategy was not as aggressive as in other emerging markets and quite slow to deploy. According to the text, despites its investments and efforts for staying in the competition like according a refund to clients who were not expecting a refund for the difference of products whose competitors undercut Amazon’s price by 5. Their market stood at only 3,5% at the end of 2012, but with the growing opportunities that China represents for the e-commerce market, Amazon’s CEO’s are optimistics for Amazon’s future.

Brazil joined India and China as one of the world’s largest emerging market, with a population that uses mobile device to make payments more and more, however, the country has a lot of tax codes, labour laws, and other regulations that make the entering in the market more hard for the company, on top of that, the roads are not finished still that makes the delivery a complication for Amazon. They entered the market for the first time in 2012 and launched the Kindle app in 2014 “after lengthy negotiations with brazilian publishers who wanted control over pricing in fear of Amazon’s aggressive discounting strategies”. They managed to stay in the competition by obtaining contracts with more than 30 publishers with books in portuguese as well as in english. The company started to offer free shipping for its Kindle products. By all theses moves, Amazon can expect a better future for their steps in Brazil.

2. How should companies and investors measure success in emerging markets?

In order, to measure the success in emerging markets, a company should, first, be able to quickly deploy their resources, as the market changes rapidly in these countries, companies need to be ready to change quickly. Competition can be fierce companies based there are generally able to reallocate their resources between units faster than companies based in the developed world.

In another part, a company has to innovate to offer products at adapted prices. As the

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