It looks like Amazon in China is currently hiring in a big way as it further invests in operations in the world’s most populous country. Here is the hiring page for jobs with Amazon in China on their website.
A look at the Amazon jobs website reveals 700 jobs up for grabs but LinkedIn suggests around a thousand vacancies may be available from Amazon in China. And the jobs are highly variable.
You could apply to be a VAT specialist, HR manager, warehouse operative or even a senior manager of various kinds. There are stacks of opportunities.
China is one place where Amazon isn’t winning. It is dwarfed by the mighty homegrown Alibaba and its Tmall. And that is scarcely surprising or unusual. eBay admitted defeat in China and Facebook doesn’t perform there well either mostly owing to government regulation and suppression. The Great Firewall of China is formidable but not impenetrable.
Critical too is national pride that prefers to back a Chinese player over an external competitor. Even Google has had difficulty in China which just proves quite how difficult it is even to get a set at the card table.
But from an Amazon perspective, the quixotic head of Alibaba Jack Ma must be the worry. Indeed, only ahead of Jeff Bezos, he’s the one person in the ecommerce industry that I’d like to be stuck in a pub with for an hour. And where I doubt Bezos would have a drink, I think Ma would cheerfully have more than one. Or would at least happily chain smoke as we shared a conversation.
It’s admirable that so many of the big US concerns are so keen to take on and profit from China but the path is surely littered with the decaying relics of their predecessors who tried and failed. And not even dot.com failures… I’m talking about looking back hundreds of years. China is the hardest nut to crack and I’m not even sure it’s possible by even the best funded US West Coast tech giants.
