Amazon eyes kitchen, fashion sectors

Amazon, which has appointed a new president for the Chinese market, said yesterday that it will expand its business from books and consumer electronics to kitchen and fashion.

The world's e-commerce giant plans to offer Chinese users unique products, such as Pebble smartwatches and Vivienne Westwood apparel, on its newly-setup online fashion, kitchen and wearable computing gadgets stores, Doug Gurr, who will be president of Amazon China in September, said yesterday in Shanghai.

With the expansion, Amazon now offers 25 million kinds of products in 32 categories in China, Gurr said.

Rivals such as JD.com and Dangdang.com have also expanded their business to the apparel category recently.

"Fashion and clothes have become a must-have category in the Chinese online retailer market because they offer high profit margin and surging demand," said Wang Xiaoxing, research of Beijing-based Analysys International.

Besides e-commerce, Amazon China has the Kindle e-book device as well as its own cloud computing services.

In the second quarter, the value of China's online B2C (business-to-consumer) market was 320 billion yuan (US$52 billion), up 72 percent year on year. Amazon China has 7.85 million users, trailing Alibaba's Tmall's 98 million, JD.com's 41 million and Dangdang.com's 9.2 million, according to Analysys.

Amazon, which also marked the 10th year of its entry to China yesterday, now has more than 5,000 employees in China and 13 operation centers in major cities nationwide, including Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin. It has a research and development center in Beijing.

Amazon will showcase some star products at the Shanghai Film Museum in the Xujiahui area, which is open to the public from 6pm to 8pm tonight.