Amazon China on recruitment drive

Amazon China appears to be ramping up business with nearly 400 mainland jobs listed on its careers website, plus another 900-odd on LinkedIn.

The US company’s China-centred recruitment drive includes senior content executives to acquire and manage content, a leader for its Amazon Lending program and a head for its storefront on Alibaba’s Tmall.

While the Seattle company still sells goods from abroad to Chinese consumers, the country’s e-commerce market is dominated by Alibaba and JD.Com, and the government places limits on foreign companies.

Meanwhile, Amazon is encouraging its more than 2 million merchants to expand their horizons to embrace international markets. To streamline the process, it offers language translation services, currency conversion and tariff services.

Amazon’s sales in China represented just 1.1 per cent of the nation’s online gross merchandise value in 2015, and by last year that figure had dropped to 0.8 per cent, according to iResearch figures.

However, in last year’s fourth quarter, Amazon controlled 7 per cent of the China’s cross-border commerce, according to ICBC. For the first quarter this year, its cross-border sales were 11 times above their level two years earlier.

Amazon this year started hiring HR executives for a new regional “shared-services hub” in Beijing, and a new office in Hangzhou – Alibaba’s home territory – is hiring sales team leaders empowered to headhunt more staff.