Google has announced a multi-million dollar investment in e-commerce company JD.com, hoping to enter the Chinese retail market.
With the $550 million, the company will work with JD.com to “accelerate how retail ecosystems deliver useful, personalized, and high-quality services.”
“By leveraging JD.com’s supply chain and technology expertise, and leveraging our technology strength, we will explore new ways for retailers to seamlessly deliver their goods to their consumers, giving them the choice to shop from anywhere they want,” the company said in a statement.
According to Google, the Asia-Pacific region is one of the largest and fastest-growing e-commerce markets in the world, with Southeast Asian consumers expected to spend $88.1 billion online by 2025.
“These Asian consumers are ready to buy, but they are hard to please,” continues the blog post, signed by APAC business president Karim Temsamani.
As part of the partnership, JD.com will participate in Google Shopping, allowing some of its products to be purchased by consumers in many regions of the world.
The contradictions
Here we should recall that the European Commission last June fined Google for abusing the search engine to promote its own products, displaying them at the top of search results.
China, on the other hand, has long operated the world’s most sophisticated censorship mechanism, known as the Great Firewall, blocking the services of major Silicon Valley companies.
Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked in the country. Recently, a pilot free trade zone operating in Shanghai has allowed some access to such content, although it is still very limited. Services such as Microsoft Outlook and Gmail have also been banned by the country’s laws.
The Chinese government has shut down streaming services and has issued repeated warnings about the need to clean up local website content.
In early 2016, China even upgraded the Great Firewall and began banning the use of VPNs, aiming to promote the “healthy development” of the internet in China. China’s ban on VPNs went into effect in March 2018.
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