Amazon Goes Global 2020

Amazon.com Inc.’s (Amazon’s) global expansion from 1998 to 2020, started with investment in the United Kingdom and Germany and ended with investment in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In 2019, as one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies, Amazon had a 15.1 per cent share of the worldwide e-commerce market with operations in 16 countries, including both developed and emerging markets. However, the company was showing unbalanced performance across countries. For example, in 2019, Amazon was the market leader in the United Kingdom (23.3 per cent market share) and Germany (48.3 per cent market share), while it only held 0.2 per cent of the Chinese online retailing market, far behind the market leader who had a 42.7 per cent market share, and it held only 1 per cent market share in Brazil with the market leader having 23.2 per cent. Amazon faced critical challenges in developing its future international strategies. Should it continue its global expansion into new markets? What should the company do with less successful markets such as China and Brazil? Also, how should Amazon deal with the ramifications of an unexpected global pandemic event in its international strategy?<br><br>This case is an updated version of Amazon Goes Global, former Ivey product 9B14M122.

The case is suitable for graduate-, executive-, and advanced-undergraduate-level courses dealing with international strategy and business policy. After working through the case and assignment questions, students will be able to<ul><li>understand international strategy issues such as internationalization motives, location choice, entry mode choice, and sequential entry decisions such as product sequencing; and</li><li>analyze why some foreign subsidiaries perform better than others within the same multinational corporation.</li></ul>

• Amazon, internationalization