TapTechNews August 3rd news, 'Zhenghe Island' released the interview content of Li Guoqing, the founder of Dangdang.com yesterday. Li Guoqing talked about topics such as 'the great war against Amazon' this time and recalled the experiences of previous years.
After Li Guoqing founded dangdang.com, 'the great war between Dangdang and Amazon' was considered the 'most exciting' one. When talking about that experience, Li Guoqing revealed that Amazon originally wanted to acquire dangdang and once offered a strong>US$1 billion offer and was 'determined to get it'. In 2003 and 2004, the sales volume of dangdang.com was 150 million yuan.
In those years, Amazon won everywhere it went and crippled the British book e-commerce in just one year. Later, in Germany, France, Japan, and South Korea, without exception. When I didn't sell, they threatened us that if you don't sell, we will fight a price war with you.
Li Guoqing believed that Amazon was okay in selling English books, but it was 'not necessarily' in the Chinese book market. And at that time, the Chinese e-commerce was not yet mature and accounted for less than 1% of its global sales. 'As a multinational company, their decision-making chain is also very long.'
Li Guoqing admitted that the price war at that time 'really reached an unprecedented and fierce level'. Amazon selected 100,000 kinds of books from dangdang.com using web crawler technology every night, and then made the price of each book 1 yuan, 10 cents or 10% lower than that of dangdang. So, Li Guoqing ordered dangdang to fight back. After a month of comparison and price adjustment between the two sides, the price dropped from 75% off to 65% off or even 50% off. 'I disclosed this situation in various meetings, and domestic private bookstores were the first to be shocked, and the publishing houses were also in an uproar.'
With this, I warned the publishing houses about Amazon's ambition. At the same time, I actively lobbied relevant departments such as the China Publishing Association and the China Periodical Distribution Association, and used the 'Anti-Unfair Competition Law' to require the publishing houses to cut off supplies to the websites with unfair competition. Eventually, Amazon Books lost 1 billion US dollars in China and left the Chinese market in disgrace.
TapTechNews note: On February 20, 2019, Li Guoqing, the founder of dangdang, publicly announced in an open letter that he was leaving dangdang.com. In 2021, Li Guoqing established the Xiangdangdang e-commerce and did 'live streaming with goods' in the form of alcoholic beverages.