Amazon in hiring binge in China to ramp up battle with Alibaba

Amazon.com is hiring by the hundreds in China to fill jobs ranging from internet software engineers to designers for Alexa, positioning the company to recoup some of the market share it lost to Alibaba Group Holding in the world’s largest online shopping arena.

The online retail giant lists almost 400 Chinese-based openings on its careers website and more than 900 on LinkedIn. They include senior executives to manage and acquire content, a leader to expand its fledgling Amazon Lending programme and a head for its storefront on Alibaba’s Tmall. And it’s hiring a hardware engineer to, among other things, evangelise for digital assistant Alexa, which works with third party products even though the Echo speaker is not available in China.

While the Seattle-based company still sells goods from abroad to Chinese consumers and has local cloud computing customers, Amazon’s been relegated to a bit player in a domestic e-commerce market dominated by Alibaba and JD. Com. Alibaba is the publisher of The South China Morning Post.

But like fellow US companies Facebook and Google, it isn’t giving up on the world’s most populous nation despite powerful domestic players and increasing government restrictions on foreign businesses.

China’s limits on foreign companies, and the savvy of local operators, has given rise to an alternate web universe on the mainland. While Amazon strikes fear into rivals around the world, in China it’s dwarfed by Alibaba. Facebook’s reach stops at the border as Tencent Holdings and WeChat rule social networking while Baidu is top of the search pile in Google’s absence.