Money Talks: Why Amazon should be afraid of Temu
Money Talks from The Economist
The Economist
4.4 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2024
⏱️ 44 minutes
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Summary
Amazon started with a plan to disrupt bookselling. It sold cheap books online, delivering them straight to customers’ homes. Three decades later it employs a million people in America and owns one hundred warehouses, each stocked with millions of products. More than a third of the US e-commerce market flows through it. Now, another company has spied an opportunity to disrupt Amazon: Temu. The Chinese e-commerce giant wants to undercut its US rival, delivering impossibly cheap stuff to Americans straight from factories in China. How worried should Amazon be?
Hosts: Alice Fulwood, Mike Bird, Tom Lee-Devlin. Guests: Wendy Woloson of Rutgers University-Camden; Mark Shmulik of Bernstein; Michael Morton, an e-commerce analyst at MoffettNathanson; and Josh Silverman, CEO of Etsy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, this episode of Money Talks is available to listen to for free, but if you want to listen every week, |
| 0:06.1 | you'll need to be an economist subscriber. For full details, search online for Economist Podcast Podcasts Plus. |
| 0:12.8 | The Economist. |
| 0:17.0 | On Thursday, March 7th, I invited my co-presenter Tom to the studio for a secret challenge. |
| 0:27.0 | Hi Tom. |
| 0:28.0 | Hey Alice. |
| 0:29.0 | So do you have any idea why we're here? |
| 0:33.0 | I do not. |
| 0:33.7 | It's a complete mystery to me what I am doing in the studio. |
| 0:37.7 | So the topic is Timu, which is this up and coming, |
| 0:42.4 | retailing Behemoth which is competing very aggressively to win over customers in America. |
| 0:50.0 | We thought it might be fun to have a race between it and the other Behemoth retailer in America, which is Amazon. |
| 0:58.5 | So we're going to order some bits from each retailer. You're going to take Amazon. I'm going to take Timu. |
| 1:05.2 | And we're going to see who wins. |
| 1:07.9 | Another minute of competition. I'm going to send you a link. |
| 1:12.0 | Here we go. Goodie King, beads for jewelry making. Friendship bracelet making kids. |
| 1:19.0 | Love it. Love me a Friendship bracelet. |
| 1:21.0 | If you've been paying attention to popular culture over the last year |
| 1:24.8 | you might have noticed that people have been making an awful lot of friendship bracelets for one event in particular. |
| 1:30.3 | Ah yes this is for Taylor Swift's epic concerts, isn't it? Yes exactly, so basically I wanted to buy some of these for an upcoming event that I might be attending and I'm going to make you buy them too. |
| 1:45.0 | All right, so my wife is going to be very confused when this set of 5,000 plus beads for making friendship bracelets arrives and it should arrive by |
| 1:58.6 | tomorrow if I order within the next eight hours it says and it costs 19 pounds 99 or 25-ish dollars. |
... |
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