Amazon.com Inc. made a move Thursday to gain access to Internet shoppers in China with an agreement to buy Joyo.com, China's largest online retailer of books, music and videos, for 75 million dollars, news report said. The world's largest Internet retailer will pay 72 million dollars in cash and assume employee stock options to buy the company, which was founded in 2000. It is based in the British Virgin Islands, operates two websites through Chinese subsidiaries and affiliates and has fulfillment centres in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. "It looks like a way for Amazon, for a relatively cheap price, to get exposure to one of the best growth areas geographically in the next decade," Norm Conley of St. Louis-based J.A. Glynn & Co. told Bloomberg financial news service. "They're getting a bigger footprint internationally and I think that's the right thing to do." Yahoo! Inc. and EBay Inc., chief competitors of Amazon, already have bought sites and made investments in China, Bloomberg said. China has more than 80 million Internet users, and an estimated 27.7 million of them make purchases online, according to market researcher International Data Corp. The company has founded international sites for users in Canada, France, Germany, U.K and Japan, said it expects international sales to surpass U.S. revenue in the future.
