Amazon.com, Inc. Invests $20M In Chinese Food Delivery Service

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Don’t let the title of this piece fool you, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is not going to start delivering (prepared) Chinese food to your door anytime soon. The online retailer certainly delivers the ingredients for you to make Chinese food through its website and even fresher options for creating a gorgeous meal through its Amazon Fresh service. Rather, the company has chosen to invest $20 million in the Shanghai-based online food vendor Yummy77.

Yummy77?

Somewhat surprisingly, seven is not a lucky number in China (or particularly unlucky) so your guess is as good as ours as to why the company has incorporated into its name. The fact that the company was launched in 2013 doesn’t provide any other hints as to the innocuous company name. The move represents the first time that the Seattle-based online retailer has invested in a Chinese company despite being in the Middle Kingdom for the last ten years. It’s being reported that the company will continue to operate independently following Amazon’s investment.

The funding from Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) will provide Yummy77 with the money it requires to begin building its operations outside of Shanghai.

Yummy77, i just can’t stop typing the name, focuses on fresh and gourmet foods that include dairy products, meat, eggs, fresh seafood, seasonal fruit and other products to the city of who knows how many. Having lived in Shanghai for a little over two years, I promise you that they have no idea how many people are living there. Never mind the fact that the cities of both Suzhou and Hongzhou both have populations of over 10 million and the growth outwards from both have nearly made them suburbs of Shanghai.

Amazon’s growing presence in China

The company is tapping into the growing demand from urban professionals for high-quality imported foods with a quick delivery time. The company sales last year reached 100 million yuan or around $16 million and this year so its registered users surpass 1 million.

Yummy77 is the B2C fresh food unit of TRUE, a listed subsidiary of Chia Tai Group and is the closest thing to Amazon Fresh which Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) does not offer in China. Amazon is a massive company but it has and will for some time trailed behind other Chinese retailers. With the investment, it appears that the company is interested in expanding its services in a country with no small number of consumers.

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