3suisses

3 Suisses is leaving China (the online ecommerce I mean) One More victim on the chinese ecommerce market. It seems that foreign companies are cursed in china. You heard about google leaving china, ebay, or facebook, youtube, and twitter being blocked in the country. The list is increasing year after year, and the reasons on how foreign companies fail on the Chinese market are debated on many forums.

 

3 suisses is not a newbie online, the company is one of the leaders on the French market. 56% of their turnover comes from their online store! Obviously they know how to deal with it… but not in China.

 

They fired everyone in the company in china in the past weeks and they will close the company in February. They made no public announcement yet but it’s obvious that they will have to since everyone in the company here in china knows about it.

 

What is really surprising is that they were among the firsts to enter the Chinese internet market, even before many well known Chinese companies. But maybe the competition level is too high, and new comers like vancl.com have just a too massive advertising investment to compete with them (basically, you see vancl everywhere online, on buses, on TV, on Outdoor advertising! and you also see their delivery guys everywhere in the city delivering the orders)

 

It must be a hard decision to leave such a huge (and growing) market, but maybe it’s part of a more global strategy to focus on their core markets.  

 

Well, on the other hand we also can see that no online Chinese player has made it in the West, it seems that the invisible border between the Chinese internet and the West is still unshakable… until When?