CRI听力:Amazon China to Source UK Brands to Chinese Customers

As part of the MoU, the two sides have agreed to help UK businesses enter the global market, with key export destinations including China and India.

Dr Catherine Raines, Chief Executive of UKTI, says China has always been a priority market among UK businesses.

She says the collaboration with Amazon China is one of the latest initiatives by UKTI to help UK businesses tap the booming e-commerce market in China.

"So if I look at simply what the UK government has done in the last two years, we've gone from a position where we were supporting about 300 million pounds' worth of export to nearly 4 billion in just two years so it's gone up ten fold. And that's just the businesses that the government is supporting, so you can imagine what have happened to the rest of business. And there is a fantastic relationship between the two countries at the highest level that really wants to make that happen."

British government has a goal of helping 100-thousand new businesses begin exporting by 2020.

Last year, Amazon China launched a global store program, which gave Chinese customers access to millions of products sourced directly from Amazon's US website.

This move tripled Amazon's overseas sales in less than a year.

Doug Gurr, President of Amazon China, says the decision to extend their global store to allow the UK and the rest of Europe tap Chinese consumers.

"The reason we have high confidence in the UK is because we look very carefully at the data of, for example, China customers visiting our UK site, so we have good information to know that which brands they are interested in, which brands they are searching for, which brands we therefore believe could be highly successful in China."

When it comes to competing with Chinese online retailers Alibaba and JD.com, Doug Gurr says Amazon China has some advantages.

"When we talk about, for example, exports of British brands to China, that would be us that leveraging the fact that all of those brands pretty much work with us in the UK and so what we are doing is saying to them 'you work with us in the UK, we know who you are and we absolutely know we are sourcing from the brand manufacture' and those are the products we will bring to customers in China. And that's the single most important thing which is when you say to a customer what we are doing is connecting you not through maybe four or three different layers of middle people, we are connecting you directly with the brand owner."

Amazon China has been promising 3-day delivery on certain overseas products since August.

For CRI, I'm Duan Xuelian in London