经济学人下载:互联网巨头用低价战略 进军平板电脑市场

Low prices are not the only thing underpinning Amazon’ssuccess. The company is technologically adept, and it has a knack of delighting customers with innovations such as its $79-a-year “Amazon Prime” shopping service in America, which offers members free, two-day shipping and other benefits. Such goodies have been crucial to its growth. But its ability to drive down the prices of everything from cameras to cloud computing gives it a colossal competitive advantage.

低价并不是唯一促成亚马逊成功的原因。该公司以技术著称，同时它还具利用创新取悦顾客的技巧，比如在美国79美元一年的“亚马逊优惠”购物服务，为会员提供“2天送达”和其他的优惠。这些极具吸引力的好处对于亚马逊的发展极为关键。可是，亚马逊能够压低从照相机到云计算一切商品的价格，这样的能力使之拥有巨大的竞争优势。

A recent study by William Blair, an investment bank, underlines the price gap between Amazon and its rivals in the retailing world (see table). The report compared the prices of 100 randomly selected goods at each of 24 American retailers with those items that were also available on Amazon.com. It found that almost half of the goods were listed on the online retailer’s site too, and that Amazon’s prices for individual products were on average 11% below those of the stores. The study also noted that Amazon’s discounts were in many cases deeper than those offered by the retailers’ own websites.

投资银行WilliamBlair最近的研究突出了亚马逊和其零售业对手之间的价格差距。该报告从24家美国零售商每一家中随机挑选出100件商品，这些商品在亚马逊的线上商店也有，并对比了两者的价格。报告发现，近乎一半的商品在亚马逊线上商店有，而且个人物品在亚马逊上的价格较之商店里平均低11%。该研究还称，在一些情况下，亚马逊打折的力度较之一些零售商的网店打折力度的还要大。

Admittedly, as an online outfit Amazon does not pay sales tax in American states where it has no physical presence. Many cash-strapped states are now keen to pass laws that would change this—a move Amazon is loudly and unsurprisingly opposing. But the William Blair study concludes that even if it has to cough up more tax, Amazon will still be able to offer prices that are lower than many rivals’. The firm’s huge scale and its massively popular website, which it will use to promote the Kindle Fire, give it an edge. And it enjoys another advantage too. “Amazon does not have to worry about the impact of its pricing on a legacy store system,” explains Kirthi Kalyanam, a professor at Santa Clara University’s Retail Management Institute.

诚然，作为一个在线商业组织，亚马逊没有向美国的各州缴纳消费税，它并没有实体店。一些现金紧缺的州目前热衷于通过立法来改变这种现状，这一举动遭致亚马逊毫不意外的强烈反对。但是William Blair研究报告总结道，即便是亚马逊勉强同意缴纳更多的税赋，它依然能够提供比一些竞争者更低的价格。公司巨大的规模和其饱受欢迎的网站会大力推广Kindle Fire，这将是一个无可比拟的优势。同时，亚马逊还享有其他的优势。Santa Clara大学零售管理学院的教授Kirthi Kalyanam说：“亚马逊不会担心对销售留存系统的定价所带来的影响。”

Amazon Web Services (AWS), which rents computing capacity in its giant data centres to customers, has also won a reputation for being cheap. Comparing cloud-computing prices is tricky, but observers of the market report that AWS is typically one of the lowest-cost providers. “Amazon operates with economies of scale that are practically impossible to match,” says Reuven Cohen of Enomaly, which runs SpotCloud, an online marketplace where firms sell excess cloud-computing capacity.

亚马逊网络服务系统将其庞大数据中心的计算能力出租给客户，赢的了物美价廉的声誉。相比之下，云计算价格的复杂多变，但是市场观察家们报道说，亚马逊网络服务系统是成本最低的供应商之一。Enomaly是一家正经营新型云计算经营模式的公司，该模式是在线市场供一些公司出售过剩的云计算能力，它的创始人Reuven Cohen说：“亚马逊经营形成的规模经济实际上无可比肩的”。