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Amazon picks its first Australian warehouse, a step towards launching

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SYDNEY: US retail giant Amazon.com unveiled the location of its first warehouse in Australia, picking an industrial area outside Melbourne in a major step towards launching operations in the world’s 12th-largest economy.


Australians can already buy Amazon products from offshore, but the prospect of an Amazon warehouse adds to pressure on traditional brick-and-mortar retailers to protect already-fragile sales.


The Seattle-based retailer confirmed plans to bring its online shopfront service, Amazon Marketplace, to Australia in April, without saying when it would begin the service or where it would locate its warehouses in the vast country.


It has not said when it will start the service in Australia, nor which freight service it will hire. Amazon Marketplace charges retailers to advertise on the Amazon website and use Amazon’s warehouse and freight networks.


“This is just the start,” said Robert Bruce, Amazon’s director of operations for Australia, in a statement.


“Over time, we will bring thousands of new jobs to Australia and millions of dollars of investment as well as opening up the opportunity for thousands of Australian businesses to sell at home and abroad through Amazon Marketplace.”


Bruce added that the warehouse, about 42 kms (26 miles) from Melbourne, would stock “hundreds of thousands of products which will be available for delivery to customers across Australia”.


Freight companies in Australia face the challenge of serving a country of only 24 million people spread across a continent nearly the size of the United States.


But with four-fifths of the population housed on the east coast, Melbourne or the larger city of Sydney were obvious choices for Amazon’s first warehouse.


Meanwhile, a Chinese partner of global e-commerce firm Amazon.com Inc has told customers to stop using illegal virtual private networks (VPNs), which can circumvent Internet censorship.


The instruction comes after Apple Inc removed VPN services from its Chinese app store over the weekend, amid a government crackdown on their use to dodge restrictions on access to overseas websites.


In January, the government passed laws banning all VPNs not approved by regulators. Its stance is that rules governing cyberspace should mimic real-world border controls and that the Internet should be subject to the same laws as sovereign states.


“If we discover (clients using unapproved VPNs), we will shut down services,” said a member of staff at Beijing Sinnet Technology Co Ltd, which operates Amazon’s cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), in China.


“We have asked clients to check all illegal cross-border businesses,” said the person, adding the company was acting on government instructions.


The person was not authorised to speak to the media and asked not to be identified. A member of staff at AWS, also on condition of anonymity, said directives had come from the government.


The relevant government authority did not respond to requests for comment.


An Amazon Web Services spokesman said that to comply with Chinese laws and regulations, the firm had to operate in China through local partners such as Sinnet.


Sinnet’s notice was “intended to remind customers of their obligations,” he said. The government has shut down dozens of China-based VPN providers and has been targeting overseas services as it tightens control over the Internet, ahead of a Communist Party congress later this year. — Reuters


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