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New frontier in tech

By Chen Yingqun ( China Daily ) Updated: 2014-07-02 07:13:55

Chinese contemporary literature now a hit in South Korea

Stone says the career of Lei Jun, CEO and founder of Xiaomi, is a good illustration of how the Chinese Internet industry has evolved.

Lei started his career at the Chinese software company Kingsoft, which, Stone says, was not particularly innovative in the beginning. In some ways, it was simply following in Microsoft's steps although the company went public many years later. He invested in the online bookseller Zhuoyue.com, which was not particularly innovative either and which Amazon later bought and turned into Amazon.cn.

But what is fascinating about Lei is how he resigned as CEO of the software company Kingsoft and kept trying to work out how to build a true Internet company, Stone says.

Stone says that Lei is similar to Bezos, who is analytical and strategic about the market and thinks about how he can improve it and how to be more innovative, coming up with small features that may make a difference.

Stone has been in China promoting his Bezos book, which won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award last year and was published in Chinese in January.

The book looks at how Bezos built Amazon into an e-commerce empire over 20 years and how it changed people's shopping and reading habits.

Stone says that when he was in Silicon Valley, many great books were written about Apple, Google and Facebook, but no one had written about Amazon.

"But in the US and Europe, Amazon was the first company on the Internet that you knew about. It changed the way people shopped, it changed the way we read and it has recently changed the way that companies operate."

Amazon was founded in Seattle in 1995. It pioneered selling books online and has gone on to develop in many areas, selling millions of products.

Though Amazon is a big company with enormous sales, its rate of return is small, Stone says, and Bezos' aim is not to make more money for shareholders, but to be very patient and ambitious about the market.