How to Invest in The Amazon of China
It’s always a good laugh hearing the D&I charlatans talk about “Asians,” as if that’s an appropriate way to group nearly 60% of the world’s population. There are actually five distinct regions in Asia containing 48 different countries. One in four people on this planet is from Southern Asia, hailing from places like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Just over one in five people on this planet is Eastern Asian, with the vast majority of those people living in China.
If you’re invested in a company that only does business in the United States, your total addressable market (TAM) is 4.2% of the world’s population. If you’re invested in a company that does business in China, your TAM is just over 18% of the world’s population. All things being equal, you’d expect that the Amazon of China will eventually be four times the size of the Amazon of the United States. Of course, that example assumes neither company sells internationally. (Amazon has about 29% international sales, a number that’s been falling for ten years straight.) The point is, the Amazon of China has a whole lot of potential.
The most successful businessman in the world might be Jack Ma, a man who bought his first computer at the age of 33 and still doesn’t even know how to code. When venture capitalists didn’t throw money at his brilliant idea, he didn’t get on Twitter and complain about how not enough people in VC looked like him, he bootstrapped his company with $20,000 his wife and friend helped him raise. Based on his net worth today of $48 billion, he showed a return of +240,999,900% on that original investment with the success of his company – Alibaba (
