Airbnb will cease business operations in China according to a fresh report fromReutersand several other news show exit . The company will formally shut down in the area starting July 30 , though Chinese customers will still be able-bodied to apply the service to rent rooms abroad .
“ We have made the hard decision to refocus our efforts in China on outward locomotion and suspend our home and Experiences of Hosts in China , starting from July 30 , 2022 , ” Airbnb said in a WeChat post on Tuesday , harmonize to an English language displacement by Reuters .
Roughly 150,000 property listing are expected to be purge from Airbnb by the end of July , harmonise to theNew York Times . The company first started operating in China in 2016 .
Photo: Imaginechina (AP)
Curiously , the decision to exit the Chinese market has n’t yet been formally announced outside of a WeChat post , and when reached for comment later Monday , Airbnb public involvement officer Christopher Nulty go down to remark on the record about the tieback from China .
TheWall Street Journalreports the reason Airbnb is leaving China can be attributed to both stiff rival from local businesses and strict covid-19 lockdowns in the country , though the latter ’s influence on leave such a large market seems garbled . China has a universe of 1.4 billion multitude and while the government ’s lockdowns have been harsh , they ’ve been localized and relatively short for the Brobdingnagian majority of the universe .
The more logical explanation is that Airbnb simply could n’t compete with apps that offer a variety of services through one portal vein . As one example , the Journal mentions Beijing - ground Meituan , which is a so - called top-notch - app that does everything from solid food delivery to movie tickets . Meitunan also has a “ lodging marketplace ” that was rebranded in 2019 to directly take on Airbnb . The name , Meituan B&B , makes the competition even more clear .
WeChat and AliPay are two more super - apps that are fabulously popular in China , providing one - check shopping for about everything without visiting a standalone app like Airbnb .
Airbnb is n’t the only American stain that ’s give up on the Chinese market recently . Urban Outfitters and Everlane both left China in recent 2021 after consumer decided that Chinese - made challenger were just as good , or even better than their American counterparts .
As Reuters notation , other tech companies have also retreated from China in recent years , includingLinkedInandYahoo , though decisions from those companies likely had more to do with concerns over datum - sharing with the Chinese government . The U.S. government activity even claimed in 2018 that China was using LinkedIn torecruit spies .
While some American companies are leaving China , others are full - steam ahead , like Tesla , which of late open an enormous manufacturing plant in Shanghai . But only sentence will tell if ship’s company like Tesla can cut it in China , as the ship’s company ’s eminent visibility CEO , billionaire Elon Musk , go on to blockade himself on the world point .
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