In Europe and America, by contrast, the view is that the game has been won by Amazon. The gap between Amazon's e-commerce market share in America and that of Walmart, the next in line, is far bigger than Alibaba's lead over the number two in China. Though Bernstein's Mark Shmulik reckons Amazon earns little profit on its core retail business, its fast-growing cloud and online-advertising arms generate huge margins that it can plough back into retail expansion. It had $42bn of cash on its balance-sheet at the end of 2020. Marc-André Kamel of Bain, a consultancy, says Amazon may spend $100bn more on information technology over the next five years than each of the world's top ten traditional retailers. It will also continue to invest heavily in logistics, putting more pressure on the likes of UPS and FedEx.

Like Alibaba in China, Amazon has drawn regulatory heat. In October 2020 a congressional committee in America said it was looking at overhauling antitrust laws to counter the power of the big tech platforms. It drew attention to the dominance that Amazon has over third-party sellers on its marketplace, and its practice of selling its own goods in competition with them. In November the European Commission accused Amazon of violating competition laws by using non-public data from third-party sellers to benefit its own retail business.