This type of article confuses me because it ignores China and India. Specific case. Alibaba copied Amazon's business model. But then it successfully spins off Alipay (later Ant Financial and Ant Group). And before the government crackdown/policy changes at the end of 2020 Ant almost successfully IPO'd at a valuation of $314 billion.

Ant's business model involved payments, insurance and lending and was fantastically profitable because Ant leveraged its data about user payments to make efficient risk decisions. If the CCP hadn't decided Ant was too big (and violating data rules) then it would probably be continuing to grow.

I don't think any of this is obscure so I don't understand why the article doesn't point out that Amazon and Walmart aren't trying something that hasn't been done before.