Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos, speaking at an annual shareholder meeting in May, said his company is “investing very heavily” in China, where it bought a Chinese e-commerce website, Joyo, in 2004. But he made clear that Amazon isn’t interested in jumping into new countries too hastily.

“We’ve been cautious about expanding into geographies at too rapid a clip just because of executive bandwidth,” Bezos said. “We really wanted to kind of get the countries where we’re established working very well and sort of proceed one step at a time.”

Asked at the shareholder meeting about India, where Amazon doesn’t have a country-specific e-commerce site, Bezos said, “We really are focused on China,” adding, “it’s not that we wouldn’t like to be in India, but we do think we benefit from focus on these expansion efforts.”

Amazon also has been adding new product categories to its existing foreign websites as a way to grow international sales. The company last year, for example, introduced office supplies to its German website, baby goods to its French website, and home and garden tools to its Chinese website—categories that it had previously established in the U.S.

Amazon’s international sales from its U.K., German, Japanese, French, and Chinese websites were up 45 percent in the first quarter to $3.35 billion, representing nearly half of the company’s total sales during that period. Excluding the favorable impact of foreign currency exchange rates, international sales growth would have been 37 percent during the quarter.

Starbucks Corp. added 394 new net stores internationally in its 2009 fiscal year, while closing 439 U.S. stores on a net basis. This fiscal year, the coffee giant expects to open 200 new net stores internationally and open 100 in the U.S.

The majority of the new international stores will be located in existing markets and primarily be licensed stores rather than Starbucks-owned locations, according to the company. Starbucks declined to break out where the new stores will go. The company right now has 5,500 international coffeehouses in more than 50 countries.

“Over the last two years, they’ve focused on the domestic market, kind of fixing some of the issues brought about by the economy,” said Dan Geiman, a retail analyst at Seattle brokerage McAdams Wright Ragen Inc. “They’re going to focus going forward more internationally in improving metrics and margins. They do see a tremendous amount of opportunity from that standpoint.”

Starbucks Corp.’s international sales jumped 23 percent to $534.2 million in its fiscal second quarter ended March 28 reflecting, in part, favorable foreign currency impacts. The company’s U.S. sales, by contrast, were up 5 percent, to $1.82 billion.