Amazon.com: Business Details, Marketing Strategies And Analysis

Company information:

Company name Amazon
Sector Retail apparel ans speciality
IPO date Thursday, 15.05.1997
Location Seattle, Washington, US
Website www.amazon.com

Fundamentals and financials:

Market cup $467.5 billion
Revenue $105.1 billion
Employees 341400
Revenue/employee $439700
Net income $1.922 billion
Shares outstanding 480.4 million
Annual earnings/share $4.04
P/E ratio 240.9
Company management: Jeffrey P. Bezos (President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board), Jeffrey A. Wilke (Chief Executive Officer, Worldwide Consumer), Andrew Jassy (Chief Executive Officer, Amazon Web Service)

If you’re browsing the web and some inexplicable force compels you to buy something on the spot, you may already have one of these sites bookmarked: eBay, Alibaba or Amazon. The latter is arguably the largest and the most popular out of the three, which is exactly what makes it so interesting from a business standpoint.

Those of you unfamiliar with this platform can be brought up to speed in just a few sentences. Simply put, it is an e-commerce company which is considered to be the largest online retailer currently in business. They offer a variety of services all over the world via a chain of localized online storefronts (each servicing a particular region – Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas). It offers nearly complete global coverage.

The company was established by Jeff Bezos in 1994, back when the internet was in its infancy stages. Curiously, before the company was branded Amazon, it went through a brief stint being known as “Cadabra.”
The platform was initially conceived to be an online bookstore, but it later underwent through a multitude of changes to become the leading force in online retail, quickly merging other competing brands and furthering its stranglehold on worldwide business.

Currently, the platform sells about 400 million products on its marketplace, ranging from music and books to movie streaming, electronics and countless other things that can be thought of.
If it’s sold anywhere online, chances are the product in question already has an Amazon page.

Financial Data

Even though the company’s modest beginnings can drive and inspire other smaller ventures to find success, the sheer scope of its current operations is simply mind-boggling.

Maybe it’s best to let the numbers to do the talking: company’s revenue is estimated around $150 billion with gross profit comfortably sitting at $47 billion. Overall market value rests a $420 billion with annual operating income of $4 billion.

Amazon Holiday Commercial – “Give” (source – YouTube)

Discover more financials about the corporation below.

Marketing

Bezos claims the name “Amazon” was picked from a dictionary with the sole reason of giving his venture an exotic name, and given how the Amazon is the longest (and largest) river in the world, the name begins to take on a new meaning.

Is there a secret ingredient to Amazon’s marketing strategy, though? Quite simply, it uses a variety of methods to convert users that have been passing by into loyal, long-term customers. And since the representation of products is quite large, they can easily market towards a large variety of clients, in virtually any niche possible.

All they do is aimed at maintaining brand loyalty: associate programs, drone deliveries and its “Prime” program may be worth a closer look. Associated materials can be found below.

Structure & Operations

Amazon has a lot of subsidiaries offering a variety of services – Twitch, Goodreads and Audible among countless others. Even Amazon’s proprietary AI engine “Alexa” demands a closer look.

Clients have come to expect quick deliveries on every order, and this business aims to deliver on that promise.
340 thousand employees are working at the company, this may seem an inordinate number, but keeping in mind their scope of operations, it becomes a requirement.

Analysis

Amazon is the second most admired company according to rankings maintained by Fortune.
The company is under continuous siege from competitors. Just to name a few, its VOD (video-on-demand) services struggle to compete with Netflix and Wal-Mart is arguably the biggest threat when it comes to retail and one-day deliveries.

Let’s delve deeper into the company and detail all relevant performance metric. How does a company stay in the Fortune 500 list for 16 years? More on that below.