As we know, the 1990s was an age of technological invention and innovation, especially concerning computers. The introduction of the internet soon started the dot com boom where many people started to heavily invest in online websites and companies believing that they were the market for the future. One of those people was Jeff Bezos, who thought that the potential commercial success of the internet and that books might sell online. Hence, he founded the company, Amazon.
Amazon was actually originally Cadabra (named after abracadabra) but Bezos chose to rename it as Amazon with the belief that the name wouldn't box him into one product or service. Amazon was an online bookstore and within less than 2 years of going online, it had earned over 15 million dollars. The next year in 1997, Amazon went public for 57 million dollars and drew many investors attention along with officially selling its 1 millionth book to somebody in Japan. By 1998, Amazon had expanded it's service to not only books but also CDs and soon started to add more categories such as toys, electronics, and tools. By 1999, Amazon had sold its 20 millionth product, making it clear that it was expanding rapidly. Furthermore, Jeff Bezos had been named Time magazine's person of the year, a huge achievement.
But after the dot com boom of the 1990s, there was the dot com bust of 2000. People realized that these dot com companies were simply not making a lot of money and were instead relying on investments. While Amazon was selling millions of products, it sadly fell into this category as well. But Amazon survived the recession largely because just before, they raised a ton of money, allowing them to have a cushion and ride out the recession.
By 2003, Amazon was still expanding and came out with the Amazon Kindle which allowed the usage of electronic books instead of physical ones and by 2007 Amazon claimed that it sold more ebooks than real ones. In 2006 they released Amazon prime to streamline shipping for their customers by adding third-party companies and had already started to absorb other companies into their empire. They even bought twitch.com a popular gaming stream site. By 2015, Amazon was worth more than Walmart making it the world's largest retailer worth over 250 billion dollars. Then in 2017, it bought out Whole Foods which only intensified the war to be the largest retailer. Nowadays, Amazon is still the world's largest retailer boasting a Q4 revenue of over 70 billion dollars in 2018 and they're only expanding.
I found your post very informative. I was especially interested in the fact that the largest retailer in the world began as a company only selling books. I'm surprised, I haven't come across Jeff Bezos more. In elementary school, I knew who Steve Jobs was, but I didn't know who Jeff Bezos was until much later.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your post, and I liked how you included detailed statistics that demonstrate the growth of the company. I would also like to mention that Amazon has a very interesting business model. As a “growth” company, Amazon initially aimed to scale its operations and did not actually make a profit for a long time. While the strategy has paid off in the long-run, Amazon is still not making as much profit as other tech giants, such as Apple ($3 billion vs. $20 billion for Q4 2018 earnings).
ReplyDeleteSource: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/31/amazon-earnings-q4-2018.html
I really found this interesting. Even though I use amazon to buy products I never once bought a book. Which I find interesting on how a e-book company switched their bushiness model to sell anything legal.
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