Amazon: The World’s Most Powerful Economic and Cultural Force

Facts about Amazon

There are probably few people in the world who do not know what Amazon is. Anyone who ever searched for a product to buy online was directed to this retailer. As Amazon constantly grabs the headlines in the news about financial markets or wealthy businesses, even those who do not shop on the internet have still heard about Amazon’s success or Jeff Bezos’s riches. Yet, although Amazon is constantly in the news, there are some less widely circulated facts about the company. They are listed below:  

• Despite starting as a bookseller, Amason.com is a tech company whose business centers around simplifying online transactions for customers.
• Amazon owns a wide range of products: Amazon Game Studio, Amazon Drive, a cloud storage application, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), a comprehensive cloud platform, used by many technology representatives worldwide.  
• Amazon owns the One Click trademark, patented in 1999. This patent expired in the United States on September 11, 2017, and has not been renewed yet.
• Amazon owns over 40 subsidiaries and brands, the most well-known of which are Whole Foods, audio-book seller Audible, book review site GoodReads, and live-streaming platform Twitch.
• Amazon gives money to charities through Amazon Smile. People shopping on smile.amazon.com, which offers the same items and prices as Amazon, contribute 0.5% of eligible purchases to their chosen charitable organizations.  
• In 2012, Amazon acquired Kiva Systems, a robotic company, for $775 million. Over 200,000 mobile robots now work in the Amazon warehouse network, carrying product shelves to workers and reading barcodes on the ground for directions.
• Amazon has its brick-and-mortar counterpart, Amazon Books, which integrates online and offline shopping. Amazon’s first physical book store opened in 2015 in Seattle, near the University of Washington.

Amazon Statistics in 2022

Billions of people are familiar with the Amazon brand, while millions are its customers. More than 89% of US buyers agree that they would rather buy products from Amazon than other e-commerce sites. As Forbes once stated, “Amazon has earned our trust by delivering the products we want, on time, intact, in the same branded brown boxes—consistently.” 

As the popularity of Amazon grows at a rapid rate, many predict that soon it will steal the show from tech giants Microsoft, Tesla, and Alphabet. The latest statistics presented below highlight Amazon’s potential to become the number one company in the world:

• Amazon is worth over $1.105 trillion in 2022.
• Having a brand value of $350 billion, Amazon is second only to Apple, leaving Google and Microsoft behind.
• In 2022, Amazon has 300 million active users.
• Among these active users, 197 million people visit Amazon.com every month.
• Amazon ships to more than 100 countries, excluding Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria.
• Over 200 million people globally have an Amazon Prime subscription.
• There are over 157.4 million Amazon Prime subscribers in the United States. 
• Amazon Prime is available in 22 countries.
• Amazon Prime video, the second-largest streaming service in the world, has over 205 million subscribers.
• Around 25.21 billion US dollars is generated yearly from membership services.
• In 2021, Amazon Prime Day sales amounted to $11.19 billion.
• On average, Prime subscribers spend $1,400 per year.
• Amazon.com receives 2.2 billion visits per month.
• Amazon owns more than 90% market share in five product categories: Batteries (97%), Kitchen & Dining (94%), Home Improvement Tools (93%), Golf (92%), and Skin Care (91%).
• Amazon boasts nearly 50% share of the US e-commerce market, which is more than triple the combined shares of its main competitors: eBay (6.6%), Apple (3.9%), and Walmart (3.7%).
• In 2021, almost 2 million SMBs operated as Amazon’s third-party sellers. Half of Amazon’s American partners use the FBA service, as it offers at least 30% lower shipping costs.
• Every quarter of 2021, about 56% of Amazon’s revenue came from third-party sellers.
• Amazon sellers earn between $26,000 and $810,000 annually.
• On average, small and medium-sized businesses in the US sell more than 4,000 items per minute.
• Amazon has 1.2 million employees in 2022. Amazon employment statistics show that the number of employees this year almost doubled from the number registered in the fourth quarter of 2019 when it was 789,000.
• Amazon hired 270,000 new employees in the second half of 2021 to help provide its one-day and same-day delivery services.
• In 2021, Amazon’s advertising revenue was about $31 billion.

Sources: Amazon, Statista 

Statistical Information about Jeff Bezos

• Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in late 1994 and was its CEO for more than 25 years, stepping down from this position on July 5, 2021.
• In 1997, when Amazon became a public company, Bezos’s net worth reached $120 million.
• Presently, Bezos is considered the second richest person in the world after Elon Musk: according to Celebrity Net Worth, his net worth amounts to $130 billion in 2022. Forbes notes that Bezos fell to No 2 for the first time in four years. He lost to Musk because of a 3% drop in Amazon stock and generous giving of $6 billion to various charitable causes. 
• Bezos makes around $8.9 billion a month, meaning he earns $321 million daily.
• Bezos’s annual paycheck is $81,000.
• Amazon’s former CEO reached the record $200 billion net worth mark in August 2020.
• Bezos benefits from his Amazon stock holdings. Since the company went public in 1997, he has sold around $27 billion worth of Amazon stock.
• In 2010, Bezos sold 6,000,000 Amazon shares worth $793 million.
• Bezos invested $7.5 billion in Blue Origin, a private spaceflight company that sends people to space. In 2021, Bezos said that tourist sales to space reached $100 million worth of tickets. 
• In 2013, Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post for $250 million because he believed that journalism is the main engine of democracy.

Sources: Wikipedia, Forbes

Amazon Q3 Earnings

Amazon reported its third-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday, October 27,  posting weaker-than-expected earnings and revenue for the quarter and giving a disappointing fourth-quarter sales forecast. The company reported earnings of $0.28 per share, $0.06 better than the analyst estimate of $0.22, with revenue for the quarter coming in at $127.1 billion versus the consensus estimate of $127.76 billion.

“Once again, Amazon suffered from slowing growth in its bread-and-butter AWS cloud business, with the outlook implying a steeper deceleration path on cloud optimizations. Amazon’s awful results and weak guidance proves it’s not immune to the challenges facing the tech industry at large as it struggles in the face of worsening macroeconomic headwinds, such as soaring inflation and worries about a possible recession.”

Jesse Cohen, Senior Analyst at Investing.com

Amazon Annual Revenue

Amazon’s increasing popularity among consumers worldwide guarantees that it will continue earning profits. Amazon forecasts its annual revenue growth rate this year will be 12.73% and expects its revenue to reach $485,902,000,000 in 2022.  

These figures are achievable partly because Amazon strongly emphasizes scientific innovations, investing generous amounts of money in scientific research. In 2019, Amazon put a whopping $35.93 billion into technology and content, 12.8% of its net sales. Amazon’s research mainly focuses on advanced technologies such as AI, machine learning, cloud computing, cashless Go stores, robotic warehouses, drone deliveries, and cyber security. There is little doubt that, given this dedicated investment in technology, Amazon’s services will continue improving, and its popularity will increase together with its profits. The table below shows the inexorable upward trajectory of Amazon’s annual revenue since 2009:

Amazon Annual Revenue (Billions of US$)

The figures in the table show that Amazon’s revenue for the second quarter was $121,234 billion, constituting an increase of 7.21% year-over-year. Amazon’s revenue for the twelve months ending June 30, 2022, was $485,902 billion, which is a 9.61% growth year-over-year. Amazon’s annual revenue for 2021 was $469,822 billion, constituting a 21.7% increase from 2020. The largest jump in Amazon’s revenue happened in the first year of the pandemic when people were locked down at home and could only shop online. In 2020, Amazon’s annual revenue was $386,064 billion, a 37.62% growth from 2019. 

Sources: Statista, CNBC 

Amazon Annual Revenue by Segment from 2018 to 2022

Amazon excels at diversifying its revenue streams to increase its profits. Indeed, the company’s success partly comes from its ability to use its various business divisions to support and drive growth for other divisions. Far from focusing narrowly and exclusively on retail e-commerce, Amazon has also established an enviable reputation in such areas as cloud computing, online advertising, and digital payments.

The tables below shed light on how each division drives Amazon’s business, individually and collectively. The figures for the current 2022 year are based on the analysts’ estimations from Insider Intelligence. They foresee that Amazon’s global retail e-commerce sales will reach $729.76 billion in 2022, constituting an 18.8% increase year-over-year. Their other prediction is that the US will make up $445.31 billion of that share, accounting for 41.8% of the total American e-commerce sales.

Amazon Retail E-Commerce Sales Worldwide (Billions of US$)

Source: Statista

Amazon Web Services Revenue (Billions of US$)

Amazon’s web services are the largest cloud infrastructure in the world. They are offered in 26 regions globally and have more than 200 services, ranging from core computing and storage to AI tools and low-code or no-code solutions for products and app developers. The contribution of AWS to the company’s overall revenue has consistently increased. In 2021, AWS revenue reached $62 billion, representing 13.26% of Amazon’s total revenue.

Source: Statista

Advertising Services Revenue from Q3 2020 to Q3 2022 (Billions of US$)

As the growing revenues generated by Amazon’s advertising services clearly show, Amazon might catch up with, and even outperform, Google and Facebook which are presently leading in the digital advertisement space. Indeed, at the end of the first quarter of 2022, Amazon’s advertising revenue jumped 25% to $7.8 billion. Google’s advertisement revenue advanced 22.5% at the end of March 2022, while Facebook celebrated an increase of only 5% over the first quarter of 2021. These numbers suggest that Amazon has a strong long-term potential and is becoming the force to be reckoned with in the digital ad wars.

Amazon Prime Services Revenue (Billions of US$)

Although the revenue generated by Amazon Prime services is inseparable from Amazon’s overall revenue, the company provides the net sales numbers related to it, including digital videos, audiobooks, digital music, e-books, and other subscriptions, save AWS. 

Sources: Statista 

Amazon Prime Subscribers

Amazon Prime was launched in 2005 as an Amazon membership service offering free two-day shipping. Although people were reluctant to pay the Prime membership during the first years, they have increasingly been warming up to the service since 2011. In the first quarter of 2018, there were 100 million Prime members worldwide. In 2022, Amazon announced that it had 157.4 million members across 22 countries.

Amazon Prime User Growth in the US

Amazon Prime Services are popular in the United States. The US accounts for 74% of all Amazon Prime subscriptions. Analysts at eMarketer expect the number of Amazon Prime subscribers in America to reach 157.4 million this year and jump to 168.3 million by 2025. The table below reflects the increase in Amazon Prime subscribers since 2013:

Source: Statista

How Many Countries Have Amazon Prime?

Amazon Prime is available in 22 countries. Since 2007, Amazon has offered its Prime Membership in the following nine countries:

Source: Wikipedia

Amazon Prime Day Sales

Amazon launched the Prime Day Sales event in 2015. It is a deal event conducted once a year and available solely to Amazon Prime members. In 2021, sales on Amazon during Prime Day amounted to $11.19 billion, which constituted a 7.7% jump from $10.39 billion a year earlier.  

According to the company, Amazon’s Prime Day in 2022 was the biggest Prime Day event. Prime members worldwide purchased more than 100,000 items per minute and ended the event with 300 million items heading to their home addresses. Amazon said that people saved over $1.7 billion and brought the company $11.9 billion in sales. Most items were bought in the following three departments: Household Essentials (29%), Health & Beauty (28%), and Consumer Electronics (27%). The table below shows how steadily people’s shopping appetite has been whetted over the years since the inception of the event:

Sources: Forbes

Conclusion

Amazon has become one of the most powerful and respected companies in the world. It has earned its enviable reputation by uncompromisingly focusing on customers, being willing to experiment, and learning from its mistakes when failing. Amazon’s logistics and shipping have reached the speed and professionalism that no other company can match. The retailer’s venture into advertising has brought success and disputed Google’s predominance as a digital-ad titan. Amazon’s foray into healthcare is expected to buoy the sector. Its constant employment of more workers contributes to positive US Non-Farm Payroll results. By investing in a private spaceflight company, Jeff Bezos has also proved that for him, quite literally, the sky is the limit.

Seeing Amazon’s triumphant march forward, analysts cannot but agree that the company will soon dominate the world. Its wealth and the price of its stock are poised to grow. According to CNN Business, the AMZN stock price will be $174 in less than 12 months, about 24% above current levels. CNN Business also predicts that in 2026, the stock could hit $7,177.35. And as Amazon disrupts and masters new areas, it will become more and more difficult for other companies to oust it from its leading position.