How Big is Amazon
How Big is Amazon
Jeff Bezos’ e-commerce juggernaut is a ravenous monster, scooping up conventional businesses and brick-and-mortar retailers by the dozen into its insatiable maw.
But did you know one of its subsidiaries essentially makes the internetwork?
Or that another wants to take over your healthcare?
One bit of Amazon wants to deliver booze to your house party, while another is eager to mend your toilet.
Join us now as we flush out the facts and investigate exactly how big is Amazon?
Amazon’s raw data is worth marveling over in itself.
Last year the company reported revenues of over $386 billion. It’s valued overall at $1.4 trillion, bigger than the next nine biggest US retailers combined.
Roughly $11,000 worth of goods are traded every single second on its platform, and last year the firm delivered three-and-a-half billion packages, one for every two human beings on earth.
It’s the world’s second-largest private employer, behind only Walmart, but of course, that doesn’t count some 5 million sellers who sell goods via the platform, a quarter of a million of whom each made over $100,000 in sales during 2019.
Amazon Prime, the speedy premium delivery club, now has almost a 150million subscribers, among them a sizeable majority of all American shoppers.
Like an iceberg, however, much of Amazon’s grandeur is invisible.
Amazon Web Services, or AWS, provides cheap, reliable server infrastructure on behalf of major organizations from Netflix to Disney, BMW to GE, Tinder to the CIA.
Being the world’s IT geek might sound like a pretty humdrum side-hustle for a fast-moving business like Amazon.
But these days AWS is in fact the most lucrative division of the business, raking in a whopping 60% of all Amazon profits, or $50 billion a year.
AWS isn’t just helping you watch Schitt’s Creek in HD.
Its servers provided the essential computational horsepower which helped pharmaceutical giant Moderna develop its Covid-19 vaccine in lightning-quick time.
Fascinating as AWS is, no discussion of Amazon’s might would be complete without goggling at its IRL footprint.
Not least AWS’s awe-inspiring network of trans-oceanic cables snaking under the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.
And the Mediterranean, Red Sea, and the South China Sea.
On top of all that Amazon also maintains 175 gigantic fulfillment centers all around the world, with many more planned.
This helps runs its core business – ferrying drunk impulse buys to your home in a matter of days or, in some cities, hours. More on that in a moment.
Less well known is the fact Amazon is moving full steam ahead into the very bricks-and-mortar retail space it’s done more than anybody to destroy.
Take Amazon Go, a network of roughly a dozen convenience stores dotted around Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, and London.
The gimmick here is there’s no cashier – scan your phone on the way in, like cameras and weight-sensitive shelves suss out what you bought, and seamlessly invoice your Amazon account.
A subtle variation on this is Amazon Fresh, the cashier-less grocery chain competing with small metro supermarkets, offering Amazon’s own food products branded ‘Solomon, for Amazon’s own-brand coffee, and ‘Lifelong Complete’ for pet food’.
There are already three of these in London, and 10 are situated across California and Illinois.
That has nothing whatsoever to do, by the way with Amazon’s notorious buyout of Whole Foods, the decidedly upscale organic lifestyle brand which itself boasts over 500 outlets around the world.
Oh, and both Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh deliver, of course.
Delivery has always been central to Amazon’s runaway success. If anybody knows how to get stuff from A to B, it’s Amazon.
You’ll have seen their vans and trucks zooming around wherever you happen to live.
But did you know its drivers typically use an app called Flex, which divvies out precious shifts to hungry gig economy workers, and supports a thriving secondary market in plugin app bots that help drivers secure the best slots by constantly refreshing the landing page?
Small wonder, when the job pays anywhere between $18 and $25 an hour.
When Amazon does use legacy state postal services – it frequently does – it’s in a powerful bargaining position.
So much so that USPS broke with its longstanding tradition and started delivering on Sunday just to help Amazon meet demand.
But that’s small fry.
Earlier this year Amazon snapped up a great deal on 11 Boeing 767s from struggling US carriers Delta and WestJet, bringing their airborne delivery fleet up to 66 aircraft.
The plan is to have 86 planes by the end of next year, and they’ve made no secret of their plans to take on big carriers like UPS and FedEx at their own game.
Unbelievably, Amazon Air is later this year opening a dedicated airline hub – essentially a private freight airport – in Kentucky.
This follows its already significant air hub presence in Leipzig, Germany.
Amazon is also making waves in the notoriously hard-to-crack sea container market.
In early 2016 the company was granted a license from the U.S. Federal Maritime Commission to operate as a non-vessel operating common carrier for cargo shipments between China and the United States.
This is all part of Bezos’ dream of vertical integration across all aspects of sales and transportation, and it gives Amazon a profound advantage over rivals.
Through another acquired startup, Zoox, Amazon will soon be ferrying humans around too via a fleet of self-driving taxis.
So Amazon is on the seabed, crisscrossing oceans, soaring through the skies, everywhere on land, and potentially up against in space, if it gets its Kuiper satellite array, a rival to Elon Musk’s Starlink, off the ground.
But Amazon isn’t in your home yet, surely?
Well, a bunch of stuff you and basically everybody you know owns probably comes from Amazon. So of course, it is.
There’s a good chance you’ve watched its streaming service, Prime Video, which not only carries a dizzying array of legacy content but makes its own very good content.
Sound Of Metal just won two Oscars, they’re currently working on an inevitably awesome televised take on Lord of the Rings, plus cutting-edge comedy like Fleabag.
Amazon’s music streaming service is reckoned superior to Spotify by many audiophiles. If you’re a gamer you’ve probably used streaming service Twitch, snapped up by Amazon for 970million in 2017.
It made $300million dollars in ad revenue in 2019 alone, by the way, and is complemented by the Amazon Digital Games Store.
And Prime Gaming, which offers games for sale plus free loot for popular titles like League of Legends and Grand Theft Auto.
But Amazon’s presence in the home starts way before that, at your front door if the company gets its way.
Back in 2018 the company bought Ring – which isn’t as you might reasonably assume, smart wearable tech for your finger.
Instead, it’s a smart doorbell that allows you to remotely check who’s calling, and even grant access on your smartphone. Amazon Ring isn’t just for forgetful housemates who’ve lost their keys.
The firm is expanding its Amazon Home Services division, which deploys an army of mobile house-cleaners and has lately started employing technicians who’ll come over and do everything from assembling your new bed to installing a catflap, to unblocking that stubborn toilet.
And thanks to Amazon Ring, you needn’t even be home when they’re at it. That’s not the only way Amazon’s been cleaning up.
Alexa, the company’s nigh-on omniscient AI assistant, is quietly listening in and offering helpful advice from over 50 million Amazon Echo devices.
Inspired by the friendly, humble, and helpful computer from Star Trek, it’s already woven into the fabric of daily life for millions of daily users.
Amazon’s head scientist in charge of the Alexa project, Rohit Prasad is working to make Alexa even smarter, capable of not only following instructions via hundreds of thousands of apps – but also known as skills – but actively anticipating what you’ll need later before even you do.
That could be as prosaic as updating your Uber order to meet a delayed flight.
Or as nifty as remembering you need vanilla essence to make your gran’s birthday cake this weekend, and subtly steering you to the correct aisle in Whole Foods via your Echo earbuds.
This is a good time for a quick look at the vast array of hardware Amazon produces in-house.
The company’s consumer electronics workshop in Sunnyvale California is called Lab126, a clever nod to Amazon’s logo, where A is 1 and Z is 26.
The Kindle was LAB126’s first hit product, rolling out of the labs back in 2007.
Later models – they update regularly – offer smart features like ‘color temperature analysis’, and the ability to sync what page you’re currently on across multiple devices.
There’s also the Kindle Fire, a cheaper rival to the iPad. The Amazon Fire TV, or Fire TV Stick.
Amazon Echo – which, by the way, incorporates seven microphones to earwig on your innermost wants and needs – has lots of different versions.
There’s the Dot, the Buds, and the Spot.
There's also the fancy bells-and-whistles Echo Studio edition or the Echo Show which incorporates a screen, and the Echo Auto in your car.
Bet you’ve never heard of Echo Frames, Amazon’s effort to pick up where Google Glass left off, or the Echo Ring, which this time actually is a piece of smart wearable tech for your finger.
The less said about LAB126’s failed Fire phone the better, perhaps.
Until now Amazon has bought processing chips from Intel, but following the lead of its AWS division will soon start using Graviton chipsets, which it’s developed since acquiring Israeli firm Annapurna.
These Graviton chips, currently in their second generation with a third on the way, use the power-efficient ARM architecture, in much the same way as the new generation of Apple computers.
Think that’s crazy?
Did you know Amazon is also in the superhero biz, owning exclusive rights to many DC comics graphic novels featuring Superman, Green Lantern, and Watchmen.
And it owns ComiXology, a cloud-based digital comics platform.
Weirder than that?
Amazon recently bought a liquor store in San Francisco with an eye to trialing a two-hour alcohol home delivery service across the city.
Which might be seen to fly in the face of another of the company’s major recent forays – into the notoriously tricky business of healthcare.
In acquiring Pill Pack for $753 million dollars in 2018 Amazon won licenses to operate pharmacies across much of the United States.
Utilizing its vast delivery network and commercial muscle, Amazon is now able to get drugs to customers cheaper and faster than rivals.
It even interfaces neatly with the US healthcare system through a slick app that simply asks for a user's social security number.
Amazon Pharmacy vice-president TJ Parker said it was hoping to transform an industry that "can be inconvenient and confusing".
The company’s nascent Amazon Care division seeks to bring a lot of disparate services, from general practitioners to top specialists, under one umbrella, accessible through a friendly interface.
Of course, critics have suggested handing over all your healthcare info to a tech giant isn’t necessarily the smartest move.
Oh, and by the way, Amazon is also very much in the business of being a critic, owning both IMDB and Goodreads.
We could go on – ever heard of Amazon Pay, the rival to PayPal?
– but you get the idea. How big is Amazon?
Amazon, to use the technical parlance, is bloody enormous.
