Jeff Bezos by Chris McNab

Author:Chris McNab [McNab, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
Published: 2022-07-12T15:40:06+00:00

Chapter 5

Amazon Everywhere

In the decade beginning 2010, the world’s perception of both Bezos and Amazon changed irrevocably. Amazon entered the new decade undoubtedly a leading figure in the world of e-commerce, but there were still question marks over long-term profitability. On a talk show in 2014, Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, referred to Amazon as a ‘Nice company’ but one that wasn’t really making money. Six years later, such viewpoints would appear almost comically outdated. Amazon’s revenue figures, graphed over the decade, showed an extraordinary growth pattern, the bar chart looking like the flat run then the precipitous climb (from 2015) at the beginning of a roller-coaster ride. At the end of 2010, Amazon recorded annual net sales of $33.4 billion, with a net income of $1.15 billion. In 2021, by stratospheric contrast, the annual revenue was nearly $470 billion, with a net income of $33.4 billion. And remember, the 2021 figures were recorded after the world had endured two years of one of the worst global crises since the Second World War, the Covid-19 pandemic. Without downplaying the human cost of the pandemic, this international calamity actually worked to Amazon’s commercial advantage, as its retail arm became a lifeline to millions of home-bound people across the world, while the switch to online working and selling fed AWS with even more commercial calories. Incredibly, Amazon’s annual revenue rose 37.62 per cent in 2020 and another 21.7 per cent in 2021.

As Amazon swelled, so did Bezos’ personal financial profile, a fact that gripped the attention of the media. His net worth topped $150 billion in 2018 and went above $200 billion just two years later. But whereas many initially innovative companies suddenly ran out of steam and fell behind energetic newcomers during the 2000s, Amazon simply kept straining into the wind, led by a boss who was never satisfied with anything approaching the status quo. Thus the inventions kept on coming, some of them self-destructing well before they reached commercial orbit, others ultimately taking great slabs of market share in territory in which few had ever even contemplated the intrusion of the e-commerce empire.

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