Overview
Amazon.com Inc. (Amazon, hereafter) is the world’s largest online retailer and a major supplier of cloud services. The firm began as a book seller but has since evolved to sell a wide range of consumer products and digital media, as well as its own electronic gadgets, including the Kindle e-book reader, the Kindle Fire tablet, and the Fire TV, a streaming media adaptor (Wigmore, 2014). Jeffrey P. Bezos founded the company in July 1994, and it is headquartered in Seattle, Washington (Market Watch, 2021).
Amazon provides online retail purchasing services. It is divided into three business segments: North America, International, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Retail sales of consumer items and subscriptions through North America-focused websites such as www.amazon.com and www.amazon.ca are included in the North America division (Market Watch, 2021). The International division sells consumer items and subscriptions via international-focused websites. The Amazon Web Services sector sells computing, storage, databases, and AWS service offerings to start-ups, corporations, government agencies, and academic institutions across the world (Market Watch, 2021).
Amazon is a hugely successful corporation that has grown exponentially over the previous few decades. Its stock price has grown by a staggering 1,380% in the last ten years, and it now trades at well over $3,300 per share (Brockman, 2021). Amazon also has a lot of opportunities for expansion, which makes investors hopeful about the company’s future. For example, earlier this year, it launched Amazon Care, a virtual healthcare programme. The business also intends to open physical locations in order to compete with retail behemoths such as Walmart. There’s a reason Amazon has been a Wall Street favourite for so long, and the firm shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon (Brockman, 2021).
| STRENGTHS | WEAKNESSES |
| Amazon has strong brand recognition due to its famous “smile” formed in the logo and is renowned across the world for rapid, efficient, and dependable online retailing and distribution. Amazon is firmly entrenched as the leader in the online retailing market in North America, with competitors such as eBay and Walmart (Gaille, 2021).
It is a diversified firm that has provided products and services ranging from digital streaming to artificial intelligence with smart speakers in addition to being the world’s largest online shopping service (Someka, 2021). |
Amazon has garnered negative attention in Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States owing to tax avoidance (Madhav, 2021). Amazon’s stance on consumer security and safety has been called into doubt. There have been occasions where Amazon’s clients’ safety, security, and privacy have been jeopardised owing to violations of Amazon’s own security standards (Gaille, 2021).
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the company’s most profitable division. Any bad incident affecting AWS’s profitability will have a major influence on the company’s overall profitability (Gaille, 2021). |
| OPPORTUNITIES | THREATS |
| Amazon’s delivery network is expected to dominate the industry in a decade, according to the US Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx. This year, Amazon aims to build 1500 delivery centres in cities and suburbs across the United States (Madhav, 2021).
With increased technology penetration and user adoption, internet connectivity, and disposable money in emerging economies, Amazon expanding into emerging markets would allow its current network of third-party merchants and independent partners to provide their services to a larger market (Gaille, 2021). |
Amazon’s growth has sparked concerns among government authorities, which have accused the company of fraud, tax evasion, and antitrust violations. Amazon and Apple were recently chastised after Amazon agreed to ban third-party sellers of Apple items from its site (Gaille, 2021)
The government is putting pressure on Amazon to hold it accountable for the harm caused by counterfeit items sold on Amazon by third-party vendors. Furthermore, the increasing cybercrime might have an influence on the company’s network security system (Madhav, 2021) |
Potential Targets
For a retail powerhouse like Amazon, the prospects for growth through acquisition of other firms are limitless. According to Salter and Weinh
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