Description of the Assignment The following is a valuation of Amazon, Inc. for the purposes of the sale of a minority stake of the company. In this valuation you will find a summary of the financial health, future performance, and an estimated value of the business

Description of the Assignment The following is a valuation of Amazon, Inc. for the purposes of the sale of a minority stake of the company. In this valuation you will find a summary of the financial health, future performance, and an estimated value of the business

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competitive wages to its employees, several instances of working conditions at Amazon facilities

have been called into question.

Ownership

Ownership of Amazon is broken down into three different categories: individual

shareholder/ownership, institutional shareholder/ownership, and mutual fund

shareholder/ownership.

Amazon's founder and former CEO, Jeff Bezos, is the top individual shareholder/owner

of Amazon, Inc., with 12.7% of the outstanding shares. Of those shares as part of the settlement

in his divorce from his then-wife MacKenzie, who helped him create Amazon back in 1994,

owns a quarter of those shares. (Investopedia) Current CEO Andrew Jassy owns 0.02% of

Amazon's outstanding shares, and Senior Vice President of Business Development Jeffery

Blackburn owns 0.01% of Amazon's outstanding shares. (Investopedia)

The Vanguard Group, Inc. is the top institutional owner of Amazon, Inc., with 6.57% of

all outstanding shares, followed by BlackRock Institutional Trust Company, N.A., with 3.59% of

all outstanding shares. The third and final institutional owner of Amazon, Inc. is State Street

Global Advisors (US), with 3.35% of all outstanding shares. (MSN)

The three top mutual fund companies that share in the ownership of Amazon are;

Vanguard U.S. Total Market Shares Index ETF AUD with 2.44% of all outstanding shares,

Vanguard 500 Index Fund; ETF with 1.86% of all outstanding shares, and SPDR S&P 500 ETF

Trust with .94% of all outstanding shares. (MSN)

Major Shareholder Transactions

On March 9, 2022, to make their stock look more attractive to retail investors and allow

employees to have "more flexibility in how they manage their equity." (Wittenstein & Day,

2022) Amazon's board of directors recently disclosed that they would be splitting the outstanding

stock shares by a 20 to 1 ratio for the first time in almost two decades.

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Customers

Amazon's customer base ranges from the everyday individual to major corporations.

Amazon is that place for anyone looking for that hard-to-find items or everyday items. It

provides consumers with a place to purchase products, but it is also a place for third-party sellers

to sell products to consumers they may not have reached had it not been for Amazon.

Along with being an eCommerce website, Amazon offers subscription services as well. Its most

significant subscription service offered is Amazon Prime. It was reported by eMarketer in 2020

that " by the end of 2021, there will be 148.6 million Amazon Prime users, up from 142.5 users

in 2020." (Anthony, 2022)

Beyond Prime and its subscription services, Amazon offers other services, such as; Amazon

Web Services (AWS). "Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's most comprehensive and

broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers

globally." (US About Amazon., 2020) "With top brands like AOL, Reddit, Netflix, and Pinterest

now running on the Amazon Web Services (AWS), the future looks bright for Amazon cloud

services." (Anthony, 2022), and with its purchase of Whole Foods Market, Amazon now has

physical stores.

Management

Amazon operates under a hierarchical organizational structure due to the immense

size of the business. The "Senior management team include three CEOs and three senior vice

presidents responsible for various vital aspects of the business reporting directly to CEO Andy

Jassy." (Dudovskiy, Amazon organizational structure: A brief overview - research