Amazon

Amazon (Amazon.com, Inc.) is an American company, the world's largest e-commerce platform and public cloud computing markets by revenue and market capitalization. It is headquartered in Seattle.

Founded by Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994, as an online bookstore, it later diversified to sell videos, MP3s, audiobooks (both streaming and downloadable), software, video games, electronics, clothing, furniture, food, toys, and jewelry . The company also owns Amazon Publishing, Amazon Studios, manufactures consumer electronics lines including Kindle e-readers, Amazon Fire tablets, Fire TVs, and the Echo smart speaker, and is the world's largest provider of IaaS and PaaS (Amazon Web Services). Maintains separate retail sites for some countries, and also offers international shipping of its products to other countries. About 200 million people have subscribed to Prime Video. 

History

Amazon.com was created on July 5, 1994 by American entrepreneur Jeff Bezos; the company was named after the Amazon River, the deepest river in the world. Initially, the company was engaged in the sale of books via the Internet. The company was one of the first to enter this market, and Bezos was eager to take as much of it as possible before serious competitors appeared. By December 1996, Amazon.com had 180,000 customers, and in October 1997, 1 million. In June 1998, the store began selling music CDs, and in November of the same year, video products. In the same year, bookselling websites in the UK and Germany were bought. Amazon also began offering intermediary services to other shopping sites, and by 1999 it had 350,000 such customers. In 1999, MP3 recordings, software, video games, electronics, clothing, furniture, food, and toys were added to the assortment. Part of the funding for this rapid growth came from the May 15, 1997, NASDAQ IPO, which raised $54 million.

In 2002, a subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, was established; Initially, it was engaged in tracking the popularity of websites and maintaining other statistics on the Internet, and since 2006 it has also begun to offer data storage and processing services on its servers. These services quickly gained popularity, with 10 billion files stored on the company's servers in 2007 and 950 billion in 2012; as of 2012, about 1% of internet traffic went through Amazon's servers.

In 2006, Shopbop was acquired. In 2009, the shoe trading company Zappos was bought for $847 million.

In 2007, the company began producing Kindle e-readers, and in 2011, Kindle Fire tablet computers. Also in 2011, a publishing subsidiary, Amazon Publishing, was established.

In 2010, Quidsi (Diapers.com) was acquired for $545 million.

On October 18, 2011, Amazon.com announced a partnership with DC Comics. Under the agreement, Amazon will get exclusive rights to the electronic versions of the most popular comics, including Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, The Sandman and Watchmen. The new partnership involves Amazon's main competitor, Barnes & Noble, being forced to remove all these electronic versions of comics from the shelves of its online store. Now it will be possible to buy comics only through the Kindle Fire tablet, launched by Amazon three days earlier.

In 2011, the company Amazon.com had 30,000 employees.

In 2012, the corporation bought Kiva Systems (now Amazon Robotics), a manufacturer of warehouse robots designed to move goods automatically. According to Wall Street analysts, the introduction of robots to automate warehouse operations will allow Amazon to reduce the cost of preparing orders by 40%.

Since April 2013, a subsidiary of Amazon Studios has entered the streaming media market, which is engaged in the production of feature television films and series.

On October 9, 2014, plans were announced to open the first-ever brick-and-mortar store in Manhattan, New York City. A little later, another store was reported, this time in San Francisco.

In 2015, Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the U.S. by market capitalization

On April 5, 2016, the company filed a patent application for a storage and delivery system that uses airships and drones. On December 7, 2016, Bezos stated that the firm had made the first delivery of goods to a customer using a drone.

At the end of 2016, the company had 180,000 employees.

In 2017, the supermarket chain Whole Foods Market was bought for $14 billion. On January 22, 2018, the company opened the world's first automated supermarket, Amazon Go. There are no cashiers in the store. All you need to buy a product is to download the app, generate a QR code, attach it to the turnstiles, take the products you need, and leave the store.

In the second quarter of 2018, Amazon increased its net profit by almost 13 times compared to the same period in 2017, exceeding $2 billion for the first time. On September 4, 2018, the company's capitalization exceeded $1 trillion, making Amazon the second firm in history to go beyond this milestone (after Apple).

In 2019, the company launched Fulfillment by Amazon Donations, a charity program for independent sellers. Under the program, unsold or returned goods will be donated through charities to those in need.

On February 2, 2021, Amazon announced that the company's founder, Jeff Bezos, would step down as CEO, retaining the position of chairman of the board of directors. According to the billionaire, he will continue to participate in important projects of the organization, but at the same time intends to devote more time to his charitable foundation Bezos Earth Fund, The Washington Post, the Amazon Day 1 Fund and the aerospace company Blue Origin. The new head of Amazon will be Andy Jesse, who previously headed Amazon Web Services.

In May 2021, Amazon announced in a press release that it had bought one of Hollywood's oldest studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), for $8.45 billion. Amazon noted that MGM would complement the work of Amazon Studios.

In December 2021, the Italian Authority for the Control of Market Competition (AGCM) imposed a fine of €1.128 billion on the American online retailer Amazon for abusing a dominant position in the market.

In March 2022, Amazon stopped sending goods to the Russian Federation due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

In November 2022, it became known that Amazon's market capitalization fell below $1 trillion for the first time since April 2020. After the publication of weak financial statements, as well as unimpressive forecasts for the rest of 2022, investors began to sell the company's shares en masse. Since the beginning of the year, the company's shares have fallen by 42%.

According to data from The New York Times published on November 15, 2022, Amazon plans to cut 10 thousand workers. The layoffs will affect workers involved in the development of new devices, retail and human resources.

At the end of 2022, the company suffered a net loss of $2.7 billion (compared to a profit of $33.4 billion a year earlier), mainly caused by the depreciation of investments in electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian.

In January 2024, a court in Moscow imposed a turnover fine of more than 200 million rubles on the company for the lack of representation in the Russian Federation.

Acitivities

The company's activities include the production of electronics and media content, the resale of goods and content from other manufacturers, the provision of retail space to third-party sellers, hosting, cloud computing and information storage, the delivery of goods, advertising services, and subscriptions to access paid content. Most of the trade is done online, but there are also physical stores in North America.

Divisions as of 2022:

North America: Sales through online stores and physical stores in the United States, Canada, and Mexico (including exports from warehouses in these countries) Revenue of $315.9 billion, operating loss of $2.8 billion.
International activities – online sales from warehouses outside North America; Revenue of $118.0 billion, operating loss of $7.7 billion.
Amazon Web Services: Providing its data center resources to commercial, government, and academic organizations. Revenue of $80.1 billion, operating profit of $22.8 billion.
By category of goods and services, revenue for 2022 was distributed as follows

sales through online stores — 220.0 billion,
Sales through physical stores — 19.0 billion,
services to third-party sellers — 117.7 billion,
Subscriptions — 35.2 billion,
advertising services — 37.7 billion;
Amazon Web Services — 80.1 billion
In terms of revenue share, the key countries for the company were the United States (356.1 billion), Germany (33.6 billion), the United Kingdom (30.1 billion), and Japan (24.4 billion).

In the Forbes Global 2000 list of the world's largest public companies for 2022, the company was ranked 6th

Working at Amazon

Amazon is notorious for its harsh working conditions.  The company employs a system of metrics, competition between employees, and negative selection, which causes employees to "either go beyond their capabilities or burn out at work."

Employees of the company also reported overtime on Black Friday, unsuitable warehouses, and surveillance of employees by the corporation.

A report by the Open Markets Institute on working conditions at Amazon claims that the firm's employees are under constant scrutiny by management, are discriminated against, and are at risk of being fired for unknown reasons. In particular, it is noted that Amazon installs surveillance cameras in workplaces, regularly lays off employees who lag behind production standards, and does not take into account certain types of injuries at work.

In 2018, employees at a warehouse in Staffordshire reported that workers were unable to go to the toilet and were urinating bottles at the workplace for fear that Amazon's automated penalty system would issue a fine to the worker. In 2021, the company's management admitted the fact that the company's drivers did not have time to go to the toilet and promised to solve the problem. The existence of such a problem in the company's warehouses is denied.

Amazon is known for its anti-union policies. For example, before the vote to form a union at a warehouse in the town of Bessemer, workers from the warehouse claimed that the company's management was interfering with the vote. For example, warehouse management began hanging anti-union posters in warehouse restrooms, conducted mandatory anti-union trainings, and sent messages denouncing unions through corporate apps and on phones.

The first successful attempt to form a union took place at the JFK8 warehouse in New York City. After the successful vote, Amazon decided to challenge the results, claiming that trade unionists had been distributing marijuana and threatening migrant workers with disbenefits in order to get workers' votes.