CUEGIS ESSAY ON AMAZON

C- Change

U- Culture

E- Ethics

G- Globalization

I-Innovation

S-Strategies

About the company:

Amazon is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company based in Seattle,
Washington, that was founded by Jeff Bezos on July 5 1994. The tech giant is the largest internet
retailer in the world as measured by market capitalisation and revenue, and second largest after Jack
Ma’s Alibaba Group in terms of total sales. The amazon.com website started as an online bookstore
and later diversified to sell video downloads, MP3 downloads, audiobook downloads, video games ,
electronics, apparel, furtniture, food, toys, etc. Now, the company also produces consumer
electronics like, Kindles, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Fire TV, and Fire Tablets. Amazon is also the world’s
largest provider of cloud infrastructure services like ‘IaaS’ and ‘PaaS’. Amazon also sells affordable
low end products under it’s in house brand, Amazon Basics

A few financial statistics of the company:

In 2015, Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States by market
capitalisation. Amazon is the second most valuable public company in the world behind only the
tech giants, apple. It is the largest Internet company by revenue in the world, and after Walmart the
second largest employer in the US. Last year, Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market for $13.4
billion, which vastly increased Amazon’s presence as a brick-and-mortar retailer. This acquisition was
interpreted by some as a direct attempt to challenge Walmart’s traditional retail stores. In 2018, Jeff
Bezos released in Amazon’s shareholder letter, the staggering number of Amazon Prime subscribers,
which was approximately 100,000,000 users! On September 4th 2018 Amazon became the second
ever to reach a $1 trillion dollar valuation , second only to Apple.

Amazon’s net revenue for 2017 added up to approximately $178 billion.

Amazom’s market share is 41%

Amazon has roughly 310 million users every single day

CHANGES:

From ordinary bookstore to the greatest superstore

Jeff Bezos wanted to name his company after a magical phrase “Cadabra” . However, his lawyer at
the time, Todd Tarbert suggested that it sounded too familiar to other companies. Bezos then
suggested the name, ‘ relentless.com’ however, that did not catch up. But, if you search
‘relentless.com’ in the internet today, you will be directed to amazon.com, as a homage to the name
that never made the cut. Eventually, Bezos decided on the name Amazon because he liked that his
company would be named after the largest river in the world, hence the river in the original logo.

Other vital aesthetic changes to Amazon, include the several changes and updates to it’s website
layout, and the company’s logo. As amazon provided plenty more services, it’s website had to
constantly change to house everything amazon provides. As time passed, simplistic designs started
to be considered modern, so Amazon updated it’s website to look as simple as possible, while
providing plenty of information at the same time, similar to how it looks like today. The logo follows
the simplistic design language, and has become more and more minimilastic as the company grew.
The website and logo is extremely important to Amazon. The website is the only way customers are
able to access amazon’s services and products. The logo is important as customers usually identify
and associate a company with it’s logo.

The company that started off in Bezos’ garage in Washington, gradually grew, to house 11
employees in a small warehouse, to eventually employing millions of employees worldwide in
several offices today. A company that was initially just selling books, sought to sell as many goods as
possible when the opportunity arose, which ended up with Amazon selling every single product from
A-Z today, just as the curved arrow in the logo suggests.

Culture and Working Environment in Amazon:

Amazon does not have the best reputation when it comes to human resource management as it a
very male dominated business and has been known to be very stiff when it comes to performance.

Recently, Amazon has been very invested in changing it’s attitude and starting to concentrate on
applying a training programme called pivot that ensures to keep employees happy, and
simultaeneously ensure they work very efficiently.

On the other hand, Amazon is very organised and makes sure to award their employees who
overperform and give deserving consequences to those who are underperforming.

So, it is safe to say it is extremely challenging to work at Amazon, and the working environment is
healthy with constant motivation and competition .

Ethics:

Many people have called Amazon evil or unethical, for killing smaller businesses, but other than
these allegations, Amazon follows several ethics, with all of them putting the customer first and
giving them the benefit of the doubt

Amazon has a strong relationship with it’s customers, with several technicians readily available to
cater to the customer’s needs. Amazon mostly gives the customer the benefit of the doubt, by
providing an option to return the product, and many warranty options available.

Globalisation:

Amazon is now one of the most reknowned brand throughout the world. Marketing that targets the
local audience has played a vital role in Amazon’s International Growth. It’s cultural awareness of
the particular country contributed to its popularity and growth worldwide. However, in 2014, 37% of
Amazon’s sales came from international markets, but this percentage has not received a big increase
in quite some time. In the same year, Amazon’s North American sales increased by 22%, while
international sales only increased 3%. CFO of Amazon, Tom Szkutak could not come up with a
definitive explanation as to why the international markets are not performing as well as the
American markets. However, he provided the vital statistic that stated internationally, Amazon’s unit
growth rates were far more better than it’s revenue growth rates. This could be due to taxes, tariffs
or lower exchange rates. Amazon’s focus of adding infrastructure and fulfilment capacity overseas
contributes a lot to Amazon’s costs, which could be a potential reason for revenue growth rates to
be comparatively low.

Innovation:

Since starting out as an online bookseller in 1998, Amazon.com has expanded year on year,
and it now offers customers over 100 million products spread over 30 categories, ranging
from health and beauty to electronics. The company’s phenomenal growth is due to its
technological innovation.
Amazon ensured that it did not stick to just being an online shopping website. It further expanded to
produce goods under its own name, e.g kindle, alexa, fire series, etc. Most of the products sold
under the brand of amazon is a brand new, unique item, which was not widely available before,
Amazon’s innovation to bring its customers brand new products has played a massive role in making
the company more than just an online shopping website.

Strategy:

Amazon’s mission statement is as follows, “ Our vision is to be the earth’s most customer-centric
company, to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to
buy online.

Other than extensive marketing, and advertisements aimed at the locals, amazon follows a few core
values that have been the roots of the mammoth company that it is.

The core values are:

Customer Obsession

Ownership

Invent and simplify

Hire and develop the best

Insist on the highest standards

Think Big

Bias for action

Brand image is formed by what you do, not what you say

Embrace Failures

Earn Trust

Dive Deep