Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) is an American multinational
electronic commerce company with headquarters in Seattle,
Washington, United States.
It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for
the following countries: United States,
Canada, United
Kingdom, Germany,
France, Italy,
Spain, Japan,
and China. It
is also expected to launch its websites in Poland,
Netherlands, Sweden
and India. It also provides international shipping to certain countries for
some of its products.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994, and the site
went online in 1995. It is named after the Amazon River, one of the largest
rivers in the world. Amazon.com started as an online bookstore, but soon
diversified, selling DVDs, CDs, MP3 downloads, software, video games,
electronics, apparel, furniture, food, and toys.
Amazon.com, Inc.Amazon.com-Logo.svg
Type Public
Traded as NASDAQ:
AMZN
NASDAQ-100 Component
S&P 500 Component
Founded 1994
Founder(s) Jeff
Bezos
Headquarters Seattle,
Washington, U.S.
Area served USA,
UK, Japan,
Germany, Canada,
China, Italy,
France, Spain
Key people Jeff
Bezos
(Chairman, President & CEO)
Industry Online
shopping,
Cloud computing
Products A2Z
Development, A9.com, Alexa Internet, Amazon.com, Amazon Kindle, Amazon Studios,
Amazon Web Services, Audible.com, Endless.com, IMDb, LoveFilm, Zappos.com,
Woot, Junglee.com
Revenue increase
US$ 48 billion (2011)
Operating income increase
US$ 1.4 billion (2010)
Net income increase
US$ 1.2 billion (2010)
Total assets increase
US$ 19 billion (2010)
Total equity increase
US$ 7 billion (2010)
Employees 56,200
(2012)
Website Amazon.com
(original US site)
various national sites
Alexa rank increase
10 (February 2012)
Type of site E-commerce
Advertising Web
banners, Videos
Available in English,
Japanese, German, French, Italian, Chinese, Spanish
Launched 1995
History
Amazon was founded in 1995,spurred by what Bezos called
"regret minimization framework", his effort to fend off regret for
not staking a claim in the Internet gold rush.
The company began as an online bookstore.While the
largest brick-and-mortar bookstores and mail-order catalogs might offer 200,000
titles, an online bookstore could sell far more. Bezos wanted a name for his
company that began with "A" so that it would appear early in
alphabetic order. He began looking through the dictionary and settled on
"Amazon" because it was a place that was "exotic and
different" and it was the river he considered the biggest in the world, as
he hoped his company would be.Since 2000, Amazon's logotype is an arrow
leading from A to Z, representing customer satisfaction (as it forms a smile).
A goal was to have every product in the alphabet.
Amazon was incorporated in 1994, in the state of Washington.
In July 1995, the company began service and sold its first book on Amazon.com —
Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of
the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.[11] In 1996, it was reincorporated in Delaware.
Amazon issued its initial public offering of stock on May 15, 1997, trading under the NASDAQ stock
exchange symbol AMZN, at a price of US$18.00 per share ($1.50 after three stock
splits in the late 1990s).
Amazon's initial business plan was unusual. The company did
not expect a profit for four to five years. Its "slow" growth
provoked stockholder complaints that the company was not reaching profitability
fast enough. When the dot-com bubble burst, and many e-companies went out of
business, Amazon persevered, and finally turned its first profit in the fourth
quarter of 2001: $5 million or 1¢ per share, on revenues of more than $1
billion. The profit, although it was modest, served to demonstrate that the
business model could be profitable. In 1999, Time magazine named Bezos the
Person of the Year, recognizing the company's success in popularizing online
shopping.
Barnes and Noble filed a lawsuit on 12 May 1997, alleging that Amazon's claim to be
"the world's largest bookstore" was false. Barnes and Noble asserted,
"[It] isn't a bookstore at all. It's a book broker." The suit was
later settled out of court. Amazon continued to call itself "the world's
largest bookstore." Walmart subsequently filed suit on 16 October 1998, alleging that
Amazon had stolen trade secrets by hiring former Walmart executives. Although
this suit was settled out of court, it caused Amazon to implement internal
restrictions and reassignment of the former Walmart executives.
