Audit Report - Amazon

Amazon’s traditional low margins were a model that has succeeded for the company in the past. However, it is unclear whether the revenue streams from the Kindle Fire would be sufficient to meet the considerable costs (Exhibit 1). At $199 the Kindle Fire was selling at cost as the components and labor were slated to be near $200. It was questionable whether it was possible for Amazon to offer the Kindle Fire for $149, $99 or even free, in return for customers signing up for an enhanced version of its Amazon Prime subscription service. A clear pricing strategy is crucial to maximize profitability and undercut the tablets currently on the market.

It can be served as a competitive advantage, which attracts more customers shifting from Amazon’s online retailer competitors into buying their products, thus increasing the market share.

How would you define Amazon’s industry? What difficulties do you encounter identifying primary competitors and key lines of business?

Best Buy is a multinational retailer of consumer electronics, computing and mobile phone products, entertainment products, appliances, and related services. The company operates retail stores and call centers and conducts online retail operations under a variety of brand names such as Best Buy, Best Buy Mobile, The Carphone Warehouse, Five Star, Future Shop, Geek Squad, Magnolia Audio Video, Pacific Sales, and The Phone House (Bestbuy.com, 4). The domestic segment consists of all operations within the United States, while the international segment includes all operations in Canada, Europe, Mexico, and China. The Best Buy 's success is contingent on the market 's demand for electronics. The company 's strategy is to provide good customer service combined with lower prices (news.cnet.com). Best Buy 's success is directly related to economic conditions, the cost of goods, and other things like fuel prices. The company 's strategy depends upon the ability to offer customers a broad selection of name-brand products; therefore, leading its success to depend upon satisfactory supplier relationships (Bestbuy.com, 8). Best Buy, as it is included in the retail segment, is a seasonal store. Their stronger quarter is the fourth quarter, which they can contribute to the holiday season for their success.

Although it is the most established because of its long history and early start, competitors such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, AutoZone Inc., eBay Inc., Rakutenchi Inc., Netflix Inc., Jet.Com, Wal-Mart and Time Warner Cable among others exist (Yahoo Finance, 2015). Notably, apart from Jet.com, Amazon’s competitors are segmented according to products and services offered; for instance, Wal-Mart stores Inc. offers competition in general merchandise and electronics segment while eBay, Time Warner Cable and Apple offers competition in the media segment. Among the competitors, Apple Inc. and Google Inc. have the highest market capitalization; however, the Amazon’s dwarfs all other competitors. Amazon has a high market capitalization at $254.82 billion (Nassauer, 2015). The table below shows Amazon’s major competitors based on their market capitalization and 52-week share price range

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Amazon.com, Inc., on May 28, 1996, started offering a range of products and services through on-line webpages. This new company began to offer products including merchandise and content that was purchased for resale from multiple vendors and sellers ranging from lots of third-party ways. The Amazon.com business has three different segments within its operating environment: Amazon Web Services, North America, and International make up the operating areas. The North American area for Amazon has segments that focus on the sales from retailers of consumer items or product from sellers through its website Amazon.com.

Amazon.com is a customer centric company. They put more effort in improving their system to make the experience of customer more comfortable so that he keeps on returning to the website. Jeffery Bezos who is the founder of the Amazon.com started this company after seeing the use of internet increasing rapidly.

Besides that, another part of Amazon as a seller model includes the Syndicated Stores program, which allows third-party

The next segment of this look at the financial condition of Amazon.com involves a horizontal and vertical analysis of Amazon’s income statement and balance sheet. Since both of these statements involve many segments, we will address key and noteworthy figures to gain a broad understanding of Amazon’s progress in the last three years.

Founded in 1977, American Eagle Outfitters (NYSE: AEO) is a retailer that designs and develops fashionable girls’ and boys’ apparel and accessories. The company’s target audience is boys and girls between the ages of 15 and 25 years old. The target audience seeks trendy and fashionable apparel product that meets a high standard of quality at an affordable price point. As of the most recent fiscal year, ended January 30, 2010, American Eagle held 1,103 retail stores in total, operating under the “American Eagle”, “Aerie”, and “Martin+Osa” brand names respectively. In addition to the retail stores,

The purpose of this essay is to perform financial statement analysis on Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN ). We start with an introduction of Amazon and its industry. We then evaluate the company’s financial position, liquidity, operating capability and financial flexibility using different ratios. To evaluate the financial performance of Amazon.com, Inc we disclose recurring NICO and do full ROE disaggregation.

Headquartered in Settle, Washington DC, Amazon.com is a cloud computing electronic and commerce company (Amazon, 2016). The company is one of the largest internet based retailers both in the US and globally based on total sales and market capitalization. The company does a majority of its business through online retail websites throughout the United States and with more that ten countries throughout World. In 2015, Amazon overtook Wal-Mart to become the most valuable retailer by market capitalization.

This case analysis serves the purpose to provide an analytical framework to evaluate Amazon.com from an internal and external perspective, and to provide strategic direction based upon the internal and external evaluation. The case will begin with an introduction to Amazon.com.

The Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader which you can download readable and audible content into. The most innovative idea of Bezos about the Kindle was the use of the “E Ink” technology to reduce battery consumption and to provide a more legible display. The Amazon Kindle’s successors were the tablets Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD. Amazon priced the Kindle Fire with just $199 as a strategy to boost its revenue from content sales. Amazon’s latest example of diversification includes the launch of the Amazon Fire TV in order to compete with Apple TV and Chromecast. Bezos also entered the highly competitive smartphone industry by releasing the Fire Phone in 2014. An economic advantage diversification provides is economies of scope. Economies of scope refer to a reduction in unit cost based on the idea that the total cost of producing two different goods or services together is less than the total cost of producing them separately. Amazon makes use of the distribution side of economies of scope by shipping a wide range of goods together rather than separately. This gives Amazon the chance to negotiate more lucrative deals with freight companies. Geographic