Evaluation of Corporate Performance

Amazon is a Fortune 500 e-commerce company based in Seattle, WA. It is one of the top companies that sells the most goods over the internet.

Amazon is a giant online marketplace offering millions of products from home and garden, health and beauty, all the way to automotive and industrial; pretty much anything you want or need can be found. Amazon also offers many of their own products such as their Dash Buttons, Kindle E-readers, Fire Tablets, and Fire TV.

They offer products are their website that are available in traditional retail outlets, but they are able to offer products at competitive prices. The majority of the products that Amazon.com sells are products that are available in stores. They sell brand name merchandise that people are already familiar with. So people come to Amazon.com, and they buy a product that they have already seen in stores. It is easier to sell a product online on a site like Amazon.com when they offer brands that consumers already are familiar with. Amazon.com has built a brand name that customers can trust.

Amazons primary industry is electronic commerce. At its core Amazon is an electronic commerce retailer. But over the years the brand has developed into something grander. Originally the company started out as an online bookstore but now has diversified its inventory to include dvds, software, video games, electronics, furniture, apparel, food, toys, and jewelry. Amazon has also become a producer of their own brand of consumer electronics, most notably their line of Kindle e-book readers, Fire Tablets, Fire TV, Fire phone, and is now a leading provider of cloud computing services. Now Amazon

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

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.

Since it founded in 1995 Amazon.com has become one of the world’s largest online retailers. Even during a period when most .com companies were falling apart Amazon.com managed to stay a cut above and survive successfully. Amazon.com is currently the 11th most searched site in the world (Amazon.com, 2015). Amazon business is built around cost leadership ensuring that they maintain an ability to sell bestselling books at a reduced rate of 30 to 40 percent off what other retailers are selling. Over the years Amazon.com has moved from selling strictly books to many unrelated items such as kitchen appliances, games, DVDs and even herbal supplements.

Amazon was originally incorporated in Washington in 1994 and later reincorporated in the state of Delaware in 1996. Amazon.com (Amazon), like Overstock is an online retailer that sells all sorts of different products and merchandise on its website. According to Mergent Online, the products on Amazon’s website “primarily include merchandise and content purchased for resale from vendors and those provided by party sellers, and it also manufactures and sells the Kindle e-reader” and they also provide “services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), fulfillment, miscellaneous marketing and promotional agreements, such as online advertising and co-branded credit cards. Amazon consists of two separate business segments, North America and International. North America consists of “amounts earned from retail sales of consumer products (including from sellers) and subscriptions through North America-focused websites such as www.amazon.com and www.amazon.ca and include amounts earned from AWS” and includes the export sales from the above mentioned websites (Mergent Online, 2011). The International business segment consists of “amounts earned from retail sales of consumer products (including from sellers) and subscriptions

Since its incorporation in 1994, Amazon’s business model had expanded from offering a simple internet marketplace for books to providing web services to online retailers, storage solutions and a dramatically expanded product line. Nevertheless, despite massive sales the company failed to produce a profit for shareholders and Amazon was on the brink of bankruptcy at the beginning of 2001. If I were a shareholder who received the company’s 2000 annual report, I would have strongly agreed with CEO Jeff Bezos that the company must achieve profitability by year-end 2001. I would recommend that the company accomplish this by cutting costs related to fulfillment and inventory and by increasing revenue by capitalizing on the previous year’s investments in infrastructure.

Today Amazon.com operates in 7 countries, which are covering the regions Americas, Europe as well as Asia. (see image on the right) In 2010 the share of sales

When Amazon first started, it began as a website for only books and as the internet began to expand so did the products that Amazon selling and shipping. Over the course of the last 21 years, Amazon has grown and sells a vast variety of products and has several

Another important factor for the company's adjustment was the "diluted earnings per share made prior to the cumulative effect of change in accounting principles" (p.25). The year 2000's per share earnings were at a loss of $4.02 whereas in 2004, it was at a gain of $1.39. Over the span of 4 years, Amazon.com has seen significant growth in its company because of well they responded to internal and external changes and it shows in their overall numbers.

Amazon is a multinational consumer electronics company and the largest Internet Company in the United States as of November 2014. The company also sells a great deal of other consumer goods. Amazon operates in three general segments: media, electronics and other merchandise. In the media segment, Amazon competes with auction site eBay, media game-changer Netflix, Time Warner Cable, Apple, with iTunes; Google with its Play Store and media producer Liberty Interactive.

Amazon has its hands in numerous business realms. They offer seven main areas of products and services according to their 2015 annual report. They participate in retail ranging from business to consumer, business to business, consumer to business, and consumer to consumer exchange of products throughout their many channels of commerce offered via Amazon.com, Amazon Auctions, and the Amazon Affiliate program which allows for partners to have pages on Amazon that they can earn a moderate

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.