My Attitude To Amazon & Its Analysis

For this class, I will be covering Amazon as my company choice. There are a few reasons as to why I picked Amazon and it is mainly due to personal interest mixed with some business interest. I have an amazon account, used Amazon Prime and their baby registry and even at one time owned a Kindle (I prefer an actual book to hold so the appeal of the Kindle lost interest quick with me) so, I do enjoy Amazon. Personally, beyond what the financials show, I believe that Amazon is a great company and their expansion from just doing books out of Jeff Bezos’ garage says a lot about them. As far as business interest goes, I believe that Amazon makes a great case study for more than just business students, but for businesses to look at for ideas or in general. Lastly, there is more than sufficient information about Amazon to be able to complete a financial analysis.

Amazon sits in the ecommerce or online shopping industry. While Amazon may have started out providing books, it has evolved into so much more. Its products and services that it offers would include merchandise, offering content from vendors and third-party sellers, grocery, home, subscriptions, digital content, publishing, database offerings, retail of consumer products for the most part, manufactures and sells electronic devices (i.e. Kindle, Echo Dot, etc.), credit card, media content, memberships like Prime and so much more (Amazon.com INC Profile, 2018).

By expanding upon the products and services offered, they have expanded their Everyone around the world is the customer base and over time as Amazon has included more they widened their customer base as well to be even more inclusive and accessible. Forbes listed Amazon as number 119 out of 200 of growth champions, 59 for global 2000, 5 for innovative company and 16 for America’s largest public company (Global 2000: Growth Companies, 2018). Not only that, but Amazon has a market cap of 777.8 billion and 193.19 billion in sales (Global 2000: Growth Companies, 2018). As we can see Amazon is going after being as diverse as possible, growth, acquiring new departments and obtaining dominance in ecommerce.

While Amazon may be accessed by any user worldwide with internet, operating wise they started in Seattle, WA and has now expanded its operations into three segments of North America, International and Amazon Web Services (Amazon.com INC (AMZN.O), 2018). It is a company that is structured for global growth. Essentially, Amazon lays out its products and services to be user friendly. It has a functional structure in how it is organized; meaning, it “focuses on business functions as bases for determining the interactions among components of the organization” (Meyer, P., 2017). As far as the hierarchy system it may seem traditional, but there is an expectation of all the different departments work together while doing their part. Amazon does file using GAAP and is a publicly traded company. Additionally, since Amazon is involved in global operations, they must conform to global standards as well.