Journey remains Unstoppable, Still have fears in Mind: AMAZON

A company who has conceptualised from a garage , he knows the difficulty and bottle-necks of business from the root always sees to the bottom line of business, whatever the high it reaches, that we can see from Jeff Bezos. His wife MacKenzie was there for the whole journey.

The family also adheres to a fairly normal routine. The Bezo family reportedly starts off the day with a healthy breakfast . To spend more time with the family, Jeff never schedules early morning meetings at Amazon, as per the report.

Jeff Bezos started his journey along with few employees on 5th July 1994 ,where he used to pack books and took them to the post office themselves in those days. Even after the company had built warehouses to store inventory, making it a business with real revenue and real assets, plenty of investors wrote Amazon off as another dot-com fever dream, destined to be gobbled up or wiped out by Borders and Barnes & Noble.

Gradually, Amazon has moved in adding different products such as media, and service. It will account for nearly half of online retail sales in 2018, according to eMarketer, and is laying the groundwork for a physical retail business - equipped with labor-saving technologies like cashier-free checkout that has legacy grocery and convenience chains scrambling to catch up. Here are some key events in Amazon's rapid evolution.

Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie open an online bookstore in Seattle. Bezos finances the company with $10,000 from his own pocket. He and the small staff spend their early days working in his garage on desks made out of doors purchased from Home Depot.

Amazon goes public at $18 per share, giving it a valuation of $300 million. In its filing, the company warns investors that it expects to report "substantial operating losses for the foreseeable future," due to heavy investments in technology and marketing as it seeks to beat back tough competition from bookselling giant Barnes & Noble.
 

As demand increases, Amazon opens a second distribution center in New Castle, Delaware, in order to serve customers on the East Coast. The 200,000-square foot facility is the beginning of a network that will eventually touch almost every state in the nation.

In 1998 Amazon expands into music by expanding its offerings and starts selling CDs and DVDs. The music section launched with 125,000 titles - far more than the average physical music store - and allowed shoppers to listen to song clips as well as view recommendations matched to their mood and Jeff Bezos had ventured into 3rd party seller marketplace and at that time the share price was $79.94, September 30 as per CNN.
 

Most of the organisation had faced the bubble burst of the dot-com and Amazon also took the hit and the stock peaked at nearly $106 a share at the end of 1999 and the company had to lay off 15% of its workforce before the stock price recovered and the Time Magazine names Bezos Person of the Year, dubbing him "the king of cybercommerce." At age 35, Bezos is the fourth-youngest recipient of the distinction and Amazon had added a new segment into its umbrella that is selling clothing and partnered with several major clothing companies to offer 400 apparel brands in its online store. Amazon has now moved far beyond books, with offerings that include electronics, toys, kitchenware, and even magazine subscriptions and to make everything streamlined, again launched Amazon Web services.

The company starts to generate extra income by licensing its platform to other e-commerce sites, like Borders.com and Target.com. Fifteen years later, Amazon Web Services dominates cloud hosting and is one of the company's biggest revenue drivers and entered China.

At that time, Amazon pays $75 million to buy Joyo, the largest online seller of books and electronics in the growing Chinese market. But the division — renamed Amazon China — faced stiff competition. As of 2018, it only had 0.7% of online sales, trailing far behind Alibaba's 58.2%, according to eMarketer.

During an earnings call, Bezos announces a $79-a-year loyalty program that includes free two-day shipping on any order. Now, with more than 100 million members worldwide, Prime is considered one of Amazon's most valuable assets and with that Kindle goes on sale.

Just as the holiday shopping season is about kick into full gear, Amazon unveils its Kindle. The electronic reading device enables users to wirelessly download books, magazines and newspaper articles among other content. Starting price: $399.

Now the real game starts and Amazon announces a new headquarters in Seattle on December 21 and that has transformed Seattle's real estate market, Amazon makes a deal with the city and a developer to consolidate its scattered workforce into 1.6 million square feet in a gritty industrial neighborhood north of downtown.

The city raises height limits to accommodate larger buildings. The company's new headquarters will eventually house 40,000 employees in more than 8 million square feet and then Amazon acquires audiobooks company Audible and pays
$300 million for Audible, which comes with a library of 80,000 programs in the United States and Europe and has been growing rapidly with the rise of smartphones and streaming-enabled car stereo systems and to complement the growth trajectory then acquires the show shopping site Zappos in an all-stock deal worth nearly $900 million and then continued acquiring the companies and bought a company into robotics, Kiva Systems, a maker of warehouse robots, for $775 million.

The deal allows Amazon to amp up automation at its fulfillment centers, delivering products faster and with less need for human staff and subsequently Jeff Bezos announces intention to buy The Washington Post for $250 million of his own money for the financially struggling Washington Post.

As the business is in the hand of Jeff, tuned to profitable and also influences in a big way.

Amazon begins delivering packages through the US Postal Service seven days a week in Los Angeles and New York and then unveils its first (and last) smartphone and the share price has touched $334.38 and acquires the social video game streaming site Twitch Interactive, a just three year old video game streaming company for $970 million and the share price got further increased and this has helped the game production division, it helps pull the global gaming community towards its cloud platform, Amazon Web Services.

Amazon opens its first physical bookstore in Seattle. After unveiling its first smart speaker in 2014 to select customers, Amazon puts the Echo in 3,000 stores nationwide just in time for the holiday season. The Echo is the platform for Alexa, Amazon's virtual personal assistant and then acquires Whole Foods.
 

Now Amazon has announced on searching for a second headquarters and chooses Canada to host its second headquarters and touched a $1 trillion market cap.

Amazon finally chooses New York's Long Island City and Virginia's Arlington to split the duties as its HQ2, with that Amazon marks 25 years in business.

After a person sees all success, then an ultimate threat comes to it’s mind and for this, he has to give divorce to his wife and business partner and Jeff Bezos pays out $38bn in divorce settlement and touches another record, Ex-wife MacKenzie Bezos will become world’s fourth-richest woman. The most interesting thing is it sets the stage for the transfer of some 19.7 million shares of Amazon.com Inc. to MacKenzie’s name. The Bezoses announced the split in January.

The announcement made by Jeff on March 11 th 2019 on, shocked Amazon investors to the core with this dire statement:

“I predict one day, Amazon will fail.”

In an interview, Bezos explained that he believes “Amazon will be disrupted one day” and eventually “will go bankrupt.” “In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.”

Most interesting is, Bezos has been dumping roughly $1 billion worth of Amazon stock every year.

That 4% holding is valued at $38.3 billion, enough to place her 22nd on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the world’s 500 richest people. Her former husband, the founder and chief executive officer of the world’s largest online retailer and web-services company, retains a 12% stake worth $114.8 billion and remains the world’s wealthiest person.

Jeff Bezos, 55, remains the world’s richest person, with a 12% Amazon stake worth $112 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’ll retain other assets, including the Washington Post and space-exploration company Blue Origin, MacKenzie Bezos, 49, said in an April tweet.

Touching a quarter century mark, Amazon had 647,500 employees and accounts for nearly half of online retail in the United States. Amazon has come under fire from civil rights groups, presidential candidates, antitrust regulators and its own employees on issues ranging from facial recognition technology to its light federal income tax bill. Through it all, the company has maintained its intense focus on the customer as the first policy.