Amazon is today one of the great companies of the moment, and also in history. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, the company, which began as a bet to be an electronic book distributor, dominates today global e-commerce, being the largest digital and non-digital retailer in the world with the exception of China, and becoming increasingly powerful in its commitment to the cloud with Amazon Web Services.
Amazon has come a long way since its initial concept, creating a paradigm shift in e-commerce fifteen years ago with its Prime model, but also sweeping away competitors, whether local businesses or sellers within its platform from which on more than one occasion it has received complaints for having copied its most successful products.
But the company would be inseparable from Jeff Bezos, its founder and tycoon who stepped aside last year to hand over the baton to Andy Jassy.
Like all Big-Techs, Amazon today is a global, powerful company with its own agenda that, due to its condition, is beginning to be able to face the governments of certain states.
But to understand their magnitude, it is better to compare them with what they are measured against. Here we will put Amazon in front of a mirror to understand its true weight in terms of influence, economics and, also, how it is managed.
1 out of every 40 people in the world is a customer from Amazon: generates more money than Spain or Mexico
We could get lost in the huge figures of Amazon, but if there is one that stands out it is that of its Prime customers, those who pay for fast shipping and other extras such as access to Amazon Prime Video.
Recently, they surpassed the figure of 200 million subscribers to Amazon Prime worldwide. In other words, 1 in 40 people in the world is subscribed to the program. And that without discounting the half of the population that does not have internet access.
Taking this into account, Amazon would be a country by population the size of Brazil, and in terms of its economic returns, its market capitalization of 1.4 billion dollars is slightly higher than the Gross Domestic Product of Spain or Mexico.
Its founder has more wealth than many countries alone
With an estimated wealth of 150,000 million dollars at his peak shareholding and before his divorce, Jeff Bezos was considered in 2018 the richest person in history. So much so that he alone would already have more wealth than Hungary. In fact, his fortune at the time could exceed that of the 48 poorest countries on Earth combined .
Although Bezos has ceded his witness as CEO to Andy Jassy in an almost feudal way -in reality, as is usually done in most large companies- the truth is that despite its immense wealth, Amazon has more distributed its shareholding weight than others, such as for example Meta.
Bezos' fortune exceeds that of the 48 poorest countries on Earth combined
As for individual shareholders, Bezos is the company's largest shareholder, with 55.5 million shares representing 11.1% of those in circulation. Its current CEO, Andrew Jassy owns 94,797 shares of the company, or 0.02% of all outstanding shares. Jassy was previously the CEO of Amazon Web Services, before becoming CEO of the entire company on July 5, 2021. Third is Jeffrey Blackburn who owns 48,967 Amazon shares, accounting for 0.01% of the shares. outstanding shares. Blackburn has been Senior Vice President of Business Development at Amazon since 2006.
A million employees who are not always in the best situation
Amazon has become a workforce of its own with a million employees around the world. And as it has grown, problems have arisen.
One of the latest scandals spoke of employees urinating in bottles to get to everything, and the working conditions of subcontracted employees or the accusations of plagiarism of successful products through Amazon Basics only increase the sensation, practice and also theoretical, of being an open monopoly.
“Jeff Bezos and his group of techies simply did what white-collar crooks have always done: Raise, spend, and sometimes lose other people's money, dodge taxes, rip off vendors, and avoid unions,” Kim Moody writes in the collection of essays The cost of free shipping: Amazon in the global economy, a book that makes an apology against Amazon and its working conditions.
The conditions of the Prime system have not deepened this, with a millimetric logistics but that requires a lot of work. Packages arriving at a drop-off center must be delivered the same day. Many are 'cross-docked', a model that Amazon borrowed from Walmart, in which “goods go in one door and go out another without being stored,” as Moody explains in the book.
For now, Amazon seems far from having any kind of competitor, but rather having managed to become a staple for many consumers. Perhaps only the investigations that are open in the United States and to a lesser extent in Europe can put the brakes on a definitely virtuous system in sales, but which has its clearly obscure points.
