Amazon have just published their latest annual report and on first reading here are some initial things that I thought were quite interesting from a marketing/e-commerce numbers perspective;

1 – There are more than 100,000,000 Amazon Prime users globally – which at UK prices I work out is worth some £7.9 BILLION POUNDS A YEAR in subscription fees alone

“– 13 years post-launch, we have exceeded 100 million paid Prime members globally. In 2017 Amazon shipped more than five billion items with Prime worldwide, and more new members joined Prime than in any previous year”

2 – Amazon Web Services ‘AWS’, which provides hosting services for Amazon and other web companies is a $20 BILLION dollars revenue a year business and makes them a LOT of money

“Amazon Web Services, a $20 billion revenue run rate business, accelerate its already healthy growth. AWS has also accelerated its pace of innovation – especially in new areas such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and serverless computing.”

3 – More than 50% of all units sold on Amazon globally were from third-party sellers making use of Amazon Marketplace

“In 2017, for the first time in our history, more than half of the units sold on Amazon worldwide were from our third-party sellers, including small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Over 300,000 U.S.-based SMBs started selling on Amazon in 2017, and Fulfillment by Amazon shipped billions of items for SMBs worldwide.”

4 – There are more than 4,000 smart home devices that can be controlled by Alexa

“We’re seeing extremely strong adoption by other companies and developers that want to create their own experiences with Alexa. There are now more than 30,000 skills for Alexa from outside developers, and customers can control more than 4,000 smart home devices from 1,200 unique brands with Alexa.”

5- There were more subscribers to Amazon Prime in India in the first year than any other previous market achieved previously

“Amazon.in is the fastest growing marketplace in India, and the most visited site on both desktop and mobile, according to comScore and SimilarWeb. The Amazon.in mobile shopping app was also the most downloaded shopping app in India in 2017, according to App Annie. Prime added more members in India in its first year than any previous geography in Amazon’s history”

6 – More than 1,000 independent authors got more that $100,000 in royalties in 2017 through Kindle Direct Publishing

7 – More than 140,000 SMBs surpassed $100,000 in Sales on Amazon in 2017

8 – Amazon employees over 560,000 people worldwide, but they claim credit for a lot more

“In addition to these direct hires, we estimate that Amazon Marketplace has created 900,000 more jobs worldwide, and that Amazon’s investments have created an additional 260,000 jobs in areas like construction, logistics, and other professional services.”

10 – Amazon doesn’t do PowerPoint! instead they have 6 page ‘narratively structured memos’ which they read silently at the beginning of each meeting.

“We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.” Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.”

Now the last one is fascinating – just imagine implementing that rule in your workplace!! I work at a marketing agency and there can’t be many meetings that don’t involve at least one PowerPoint presentation of varying quality.

Take a look at Amazon’s 2017 Annual Report for the full details – these were just the bits that jumped out at me on first reading. Anyone spot any more worth discussing?

#amazon #ecommerce #powerpoint #aws

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