Amazon.com, Inc was primarily founded on July 5, 1994, by Jeff Bezos, a former Wall Street Hedge Fund Executive. The company was incorporated In Washington, D.C. originally as ‘Cadabra’, but it was later changed to Amazon.com, Inc.
Initially, the company started as an online retail store for books, today Amazon.com, Inc grew to be an American multinational technology company that focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence and is also one of the world’s most valuable brands.
Amazon issued its initial public offering of capital stock on May 19, 1997, at $18 per share trading under the NASDAQ stock exchange symbol AMZN.
When Amazon opened as an online bookseller, it was able to sell to 50 states and 45 countries earning at least 20,000 per week in its early two months. “Douglas Hofstadler’s Fluid concepts and creative analyses: computer models of the fundamental mechanisms of thought was the first book sold on Amazon in 1999.
Amazon’s rapid and massive growth was and it’s still mind-blowing. It reached 18,000 customer accounts by December 1996, and in 1998, Amazon started expanding the list of products it offered while growing its revenue to $610 million. And in 1999 Bezos gained an award from the Times Magazine, as the person of the year due to the company’s success in popularizing online shopping.
Fun Fact
Amazon was chosen by Bezos primarily chiefly because it began with the first letter ‘A’ and because of its association with the vast South American River. I’m addition, ‘A’ was chosen because it would probably be at the top of an alphabetized list.
While Amazon was popularly known starting as a bookseller, Bezos claimed that Amazon.com was not merely a retailer but a technology company that simplifies online transactions for consumers.
Expansions
The company keeps recording success upon success from the 200s till present. In October 20003 Amazon launches A9.com, a subsidiary of Amazon.com. Amazon launches Amazon mechanical trunk, an application programming interface(API).
In 2007 Amazon began to sell its own kindle e-readers and also offered it for people to purchase them as ebooks, it gave people the privilege to write and publish books. By 2010, more people but e-books than physical books from Amazon.
The company later opened its first physical retail store in November 2015. The bookstore is known as Amazon Books and it is situated in Seattle, in the university village shopping center, and a whole lot of other products and acquisitions hereafter.
As of 2017, Amazon already had over 566,000 employees worldwide.
Amazon currently has private label brands like Presto, 206 collective, Apparel, Food and Beverage, Mama bear, and others operating under them.
The company also acquired a great many companies such as Alexa, Goodreads, whole foods, and recently iRobots, and a lot more.
Amazon generated $386 billion in US retail e-commerce sales in the year 2020.
Amazon is now the fourth biggest company in the world, with a market cap of $1.696 trillion.
Source: Wikipedia
