Invention is in our DNA and technology is the fundamental tool we wield to evolve and improve every aspect of the experience we provide our customers - Jeff Bezos, 2010 Shareholder letter.
Founded in 1994 and headquartered in Seattle, Washington, Amazon.com employs approximately 37,900 worldwide with more than $34.20 billion in revenue in 2010, nearly half of which is generated outside the US, and is growing fast (net sales in 2010 grew 40% compared with 2009). The company completed its initial public offering in May 1997 and is traded on the NASDAQ under AMZN. Their mission is "to be Earth's most customer-centric company where people can find and discover anything they want to buy online". Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as books, movies, music & games, digital downloads, electronics & computers, home & garden, toys, kids & baby, grocery, apparel, shoes & jewelry, health & beauty, sports & outdoor, tools, auto & industrial.
Amazon.com has more than 137 million active customer accounts and more than 2 million active seller accounts. In 2010, Interbrand ranked Amazon.com #36 in their annual ranking of the world's most valuable brands.
Amazon has teams across the world working on behalf of its customers, including Fulfillment Centers, which provide customers with fast, reliable shipping directly from Amazon's retail websites, and Customer Service Centers, which provide 24/7 support. In addition, Amazon's technology teams are located in Seattle and in International Development Centers designed to tap the world's best technical talent.
Technological innovation drives the growth of Amazon.com to offer customers more types of products, more conveniently and at even lower prices. Since 1995, Amazon.com has significantly expanded its product selection, international retail websites, and worldwide network of fulfillment and customer service centers. Today, Amazon.com offers everything from toys and video games to MP3 downloads and Amazon Kindle. Amazon sold millions of third-generation Kindle devices with the new advanced paper-like Pearl e-ink display in the fourth quarter of 2010, and the third-generation Kindle eclipsed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as the bestselling product in Amazon's history.
In 2000, Amazon.com began to offer its best-of-breed e-commerce platform to other retailers and to individual sellers. Today, hundreds of thousands of world-class retail brands and individual sellers increase their sales and reach new customers by leveraging the power of the Amazon.com e-commerce platform. Partners such as Benefit Cosmetics, bebe and Sears.ca work with Amazon Services to power their e-commerce offering from end-to-end, including technology services, merchandising, customer service, and order fulfillment. Other branded merchants such as Macy's and Lands' End leverage Amazon.com as an incremental sales channel for their new merchandise. Smaller sellers participate in Amazon where they offer new, used and collectible selections at fixed prices to Amazon customers around the world.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) (www.amazon.com/aws) provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront.
Amazon's evolution from Web site to e-commerce partner to development platform is driven by the spirit of innovation that is part of the company's DNA. The world's brightest technology minds come to Amazon.com to research and develop technology that improves the lives of shoppers and sellers around the world.