Overview
Amazon.com, Inc., founded in 1994 and headquartered in Seattle, is a global business built around online and physical stores, third-party marketplace services, subscription offerings, consumer devices, digital media, advertising, and cloud computing through Amazon Web Services (AWS).[1][2][3][4][5] The company says its mission is to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company,” and it serves a broad set of customers that includes consumers, sellers, developers, enterprises, content creators, advertisers, and employees.[6][7]
Amazon organizes its operations into three reportable segments: North America, International, and AWS.[8] Its scale is supported by fulfillment networks in North America and international markets, physical stores, digital delivery capabilities, and customer service centers operated globally, and the company notes that its international activities are significant to its revenues and profits.[9][10] In 2024, Amazon generated $637.959 billion in net sales and employed approximately 1.556 million full-time and part-time workers at year-end, making it one of the world’s largest employers and commercial platforms.[11][12] [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]
Products & services
Amazon’s product portfolio spans physical goods, digital content, subscription bundles, and proprietary devices. Its stores sell a wide range of consumable and durable goods, and its online stores also include digital media content such as books, videos, games, music, and software.[13] Amazon-branded device lines include Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Fire TV streaming devices, Echo smart speakers, Ring and Blink home-security products, and eero Wi‑Fi systems.[3] Its Prime subscription combines fast, free shipping on tens of millions of items with streaming video, live sports, and other member benefits.[3] Amazon also develops and produces media content for its entertainment offerings.[3]
For merchants and advertisers, Amazon offers third-party seller services that include commissions, fulfillment and shipping fees, and other seller services tied to listing and delivering products through Amazon stores.[14] Its advertising products include sponsored ads, display advertising, and video advertising sold to sellers, vendors, publishers, authors, and others.[5] Beyond retail, Amazon has expanded into healthcare through One Medical, which it acquired to provide healthcare options for customers, and through Amazon Pharmacy, an online pharmacy offering prescription delivery, automatic refills, and 24/7 pharmacist access.[15][16] It is also developing a satellite network intended to provide global broadband service.[17]
AWS is Amazon’s cloud platform and offers on-demand compute, storage, database, analytics, and machine-learning services.[4] Named AI products include Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service for using and customizing large language models with customer data; Bedrock includes Guardrails, Knowledge Bases, Agents, and Fine-Tuning, and offers models from Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI, and Amazon’s Titan family.[18] Amazon SageMaker HyperPod is described as reducing foundation-model training time by up to 40%, while SageMaker Inference reduces deployment cost by 50% on average and latency by 20% on average.[19] AWS Trainium2 chips are described as delivering up to 4x faster machine-learning training for generative AI applications and 3x more memory capacity than first-generation Trainium chips.[20]
In 2024, Amazon’s reported net sales mix was 38.7% online stores, 24.5% third-party seller services, 16.9% AWS, 8.8% advertising services, 7.0% subscription services, and 3.3% physical stores, indicating that its revenue base is spread across product sales, merchant services, cloud services, advertising, and subscriptions.[21] [13][3][14][5][15][17][4][18][19][20][21][16]
Geographic presence
Amazon’s principal executive offices are in Seattle, Washington, and the company says it owns and leases corporate headquarters facilities in Washington’s Puget Sound region and Arlington, Virginia.[2][22][23][24] Amazon organizes its operations into three reportable geographic groupings: North America, International, and AWS; North America covers North America-focused online and physical stores, International covers internationally focused stores, and AWS is a global business.[25][26][27][28] In 2024, net sales were $387.5 billion in North America, $142.9 billion in International, and $107.6 billion in AWS, equivalent to about 60.7%, 22.4%, and 16.9% of consolidated net sales, respectively.[29][30]
Amazon attributes net sales to countries primarily based on country-focused online and physical stores or, for AWS, the selling entity.[31] On that basis, 2024 net sales were $438.0 billion in the United States, $40.9 billion in Germany, $37.9 billion in the United Kingdom, and $27.4 billion in Japan, with the rest of world contributing $93.8 billion; these amounts represented roughly 68.7%, 6.4%, 5.9%, 4.3%, and 14.7% of consolidated net sales.[32]
Amazon’s physical footprint is concentrated in North America but remains substantial internationally. As of December 31, 2024, it reported office space of 29,551 thousand leased square feet and 9,104 thousand owned square feet in North America, versus 23,771 thousand leased and 1,802 thousand owned internationally.[33][34] It also operated 618 physical stores in North America and 27 internationally.[35] For fulfillment, data centers, and other facilities, Amazon reported 448,168 thousand leased square feet and 36,869 thousand owned square feet in North America, compared with 176,287 thousand leased and 18,958 thousand owned internationally.[33][34] The company employed approximately 1,556,000 full-time and part-time employees at year-end 2024, but it did not provide a geographic employee split in the cited disclosure.[36] [2][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]
Business segments
Amazon reports three operating and reportable segments: North America, International, and AWS. North America primarily covers retail sales of consumer products, including sales by third-party sellers, plus advertising and subscription services through North America-focused online and physical stores; it also includes export sales from those online stores. International has a similar consumer-retail, advertising, and subscription focus through internationally focused online stores, with a defined export scope separate from North America. AWS consists of global sales of compute, storage, database, and other technology services for start-ups, enterprises, government agencies, and academic institutions.[8][37][38][39]
By 2024 net sales, North America was the largest segment at about 61% of revenue, International contributed about 22%, and AWS contributed about 17%.[30] As a separate sales disaggregation view rather than a segment structure, Amazon also breaks consolidated net sales into Online stores (about 39%), Physical stores (about 3%), Third-party seller services (about 24%), Advertising services (about 9%), Subscription services (about 7%), AWS (about 17%), and Other (about 1%).[21][13][14][40][41][42][31] [8][37][38][39][30][21][13][14][40][41][42][31]
Company history
Amazon.com was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos.[1] The company began as an online bookseller, launching its website in 1995.[43] It moved into the public markets in 1997, when Amazon announced its initial public offering, marking an early milestone in its expansion beyond its startup phase.[44]
Over the following decade, Amazon broadened its business model and technology platform. It launched Amazon Marketplace in 2000, adding a major third-party seller business to its retail operations.[45] In 2005 it introduced Amazon Prime, and in 2006 it launched Amazon Web Services, which became a major cloud computing business.[46][47] Amazon followed with the introduction of the Kindle e-reader in 2007, extending the company into digital devices and content.[48]
In 2017, Amazon agreed to acquire Whole Foods Market, a significant move into physical grocery retail.[49] In 2021, Jeff Bezos transitioned from chief executive officer to executive chair, and Andy Jassy became CEO, marking a major leadership change after Bezos had led the company since its founding.[50] [1][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50]
Sources
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