Things to Know about Amazon - A FAANG Stock Member

About Amazon

Amazon.com, Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN) is a NASDAQ listed American international technology company, which is based in Seattle, Washington. The company is into e-commerce, digital streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence business. Amazon is amongst the top five technology companies in the world. It is one of the members of the FAANG stocks.

Amazon works on four principles:

• Customer obsession instead of focusing on its competitor.
• Passion for invention
• Commitment towards operational quality
• Long-term thinking

On 5 July 1994, the company was founded by Jeff Bezos in Bellevue, Washington as an online marketplace for books. Slowly the business expanded from selling books to selling other products like electronic items, software video games, apparel, food, groceries, kid’s items, jewellery and many more.

Amazon Services:

• Online Shopping
• Amazon Web Services
• Prime Video
• Amazon Music
• Fire TV
• Fire Tablets
• Echo and Alexa
• Kindle E-readers and Books

Amazon Supporting Small Businesses:

Amazon aims to become the most customer-centric company in the world. Across the globe, half the products sold are from small and medium sized businesses, and they provide their products to the customer through its marketplace. In 2018, 50,000+ small and medium sized businesses surpassed US$500,000 in sales in Amazon’s stores and they earned more than US$500k

These customers (small and medium sized businesses) deliver packages from Amazon to the end users across the globe. They even write books and share videos that can be seen on Kindle or Prime Video.

Since 2000, the company has opened virtual shelf space, which enables these small and medium sized businesses to sell their products via online store. Thus, helping them to save a lot of money which they require for establishing a physical store.

Reports say that around 1.6 million jobs around the world were created via small and medium sized businesses by selling products through the online store. It may also be interesting to know that Amazon since 2011 has invested tens of billions of dollars in building infrastructure as well as technical services which support these businesses to reach their clients.

How to Make Money with Amazon:

• Sell Product on Amazon: Enables the small and medium businesses to sell their products across various countries.
• Sell Services on Amazon: Amazon also supports selling services like Assemblers, House Cleaners, Handymen, and more, selling professional services to the area where the customer resides. The benefits of this are that it has zero upfront cost, no need to look for leads, best service provider in the area where the customer stays. Thus, it helps in growing the business.
• Sell on Amazon Business: It’s a B2B marketplace on Amazon. This offers business clients with the pricing and other selection along with the ease of Amazon’s characteristics and advantages that are created for businesses of different sizes.
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Become an Affiliate
• Advertise your Products
• Self-Publish with Amazon and many more.

Amazon Payment Products

• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter

Q2 FY2019 Highlights:

Amazon delivered a strong result in Q2 FY2019 for the quarter ended 30 June 2019.

• The Q2 Sales of the company increased by 20% to US$63.4 billion.
• The company noted a 65% growth in its operating cash flow to US$36.0 billion for the trailing 12 months ended 30 June 2019 against US$21.8 billion for the trailing 12 months ended 30 June 2018.
• Operating income soared to US$3.1 billion in the 2nd quarter.
• The net income of the company went up to US$2.6 billion.
• During the quarter, Prime Day remained the largest shopping event in the history of the company. There were more than one million deals that were made available to the Prime members.
• The company also hosted thousands of attendees at re:MARS, a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) conference which centred around machine learning, automation, robotics, and space.
• The all-new Echo Show 5 was also introduced by the company during this period. It has a compact layout, with a display of 5.5 inches, powerful sound, High Definition camera, and an in-built camera shutter. It also launched the all-new Kindle Oasis which has a best Paperwhite display along with e-ink technology.
• The all-new Fire 7, the next generation tablet of the company was also launched during the period.
• The company reported a growth in the count of Alexa-compatible smart home devices. Apart from this, Alexa Guard, a feature which supports the customers in protecting their home by identifying sounds of smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms, and glass breaking was made available across the US.
• The company is working continuously to introduce more features and capabilities in Alexa. Features like Alexa Announcements, enabling its customers to transmit a one-way message to their Alexa devices was made available in countries like France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Mexico. Alexa also supports Outbound Calling in the UK. With Vodafone plans, the users can make or receive calls from the echo devices.
• In countries like Japan, Germany, and the UK, the company launched the capability for Alexa developers to earn money using in-skill purchasing for their skills.
• Amazon along with Google started the official YouTube app on Fire TV devices as well as Fire TV Edition smart televisions
• AmazonFresh extended to Las Vegas with availability for delivering the product within 1 to 2 hours.
• Amazon Beauty announced the availability of HAUS Laboratories, which is an exclusive makeup collection by Lady Gaga and makeup artist Sarah Tanno to the customers across the world.
• Amazon Prime was also rolled out in the United Arab Emirates.
• Amazon Flex was introduced by the company in India, which provides the local partners to deliver packages to increase delivery capacity for sellers as well as boost delivery rate for customers.
• Across nine cities in India, the company introduced the Packaging-Free Shipment program, which would help in reducing waste by transporting orders in their original packaging and merging multiple shipments in a recyclable crate or a corrugated box.

Q3 FY2019 Guidance:

The company claims that its results are volatile and there are chances that it might get impacted because of factors like foreign exchange rates, changes in global economic conditions and customer spending, world events, the growth rate of the Internet, online commerce, as well as cloud services along with other factors.

• The company expects its net sales to be in the range of US$66 billion and US$70 billion.
• The operating income is anticipated to be in the range of US$2.1 billion and US$3.1 billion against US$3.7 billion in Q3 FY2018.

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