Amazon 30 Years: What’s Next for ‘The Everything Company’? – BBC News

Three decades after its launch, it’s hard to grasp the scale of Amazon.

Consider its vast warehouse in Dartford, on the outskirts of London. It holds millions of items in stock, with hundreds of thousands bought every day – and it takes two hours from the time something is ordered, the company says, to being picked, packed and shipped.

Imagine that scene and multiply it by 175. That’s the number of “fulfillment centers,” as Amazon likes to call them, it has worldwide.

Even if you think you can imagine that endless stream of packages traveling around the world, consider something else: that’s just a fraction of what Amazon does.

It’s also a major streaming and media company (Amazon Prime Video), a leader in home camera systems (Ring), smart speakers (Alexa), and tablets and e-readers (Kindle), it hosts and supports large portions of the internet (Amazon Web Services), and much more.

“It was called ‘The Everything Store’ for a long time, but I think Amazon has become sort of ‘The Everything Company,’” Bloomberg’s Amanda Mull told me.

“It’s so big and ubiquitous and touches so many different aspects of life that after a while people start to take Amazon’s existence for granted in all sorts of aspects of daily life,” she says.

Or, as the company itself once joked, the only way to get through a day without enriching Amazon in any way was to “live in a cave.”

Amazon’s story, since its founding by Jeff Bezos in 1994, has been one of explosive growth and constant innovation.

But the biggest question as the company enters its fourth decade seems to be: What do you do once you’re The Everything Company?

Or as Sucharita Kodali, who analyses Amazon for research firm Forrester, puts it: “What’s left?”

“If you’re already at half a trillion dollars in revenue, and you already are, how do you continue to grow double digits year over year?”

One option is to try to tighten ties between existing businesses: The vast trove of shopping data Amazon has on its Prime members could help the company sell ads on its streaming service, which — like its competitors — increasingly makes its revenue from commercials.

But that’s not all: what benefits can Kuiper, its satellite division, offer to Whole Foods, its supermarket chain?

According to Sucharita Kodali, the answer to some extent is to “keep trying” to start new business ventures and not worry if they fail.

This week, Amazon shut down a company robot line after just nine months. According to Kodali, it’s just one in a “graveyard of bad ideas” the company has tried and discarded in order to find the winning ones.

But, she says, Amazon may also need to focus on something else: the increasing scrutiny from regulators asking tough questions like what is it doing with our data, what is its environmental impact, and is it simply too big?

According to Kodali, all these issues could be grounds for intervention, “in the same way we pushed back the monopolies that grew into giants in the early 20th century.”

For Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce intelligence agency Marketplace Pulse, the company’s size poses another problem: The places where Western customers live simply can’t accommodate much more stuff.

“Our cities are not built for much more deliveries,” he tells the BBC.

That makes emerging economies like India, Mexico and Brazil important. But, Mr. Kaziukėnas argues, Amazon should not just enter the market there, but also conquer it to some extent.

“It’s crazy and maybe it shouldn’t be this way, but that’s a topic for another time,” he says.

Amanda Mull points to another priority for Amazon in the coming years: fending off competition from Chinese rivals like Temu and Shein.

Amazon, she says, has “created the spending habits” of Western consumers by acting as a trusted intermediary between them and Chinese manufacturers, and adding easy returns and lightning-fast delivery to the mix.

But if you take that last element out of the deal, you can lower prices, as the Chinese retailers have done.

“They said, ‘Well, if you wait a week or 10 days for something you just buy, we can give it to you for almost free,’” Mull said. It’s a proposition that resonates with many people, especially in this time of cost-of-living crisis.

Juozas Kaziukėnas isn’t so sure. He suggests that the new retailers will remain niche and that something much more fundamental is needed to challenge Amazon’s position.

“If shopping means going to a search bar, Amazon has done it right,” he says.

Thirty years ago, a start-up company saw emerging trends in Internet usage and realized that it would disrupt first retail, and later many other industries.

According to Mr Kaziukėnas, it will take a similar leap of imagination to make something like this happen again, perhaps in the field of AI.

“The only threat to Amazon is something that doesn’t look like Amazon,” he says.