Amazon 2019 FY Annual Report and Letter By The Numbers

Supply Chain
Written By Rick Watson

Amazon just released their 2019 Annual Report and Letter to Shareholders. I read them both so you don't have to.

Here are a few interesting points I called out:

  • As you might expect, it's all about Corona not about 2019.

  • Amazon has moved a number of its staff to build its own testing facilities and labs. I haven't heard another company doing that which wasn't doing it before the crisis.

Now the numbers:

  • AWS represents 12% of net sales of the entire business. But 63% of the profit. WOW. If you a retailer on AWS and you compete with Amazon, please move to Google or Microsoft Cloud.

  • Amazon has closed over 6,000 seller accounts globally due to price gouging.

  • Amazon directly employs 840k people worldwide now, that is a massive number. Walmart? 2.2 million. Alibaba? Only 100k. (That's amazing).

  • Amazon has 272 million square feet of space devoted to data centers and fulfillment centers globally. That is massive.

  • Amazon has 20 million square feet of physical stores, a fact I bet they are happy about at the moment despite many saying they should scale their retail investments faster. (Where are these 20 million?)

  • Amazon's international business is only growing at 13% y/y. As opposed to 21% y/y in North America. Both decelerated in 2019.

Rick Watson

Rick Watson founded RMW Commerce Consulting after spending 20+ years as a technology entrepreneur and operator exclusively in the eCommerce industry with companies like ChannelAdvisor, BarnesandNoble.com, Merchantry, and Pitney Bowes.

Watson’s work today is centered on supporting investors and management teams incubating and growing direct-to-consumer businesses. Most recently, in partnership with WHP Global, Rick was a critical resource in architecting the WHP+ platform, a new turnkey direct to consumer digital e-commerce platform that powers AnneKlein.com and JosephAbboud.com.

Watson also hosts a weekly podcast, Watson Weekly, where he shares an unbiased, unfiltered expert take on the retail sector’s biggest players.

In the past year alone, Rick has spoken at many in-person and virtual events as well as podcasts on topics ranging from retail/ecom to supply chain/logistics and even digital grocery including CommerceNext IRL, ASCM Connect, and Retail Innovation Conference.

https://www.rmwcommerce.com/
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